Samsung both sells premium hardware and manufactures a lot of it own components in house and sales components to other manufacturers including Apple. I consider Samsung “successful”.
Every single low margin PC company that exists now like Dell, HP etc were much more profitable than an almost bankrupt Apple in 1997. They had no vision and decided to compete on price. It doesn’t matter why they are barely profitable low margin businesses.
Seeing there revenue vs profits, they should take Michael Dell’s (bad) advice to Jobs when he came back - “shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders” who could make more money in treasury bonds.
I don’t care if a company monitors which websites I go to on a work computer, what applications I run or what I say on Slack.
On the other hand I would be looking for another job if they had keyloggers or were taking screenshots even if they said anything about me shopping on Amazon or randomly browsing Hacker News or any website that wasn’t gaming or Netflix during work hours.
Heck I use to travel a lot more for business and I used my work laptop for Netflix and other streaming services in the hotel.
As long as I’m meeting performance standards it shouldn’t matter.
Successful == decently profitable with decent profit margins. Someone else mentioned LG with an annual profit of $2.4 billion as a “successful” company.
*BUT* I downloaded the source code from Vercel’s site, built and deployed in a Docker container (I never download random npm packages to my local computer), deployed the Docker container to Lambda (choose your Docker deployment platform. They are a dime a dozen), had a tightly scoped IAM role attached to the Lambda and my secrets were in Secret Manager.
My deployment also had a placeholder for the secrets when it was deployed and they were never in my repo and purposefully had to be manually configured.
I would never trust something like Vercel for hosting. I’m not saying go all in on a major cloud provider. Get your own cheap VPS if that’s all you need and take responsibility for your own security posture the best you can.
I would buy Mac hardware running Windows long before I would buy x86 hardware running MacOS. In fact Mac OS on x86 was really nothing remarkable. Macs were objectively worse than most Windows PCs during the last few years on x86 at least the laptops were.
Name one other successfully computer hardware company? PC makers are barely profitable commodities, other phone companies aside from Samsung are making pennies, the Microsoft XBox division is on life support, Sony sold off its TV division. The PS5 is going okay but doesn’t sell in near the numbers of iPhones. Who is left?
You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race.
You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
And neither does Google. The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. The latest version of iOS supports my iPad released in 2019.