Mac Sales Declined Nearly 10 Percent Last Year (9to5mac.com) 328
It's not surprising that Mac sales dropped for Apple in 2016 as they experienced their first year over year sales decline since 2001. What is interesting, however, is that as Mac sales dropped roughly 10% and personal computers overall dropped 5.7% for the year, the top four leaders in the market all saw growth as Apple was pushed to number five. From a report: Although Mac sales were up in Q4 2016 compared to Q4 2015, an analyst note today from Bloomberg's Anand Srinivasan and Wei Mok has revealed Apple has dropped to the fifth largest PC vendor, with ASUS overtaking fourth place. The top four vendors are now Lenovo, HP, Dell, and ASUS. The report adds, "Those four companies represent 65.2% of the overall market and each grew year -- over-year, while Apple ceded ground, declining 30 bps to 7.1%. The other 27.7% of the market is comprised of more than 200 vendors. In a market expected to consolidate, Samsung and Fujitsu are reported to be in discussions to sell their PC businesses to Lenovo."
Well, no shit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most everybody that wants a Mac already has one. If they want a new one, well, there isn't one. No new Mac Pro in three years. Same for Mac minis and the last "upgrade" was actually a downgrade. No new iMac in two. Tim Cook said last year he was expecting for people to upgrade their Macs every three years, but the sad truth is that three years is up for many people and the Mac on sale is the one they already have or so close to it that there's no reason to upgrade unless it's dead. Add in that the newer models may be less upgradable than the ones they already have and that's less incentive to get a newer Mac. I'm still on my 2008 Mac Pro because it still works and I'm certainly not going to shell out top dollar for a three year old machine. i thought I might even go down to an iMac, but they're almost as old.
Re:Well, no shit! (Score:5, Insightful)
+1 Stagnant hardware is a death sentence in the PC industry. Frankly I am shocked they haven't dropped more. Too much of their desktop hardware is not only stagnant, but has mobile grade stuff on the inside, making the extra Apple tax that much harder to stomach.
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Not the hardware, but the use of a desktop is causing the decline.
I have a laptop over 5 years old and other than it being bulky and I lost some rubber tabs by today's standards there is isn't any motivation for me to upgrade. There isn't software that takes advantage of the newer faster software that I use. The stuff that I do use is more limited by network speed than my pc speed.
If I were into gaming or CAD perhaps I could use a faster computer but for my needs it is on par with my newer work PC
No... not really that true .... (Score:2)
I mean, jellomizer might be absolutely correct in his estimation that his "over 5 year old" laptop is still good enough for him to keep using it.
But in the overall sense, I don't think you can explain this drop in computer sales (especially the fact that Apple is now seeing 2x the decline of the rest of the industry) on the general fact that an older machine is still usable for a lot of folks.
There has ALWAYS been a subset of computer users who have no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Their onl
Re:Well, no shit! (Score:5, Insightful)
the only reason they haven't dropped more is the fanatical userbase who thinks Tim Cook takes golden shits.
Sorry, this isn't the Reality Distortion Field you are looking for. It's just inertia. If you are on a particular system, moving to another one is a PITA. Yes, it is arguably less so than say, a decade ago but for professionals with complex or demanding work flows it is often a lot of busy work that doesn't get you any further than you were before.
So if your five year old hardware is working OK - and 5 year old MacPros, MacBook Pros and most Mac Books will get the job done for MOST (not all) people. That will stop being the case eventually and people will drift off to the Dark^HOther side.
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... in your opinion.
Re:Well, no shit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly he's not far off. And a reminder that the comparative isn't always indicative of superiority. In other words, "better" doesn't mean that it's better than good.
What's there to choose from? Linux. Great idea, but hardly the system for the non-geek. Sad to say it, folks, but it ain't. Even after all those years. Odd as it may sound, the main reason is that there's so much to choose from. And it all already starts with the distribution. And then which GUI? And which editor? And which...
And Windows, let's be honest, Windows is itself living off inertia. There has been exactly zero improvement since XP, and depending on whether you consider privacy an important aspect you could easily say that it's been getting worse.
So yes, I can't really argue against him. Mac OS is probably the best, or let's rather say, the least crappy OS currently supported by its maker.
Re: Well, no shit! (Score:3)
Zero improvement? How can you possibly make that statement. Just the move to 64bit is worth the upgrade, not to mention all the security hardening (yes I know it's still shit but I'm comparing 7 to XP). The rationalisation of the file structure was also long overdue and whatever you think of PowerShell it's way better than BAT files or WSH.
