Gross margin doesn't tell you much about their level of investment. Gross margin is only revenue minus COGS (i.e. hosting, support, potentially infra teams). To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share).
SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here.
> To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share).
Total R&D for the entire corporation was $9 billion compared to $29 billion just in Services revenue. How much of that R&D do you think the crApp Store needs, compared to the hardware and the operating systems? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2025-q4/FY25_Q4_Consol...
> SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here.
App Store is essentially an online retailer (or consignment store), not SaaS. Apple is selling software written by other developers.
In practice, I don’t think tax policy is the primary driver for where people chose to live. Even very wealthy people.
If I were very wealthy the first thing I would want to buy is proximity to the people I love, the food I like, the culture I’m excited about. For many people that means being close to home.
I can’t imagine how shallow my life would have to be for me to optimize it around taxes.
That's the thing though - the ultra wealthy already do buy that kind of proximity. They have multiple properties all over the world, accessed via private jet, helicopter, or mega yacht. They live in an entirely different reality compared to someone with a job - even someone who works in the c-suite.
They also aren't the ones doing the optimization. They have people for that. This article seems to be written by someone who is trying to bring that kind of service down the ladder to the slightly more common folk - the mega rich, not just the ultra rich.
Extremely impressive that they were able to ship inside-out tracking, pancake lenses, and eye tracking + foveated rendering. Each of these is a serious engineering challenge. Very few organizations could pull this off.
Have an onsite team or have hybrid setups that bring people within geographic areas together. Nothing replaces getting around a physical whiteboard in a physical space.
Context is in the original statement that retreats are a fix for burnout.
Sure Figjam is great but my anecdata is that a majority of the value of the whiteboard is the discussion as it happens not the resulting artifact. Lucid works better for that because it let's you easily frame things into slides (yes, a section in figjam is usable for this but it's not the same).
The concept being that you break things down and layer in details so the evolution is explained similar to the train of thought from live sessions.
I've been remote almost exclusively since 2012 and have used everything out there... the biggest thing that makes an improvement with remote comms? A very high quality microphone with a high quality compressor / gate (hardware, even) and using Mumble / Teamspeak / etc with a good codec where everyone can hear everyone speaking at the same time with low latency. That's what we lost from copper phones and it's exponentially worse in Zoom where you can't tell when someone is trying to interrupt you with the auditory cues. It really makes a big difference.
I'm an extrovert so I love video / cams on but really audio is all that is needed when paired with a tool like Figjam and getting high quality audio makes a remarkable difference.
Every vendor you bring in comes with switching cost, and this is no different. But we do our best to make it easy for folks to migrate off of our platform should they decide.
