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Asymco
Personal blog · asymco.combusinesshardware
Asymco is a personal blog at asymco.com about business and hardware. Since 2010, 373 different Hacker News readers have linked it 765 times, most often “Apple now strives to design and build products that last as long as possible”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Asymco for Horace Dediu's industry analysis, mostly of Apple, and cite its charts and figures as data. One commenter calls it a good explainer of disruption theory.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Asymmetric Intelligence
Most-linked posts?
- Apple now strives to design and build products that last as long as possible7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-09-13
- /2012/05/03/the-phone-market-in-2012-a-tale-of-two-disruptions/7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-06-26
- In memoriam: Microsoft’s previous strategic mobile partners6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-02-11
- Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation |5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-04-16
- The Number5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-02-27
- The rise and fall of personal computing5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-01-18
- The Most Important iPhone Ever5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-09-21
- Wherefore art thou Macintosh?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-11-02
- Apple has moved on4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-07-26
- Apple’s rank in mobile phone profitability and revenues4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-02-04
What Hacker News says?
Well, you may love to forget, but a lot of us don't. We didn't forget that our community was called a cancer ( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_... ) We didn't forget that microsoft is one of the biggest pattent troll in the world ( http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=... or http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/27/microsoft-has-received-five... ). We didn't forget than the…
Comment linking /2011/05/27/microsoft-has-received-five-times-more-income-from-android-than-from-windows-phone/
on “Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub”Submitted Microsoft makes 5 times more income from Android than from Windows Phone as a story · 218 points
HN discussionhttps://www.asymco.com/2023/09/04/the-2-trillion-economy/ OK is an understatement.
Comment linking /2023/09/04/the-2-trillion-economy/
on “Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union”Submitted Steve Jobs didn’t as a story · 186 points
HN discussionThis is Horace Dideu's take on Apple's revenue: http://www.asymco.com/2013/08/22/the-revenue-table-imperial-... Profit-wise, Apple claim that their digital stores only break-even, but revenue-wise, the stores dwarf the Macintosh line, with music alone matching Macs.
Comment linking /2013/08/22/the-revenue-table-imperial-units-edition/
on “Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months”Submitted Apple now strives to design and build products that last as long as possible as a story · 182 points
HN discussionThere is some more subtlety to this too. Apple's products (like most tech companies) are made by contract manufacturers, primarily Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry). What Apple does different is to buy the equipment Foxconn needs to make the products. This means there is no financial risk in that equipment to Foxconn, and that Foxconn's other customers don't get to take advantage of the equipment. I highly recomm…
Comment linking /2015/02/10/how-many-ios-devices-didwill-apple-ship/
on “I Quit: What really goes on at Apple”Submitted Competing with a Mac as a story · 143 points
HN discussionIf you don't like that report you can check out two others that are provided by sources that most would describe as "rabidly pro-Apple". The trend is pretty clear and has been for a while so I'm not sure why everyone seems so suprised by this. Though given Apple's yearly cycle which has a slump in Q3 and a big spike in Q4 they may briefly reclaim the crown in Q4 if their next launch does well. Strategy Analytics: ht…
Comment linking /2013/08/21/amp-index-update/
on “Nokia acquired by Microsoft”Submitted CES2011: The end of the PC era as a story · 138 points
HN discussion- nl · 2016-02-02
A P/E ratio of 14, and the company basically tripled their numbers in ~4 years. Does Google's P/E of 35.7 suggests we can look forward to a rough 10x increase in Google's numbers over the next 4 years? No, it means that investors didn't believe there was much room for further growth at Apple[1]. They were clearly wrong! (Note that if you think that they are still wrong then there is a good opportunity to make money…
Comment linking /2011/03/24/analysts-apples-growth-next-year-to-drop-to-half-of-what-it-could-obtain-during-the-recession/
on “Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World” Submitted Determining the Average Apple Device Lifespan as a story · 110 points