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Who's opinion do you think they were providing, yours? Sheesh
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No, it's fact.
Is this one of those "alternative facts" I've been hearing about?
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"Sure, it's great, if you want a CLI that's 10 years out of date."
That's the sacred Unix command line you're talking about. If you think Apple fans are the world's most hopeless cultists, you haven't met a Unix fan.
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That and software developers who have received requests to port their applications to macOS and iOS.
Re:Well, no shit! (Score:5, Interesting)
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http://lightroomsolutions.com/... [lightroomsolutions.com]
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Although Adobe relentlessly pushes its infernal subscription model, Lightroom is their one good application that is still available as an install. And it doesn't even cost a fortune.
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So well said. At this point other than 2 flavors of performance reduced (by form) Macbook Airs (Macbook and Macbook Pro) and the iMac (a laptop in a monitor), it appears their entire desktop line is dead and just waiting to be retired.
They keep quiet about their upgrades and from other news and rumor sites, I can infere that they not only scavenged people from the desktop line for the Mac Books but that also Intel hit some blip in production so the chips they were planning on using are coming out much later than expected. Still, even if they did forego use of whatever chips that other desktop companies are using, I would expect updates in RAM, video cards, and harddrive space over the years enough to show a blip on Mac Rumors upgrade gui
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Yup.
1. Abandon product line.
2. ?
3. No profit for you, idiots.
I don't know why... (Score:3)
I can't understand why people keep saying Mac sales are dead or dying.
Just in the last week, I bought a 64GB, 3GHz, triple one-terabyte drive, 12/24 core Mac Pro with a graphics card that will more than do what I need. Beautiful tall thing, truly awesome case design, lots of ports, three open card slots, expandable, physically secure, latest MacOS installed.
For ~$1500.00, with free shipping and 30 days return privileges to make sure it arrives safely and works as specified.
I bought it at what has become my
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Parent is a perfect example of Poe's Law.
Honestly, I can't tell if he's serious or snarky.
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Thank you. :)
Let me help you out. The answer is, "Yes."
When to buy a Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When to buy a Mac (Score:5, Informative)
Re: When to buy a Mac (Score:5, Informative)
Ram has not been upgradeable aftermarket in any MBP released after 2011. In the latest models you cannot even swap the SSD drive; that's a slap in the face, it basically forces you to buy their AppleCare insurance as soon as warranty runs out (1 or 2 years depending on country). And if you want extra power bricks, you have to buy them AND power cables separately. That's taking "nickle & dime" to a new level.
Re:When to buy a Mac (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:When to buy a Mac (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, both RAM and SSD are soldered now so no upgrades at all.
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That is more of a buy schedule. It just tells you how long it has been since the product was updated, and whether you should wait and not waste your money right then.
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You know, you're absolutely right.
I'm going to march right over to the Apple store and take a look at their latest full size towers.
Re: When to buy a Mac (Score:2)
Or maybe they want more than 16GB of RAM. Crazy talk I know.
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Depends on whether your 2010 is still as-shipped or not. Stick a 1 TB SSD in that 2010, and the performance difference gets a lot smaller.
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I had a 2009 Mac Pro that I hacked into being a 2010 Mac Pro with CPU upgrades and a firmware swap. Was waiting for a new one, stopped waiting last year and built an X99-based PC for far less than you would pay for a Mac Pro, and it has far better hardware in it. No, it may not be as small as the trash can, but I don't care about that - I have a corner desk where it sits nicely behind the three 27" displays where nobody can see it anyway.
Only thing I'm missing is macOS, but they've kind of been screwing t
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My mini mac G4s still work (I plan to replace the hdds with hybrid sshds via an ide-sata adapter), as does an old Quicksilver G4. But my intel iMacs graphics are failing, and is basically impossible to fix without shelling out silly money. Macs used to be an investment. But they have tended to get shorter and shorter lives, and get less and less maintainable.
How Lee Iococca killed the US Auto industry. (Score:5, Interesting)
He called it the "Planned Obsolescence". He argued, "If the planned life of a car is five years, it is a waste to design its components to last 10 years". So he deliberately got the cars built using less durable components. But statistics is a bitch. If the car had 100 components each with a design life of five years and they had 95% confidence level, you are likely to have at least 5 failures before 5 years. (Roughly speaking, I did not ace my stats class either).
But US was on a roll so and all the car makers got on the bandwagon. But rest of the world wanted reliable and durable cars. Where cars were considered too valuable to be scrapped in three/five years, the market demanded better cars. The Japaneses served those markets using small econoboxes, something no American would even look at.
