At $400 billion, Apple is worth more than Greece

[goddog]

Pemalite said:

ThePS3News said:

Millenium said:
Apple is still a company that put out overpriced crap, I'll never buy a Apple product.

Didn't even know Greece was worth that much anymore :-p

Apple is a company that ONLY makes quality products. Love them or hate them, You have to respect them for what they have done to the electronic industry.

Cant say the samething for Microsoft....

Apple doesn't manufacture most of it's products.
They buy chips from 3rd party manufacturers, namely Samsung.
The Apple A5 processor? That's not an Apple design. That is an Arm design backed up with an old PC manufacturer-gone mobile PowerVR graphics chip and manufactured by Samsung.
Foxconn usually assembles everything.

Screens? Samsung, LG... You name it, the iPhone, iPod, iPad actually has more Samsung technology than Apples, so really the quality is a testament to Samsung, not Apple.

Apple's strength is that they secure the latest technology at a good price to get first-dibs exclusivity on it.
Even their Operating Systems aren't purely origional designs, they have firm roots in the Unix world.

Apple doesn't make "quality products" everyone else does it for them, Apple actually has very-low R&D expendeture.

Microsft probably has done allot more tech-worthy innovations than what Apple has done, Microsoft does allot collaboration with Developers and Manufacturers to set unified standards and advance technology which has benefitted the PC arena greatly (Which in turn trickles down to other platforms like the Xbox, Playstation and Wii with their Direct X standard used to guide the design of the graphics chips used in those consoles.)

Apple doesn't really get down and dirty with Developers and Manufacturers and supports them in the way that Microsoft does.

the A5 is heavily modded by apple and is a custom core with rights bought from the arm consortium (the get a discount for being on the board of the old AIM group that headed up powerpc and risc instruction set development which is where arm comes form), they bought the company Intrinsity to do this a few years back (that company made chips for cruise missiles - * edit * correction P.A semi handled that , also a company apple bought to work on semis *end edit*)

  you have to approach apple a bit differently, they use the massive cash hoard to buy hardware and help build factories for their manufacturers (the 6 billion upfront to sammy for a factory to use tech no one else had and sammy would not have built otherwise) generally locking up exclusivity or a giant % of production volume guaranteed for a period of time. another example would be the machined cases apple fronted the costs for lathe and development of the lath but the supplier owns it and can use it with other clients after a set amount of time. apples R&D is not just in its R&D costs but also in its parts contracts

Id say apple has made some quality acquisitions starting with NeXT (NeXTSTeP OS) and then modified with a look to UI and industrial design (and used the acquisition talent in programing ) to drive the change.

I think MS biggest fault is understanding its own UIs and how people use them, or misinterpreting the data… god i hate the new metro UI in xbox i miss blades and NXT at this point, so much of a pain to use now. and the whole kin fiasco. honestly i worry about the 360 MS attempt to shoe horn it into the phone/os world and removing the father of the box in favor of the girl who handled the metro UI on 360 for the 720 launch