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When companies focus on just one thing in a vertical, they're incredibly vulnerable. Samsung does lots of things fairly well, with some hiccups, well beyond just personal electronics and home appliances. It's diversification.

EDIT: Samsung does all sorts of things including ship-building, life insurance, construction and advertising.

For example, Apple MacBook Pros have become uncool, expensive, unrepairable and impractical... a giant FU to customers. That business is tettering on failure because they've been hypnotized on elixir of utopian, aspirational design rather than technical, environmental and practical usability. iPhone is the lion's share of Apple's business, and they're losing ground to Android. That's a problem and most other products have plateaued and aren't anywhere near as dominant-capable or category-defining as the smartphone. That means Apple is a basically a banana republic (pun intended) unless they create or retake a category with a non-incrementalist product.

Disclaimer: I own an A1278 13" from 2013 but refuse to buy a $3000 soldered on RAM and SSD laptop that can't be transfered without proprietary service tools and whose glued-on batteries are a PITA to change. Also the low-travel, flush keyboards are terrible. Looking at Lenovo and System76 machines instead.



> That business is tettering on failure

They sold over 4 million Macs this past quarter, so I don't know what you're going on about here.


Numbers today are all well and good, but goodwill and rate-of-change indicate future trends. People will tire of $3000 laptops with nonfunctional WiFi and Apple Authorized Service Centers voiding their AppleCare warranties.


> Numbers today are all well and good, but goodwill and rate-of-change indicate future trends

Well, they're down YoY, from 4.2 million to... 4.18 million. So in another 200 years, they'll have all disappeared.


>EDIT: Samsung does all sorts of things including ship-building, life insurance, construction and advertising.

You can't compare a conglomerate to an integrated company.


>That business is tettering[sic] on failure ...

Citation required. (other than you refusing to buy one).

> Looking at Lenovo and System76 machines instead.

Please don't do System76, their laptops are pieces of crap. My wife and I have had good experiences with thinkpads though.


Keywords "Looking at." I'll take that as a datapoint.


I mostly agree with this post but the more I type on my new MBP keyboard the more I love it. Was skeptical at first, made a lot of noise, felt weird, but this flipped pretty fast to big appreciation.


There's less affordances for touch-typing based on the shape of keys like Lenovo or older keyboards for boundaries of keys... it just makes typing harder unnecessarily to shave a few millimeters.


Yeah but not the touch bar.


Touchbar is definitely a no-go, requires looking down and breaks flow.




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