I am sure people said the same 100 years back when they probably thought living beyond say 60 was too much. I know that in poorer countries due to high infant mortality rate and other issues just reaching 60 was a big milestone for the average person. The bigger question is how will the existing financial system adapt for such a scenario if even 10% of the population manages to extend from 82 to 100+
50% of highly educated women in certain countries are expected to live to 100+ years old according to some demographers, although others believe there's genuine biological limits making this unlikely (they still believe a substantial amount will reach it).
People have been reaching the age of 100 since antiquity, reaching 110 probably happened hundreds of years ago as well. Which just shows the biological limit hasn't been extended just that there's more people reaching it.
> I am sure people said the same 100 years back when they probably thought living beyond say 60 was too much.
At least in Western cultures, 70 was long considered the "natural" lifespan for humans. E.g., Dante's Divine Comedy takes place when the main character is at the literal midpoint of his life, 35.
So you end up with octogenarians in power? No thanks.
I am glad that in my country people retire and fuck off to spend their last days on holiday. Spending their accumulated wealth has become a major engine of the national economy.
If anything, we’ve seen that older generations of leadership can’t keep up with changing technology and fail to adapt to massive upheavals.
In times of rapid technological development, the old are not wise. They are reactionary and cannot adapt. Their brain stopped developing before the internet. To expect them to make adequate decisions for the current landscape is to expect them to understand a world they simply weren’t built for.
Well, before we figure out who to send to the old age camps to be ground up and turned into McDonald's and Legos... first let's get some nice "age discrimination" laws in place preventing running for government office after age 67.
“Capitulating to the current regime on everything is in shareholder’s best interests” is neither a foregone conclusion nor a statement of fact. It’s economic myopia at best.
Let me be clear - I'm not happy about it. But ignoring such a reality reminds me of that quote comparing Job's best friend to a lawnmower.
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
I’m telling you that thinking a->b is myopic. It could be that shareholder value would’ve been higher had Tim Cook told Trump (or Biden, or Trump, or Obama) to go fuck himself. Perhaps the people who spend money on iPhones, specifically, would’ve been more inclined to buy a new iProduct, than they are now that he’s bent the knee.
Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”. There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value.
Edit to add: Think TSLA, if you want a concrete example. If that stock was at all trading on fundamentals (and if they had a remotely capable or competent board) and not Magic Memes, Musk’s hard right pivot was inarguably bad for the brand and shareholder value, even if it made the President temporarily happy.
Given that Apple is doing well, the onus is on someone claiming that Apple would have done better, having a strong argument.
Not "could" have done better, because things could obviously have gone better, worse, or anything else, given any substantive or random difference. Could means nothing.
(And I say this as someone very disappointed with how Cook handled that.)
Ah, "If you can't definitively and completely prove a negative then you're wrong (but also I'm like, totally not carrying water for those people)" is definitely not a weak opinion, though.
That said, maybe you should read the discussion a bit more carefully before jumping in with "OMG PROOOOOOF" or whatever the fuck this was supposed to be? The entire, plain English discussion, revolved around one thing not being the only possible "fact" just because it happened. None of the posts were particularly long, and none used challenging words.
My point isn’t that anyone’s view is wrong. I can’t make that claim either.
I hate what Cook did.
I would be happy and open to anyone who can point out how Apple was supposed to handle the actual threat of major tariffs in their components and systems better than he did.
But simply asserting a counter factual, a plausible way it might have been better, isn’t that. What would Cook be expected to do with that?
But what?
Not dismissing that there was a better way. There must be. It’s very worthwhile figuring out, even as a counter factual. That’s how we all learn.l
Not judging anyone. My answer is just or even more weak! I have really thought about this too, and come up with nothing so far.
(I appreciate and take note that my comment didn’t communicate my point well enough. It’s important to recognize weak reasoning. But that wasn’t meant to discourage, or show a lack of respect for another person’s efforts. I want a better answer too.)
> Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”.
You're writing words that I did not say or imply.
The point is going against any (current) admin is almost always bad for a publicly traded company. Any public entity is going to have to have extremely good reasons to "fight back", how doing so is good for business. As a CEO of such an entity you're having to answer to many people who want a concrete plan and a belief in your strategy.
In the first rodeo, when all this was novel, it was believed such social signaling would pay off. Obviously silicon valley as a whole no longer feels this way.
TSLA is an outlier being grounded more on some superior man theory, that Apple did have in the past w/ Jobs, who is no longer there. Religious fervor stuff. It doesn't really apply. Rational moves here, please.
> There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value
This is what I asked you to expound on. Please state a few.
Most shareholders may not care beyond the next quarter, but CEO action that led to those results were made couple of years ago at least, and current action will do as much to determine not the next quarter, but one slightly further in the future. Hence Jamie Dimon, for example, making a different decision in a similar matter. As Dimon explained: “[…] we have to be very careful about how anything is perceived, and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it. So, we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like buying favors or anything like that”[1].
That's an extremely low bar, Windows has been shit for a long time and has basically only degraded. Some people think Windows 10 was good, it wasn't, they just haven't used Windows for long enough.
Apple software isn't bad, but it is often obtuse and buggy. And, with iOS 26, usability has taken a big hit.
On macOS when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it takes forever. On KDE when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it's instantaneous.
On macOS when I connect or disconnect an external monitor, my applications get all confused on where they should display, especially if I then reconnect a monitor. On KDE when I unplug my monitor everything goes nicely onto one desktop. When I put a monitor back in, everything goes back to where it was before. It just works.
On macOS, every time I install a new program I need to do some dance with System preferences to allow it to run. I tried some command line settings that supposedly disables this, but it never sticks. Every few months, the process is different than it was before. On KDE, I just run my software and it works.
On macOS, I don't have useful window snapping behavior or full-screen behavior, nor am I able to have focus follow my mouse. On KDE, I have these.
macOS just doesn't work for me. But the competitors have a good solution.
Why not? People choose their tools by criteria that matter to their use cases. For some, alt-tab behavior doesn't matter. For others it's a primary pain point.
Computing should be personal. Some people like to mold their tools to their way of working. Others adapt their way of working to their tools. KDE is for the former, and macOS is for the latter.
Why would someone else use my criteria? They should use their own criteria? I certainly am not going to use your "it's niche so it can't be useful" criteria as it's important to my usage.
It’s so sad. Circa 2003 OS X wasn’t just good it was amazing. Nearly Movie OS quality. Every release the quality goes down. Every migration to SwiftUI more and more AppKit standard feature get lost.
Sucked compared to what? My OS X life began shortly before Panther, and coming from a Linux laptop everything was better. Compared to Windows XP, everything in Panther was better. Panther on a 1GHz TiBook was amazing compared to anything else at the time.
Books can go on it too. No matter the free storage space on my iPad, it relentlessly nerfs stuff to iCloud rendering its utility on long aeroplane journeys completely worthless.