HN discussion$1 billion is Apple's ad budget as of two years ago and a non-trivial fraction of Coke's overall annual ad budget. I call bs. ( http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Screen-Shot... )
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Screen-Shot-2013-11-04-at-11-4-4.55.03-PM.png
on “Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance”Submitted 60 percent of Apple’s sales are from products that did not exist three years ago as a story · 107 points
HN discussionOk I see where you're going. I think we'd both agree that the PC market is mature and unlikely to grow further, their services revenues aren't looking sustainable long term, and that AI demand is high. Good food for thought! Some facts to consider tho since I think you're underestimating the apple silicon change: MacOS market share went from 7.5% (2020) -> 9% (2025) Mac gross margins are harder to estimate but sugge…
Comment linking /2026/03/18/the-biggest-surprise-of-the-macbook-neo/
on “MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch”Submitted IPhone 5C: C is for Cognitive Illusion as a story · 87 points
HN discussionIf they don't ship before the holiday season, they'll be setting themselves up for failure. Apple will be releasing a new iPad in February, so the consumer market will be toast for them. Tablet growth continues to explode, and by the end of 2013, it's conceivable that tablet sales will outpace traditional PCs: http://www.asymco.com/2012/03/02/when-will-the-tablet-market... In a BYOD world, can enterprise sales provi…
Comment linking /2012/03/02/when-will-the-tablet-market-be-larger-than-the-pc-market/
on “Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet”Submitted Post PC as a story · 85 points
HN discussionI got to learn about disruption theory through Horace Dediu ( http://www.asymco.com ) who is probably one its best explainers and practitioners (the latter being why you should listen to Dediu in the first place - skin in the game).
Comment linking /
on “Clayton Christensen has died”Submitted iTunes now costs $1.3 billion/yr to run as a story · 74 points
HN discussionAmazon has always been viewed in the long-term as the 'big winner'. But, Apple makes good money and is growing revenue, on the back-end with their 850 million iTunes users. Amazon's dominance is always a 'future certainty', meanwhile Apple eats it's lunch. i.e. "iTunes, Software and Services has been growing between 30% and 40% for four years and is on its way to $30 billion/yr in transactions and sales for 2014." h…
Comment linking /2014/05/09/measuring-not-getting-the-cloud/
on “Amazon Fire Phone”Submitted IPhone share of phone market: 5% volumes, 20% revenues, 55% profit as a story · 74 points
HN discussionThis is so often overlooked -- Apple's revenue capture of the market is what is astonishing. In 2019, Apple captured 32% of the global revenue for the mobile phone industry and 66% of all profit in Q3 of 2019 [1]. Asymco used to report on this frequently but I'm having trouble finding recent examples [2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-... [2] http://www.asymco.com/2011/08/02/apple-s…
Comment linking /2011/08/02/apple-share-of-phone-revenues-increased-to-28/
on “Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac”Submitted The iOS Economy, Updated as a story · 73 points
HN discussionIt’s obviously not true that nobody uses Safari on Apple’s laptops and desktops. Apple’s Mac sales have doubled since 2008 and is in the top 5 when it comes to PC shipments: http://www.asymco.com/2016/11/02/wherefore-art-thou-macintos... Shipping ~30 million Macs a year certainly isn't almost nobody.
Comment linking /2016/11/02/wherefore-art-thou-macintosh/
on “Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari”Submitted Apple has paid over $2 billion to app developers, $12 billion to record labels as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI'd go further. Nylon as a material was invented and then the current rope tech was improved by it. Innovation stemmed from the fact that we now have a stronger rope and can use it for stuff that was not possible before. (largely inspired by: http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding... )
Comment linking /2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innovation/
on “Why things might have taken so long”Submitted Apple captures 50% of consumer revenue of the top half of the S&P 500 as a story · 67 points
HN discussion> My complaint is that the incremental improvements that Apple bring to the industry - regardless of how sleek they may be - isn't itself innovation. That's really debatable. Innovation is about bringing something new and uniquely useful to the market [1]. It is an economic term, arguably coined by economists to distinguish from invention, which often has zero economic impact. Innovations can be incremental. They mi…
Comment linking /2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innovation/
on “Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?”Submitted Nokia’s price for exclusivity as a story · 65 points
HN discussion
