The fruit company still has an internal culture, especially in hardware-focused teams, with a relentless focus on shipping products followed by iterative refinement.

Is it though?

Their revenue last year was 400 billion dollars... you tell us.

They are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.

I'd say it depends on your definition of "good", since the revenue seems to suggest they're doing something most people agree with.

By that logic, the online scam industry is shipping the best products of all time. By some estimates they make over a trillion a year.

IMO false equivalence... scams are designed purely to steal money from people, while Apple products carry intrinsic value and benefit to most people.

I realize it's a strained equivalence, but Apple makes a lot of money violating EU anticompetitive laws. Their stranglehold over app distribution is not entirely dissimilar to ransome.

have you seen the M chips? to me that revolutionized computing. supercomputer-level latency for in-ram operations on a $2k laptop

Sounds awesome. But they achieved it by basically harwiring specific RAM to specific CPU. It's awesome that they made a product, but there's no extensibility and since it's internal apple innovation it's basically a technological dead end. Nobody can build anything upon this and there's nothing to build. Even a cool $2k laptop you can run small LLM on is basically a closed off expensive toy. Much like iPhone.

Technology will grow in parallel and surpass it fairly quickly like the Android phones did. Only brand loyalty in US holds this thing still propped up long term.