The only thing I’d push back on is the weird and wacky iPad apps - our brains and fingers need some consistency in UI, doesn’t mean it can be fun though!
How many companies on that list make money by manufacturing a physical product and selling it to customers? How many other consumer goods companies 11x their market cap? How many other consumer goods companies have revenues remotely approaching Apple?
The business you mention are pure service / zero marginal cost businesses, and in that time internet usage has expanded both in reach and depth (it is being used for more things in more places), so their opportunity for profits has grown. Apple turns aluminium and silica into a laptop. They didn't even miss a beat during COVID.
Yay for Tim Cook for scaling this to the absolute behemoth of supply chain and manufacturing that modern Apple is.
As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don’t. Don’t restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
It’s a bit more complex than that. Octopus do a deal where you can lease a car and get the energy for it for free provided you agree to have it plugged in > x hrs a month. My read on that is that the cost of balancing the grid is greater than the cost of generating power. So grid is expensive, but power is cheap.
Could be higher - multiple Scottish windfarms are fully curtailed (developers paid for generation but the grid can’t distribute so they don’t use the power). Once the grid is upgraded with Easter Green Link 1-5 & Western Link 2, and the Scotwind Windfarms built this would be even higher!
Why should Apple have done this? It doesn’t fit their business in anyway shape or form. Where does data centre hardware sit relative to electronics / humanities cross roads that is foundational for Apple?
Apple is presumably leaving a lot of money on the table by not trying to sell Apple Silicon for AI inference and training. They're the only ones who can attach reasonably large GPUs (M3 Ultra) to very large amounts of cheaper memory (512GB SO-DIMM per GPU). Apple could e.g. sell server SKUs of Mac Studios, heck they can sell M3 Ultra chips on PCIe cards. And they could further develop Apple Silicon in that direction. Presumably they would be seen as a very legit competitor to Nvidia that way, perhaps moreso than Intel and AMD. I'd assume that in the current climate this would be extremely lucrative.
Now, actually doing this would disrupt Apple's own supply chain as well as force it to spend significant internal resources and cultural change for this kind of product line. There's a good argument to be made it would disproportionally negatively affect its Mac business, so this would be a very risky move.
But given that AI hardware is likely much higher margin than the Mac business an argument could probably (sadly) be made that it'd be lucrative for them to try it. I personally don't think Apple is inclined to take this kind of risk to jeopardize the Mac, but I'm sure some people at Apple have considered this.
Yeah nothing about Apple is server side and imho that's what training is. To be serious about it as a company you have all sorts of other tools (crawlers, etc...) helping with training so it basically has to be in the datacenter at any reasonable scale anyway. And that's just not where Apple lives. We saw with Swift that they couldn't focus on server side enough to make it a serious language there and they've consistently declined to enter that area over the years because it's outside their wheelhouse.
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