Then came the oil shock! Americans tried the tiny Japanese econoboxes, for fuel economy. But fell in love with their durability. The difference between the reliability of Japanese and American cars were stark, plainly visible, no amount of marketing gimmicks could fix that. GM went from 60% of the world auto market in 1959 to less than 30% of just US auto market in 1990.
So the lesson Apple might learn would be, "We should not be building our computers that last this long."
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It's an interesting theory, but what point did American cars become unreliable due to planned obsolescence?
The problem I have with this argument is that ALL cars were inherently unreliable through the basic components of them. I'm just barely old enough to remember when tuneups were totally mandatory -- changing the points in the distributor, checking the timing, frequent plug and wire replacements, fairly frequent carburetor adjustments and so on. That was every American car through the advent of fuel in
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Have you looked at Consumer Reports reliability ratings of American cars in the 80s and 90s? It is a runaway process. Volvos got a reputation for safety at that time. Safety conscious buyers went to Volvo. And the company decided to emphasize safety and invested in it. Japanese were looking to break into US market. The were attacking every sector. In auto sector they emphasized reliability. They will test them in road
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While it's true that the ignition on the old cars had to be babied, as long as you did that along with keeping the valve lash in specs and changed the oil regularly, those old Japanese cars would go until the body rusted away. And once you could swap in an electric ignition things got a lot better. Meanwhile at the same time American cars would need a new engine before 100,000 miles as well as shit like the brake lines being built out of such shitty metal that even my '96 Ford recently lost its brakes (as w
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Apple has lost their way specially in laptops.
Back in the day when Air came out it was really nice, having better specs than other light computers and yet not outrageously expensive. I know of several people who did not want a mac who bought them and often put windows on them. I nearly bought one too but in the end wanted a few more ports so bought an otherwise worse competitor. At the same time they had the Pro line that had the ports and higher end specs, again in a fairly nice package with only modest pr
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Apple has lost their way specially in laptops.
Not even close to being true.
Re: Well, no shit! (Score:3)
Exactly! I agree with you.
Apple has lost their way in desktops far far more than they have lost their way in laptops, where they have only moderately lost their way. They cannot even take a standard USB flash stick!
Friend of mines 2016 MBP has filled it's screen. Crack developed right across it over a few days of sitting on a desk. Obvious manufacturing flaw.
So you think Apple will cover it under warrantee? Not a chance. Apparently it managed to drop itself then put itself back on the desk.. Without anyone
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I have a 4 year old laptop running a 4000 series i7 and I look at websites on occasion to see if there is a laptop out there that has comparable specs + a dedicated graphics card (mine is just built-in intel) and there hasn't been much from any manufacturer in the realm I'm willing to pay.Sure, I can spend $2k or more to get some portable gamestation, but that's not what I want. I
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I am afraid of what kind of "holding it wrong" a new machine will introduce, and I like my new desk.
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Ditto.
My late 2013 MBP with retina is still serving me just fine... At least, when i look at each new batch that comes out, I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade... Well, no... there is an upgrade path, but it involves going Dell and Ubuntu.
Sad that its 2017 and Apple can't deliver a knockout punch to its own 2013 tech.
WHat'd the latest round bring? Touchbar and removal of all ports except USB C... I"m sure those were features everyone in the world was dying for...
Intel should of put QPI in all cpu's / chipset (Score:2)
Intel should of put QPI in all cpu's / use if for the link to the chipset.
1 socket cpu's with QPI don't make use of it just the slow DMI link.
But apple can do better if they where to drop being supper thin.
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If Intel wasn't intentionally hobbling their hardware, they could be producing low power chips with QPI that would allow scaling out to 64 cores or more in the power profile of their current workstation boards, before including options like Xeon Phi compute modules on-board as well.
They would just need to use the lowest functional binned chips for a new SKU that they could price competitively for the high consumer/prosumer line and/or offer them exclusively through apple's hardware channels.
But instead they just keep rehashing the same chips for going on 8 years now, rather than offering customers either something NEW, or something featuring tech normally above their budget.
Instead we get crap like Skylake etc where the only new features are bad for the customer, and the performance difference isn't high enough to warrant it for any but those who have to own the latest and greatest regardless of cost or sensitbility.
That is it, exactly.
Apple needs to get into the CPU business.
Hm. Well, actually, there is some shit. (Score:2)
Unfortunately, no MacOS, and no Mac apps.
So it doesn't matter what hardware we can get.
I have no doubt at all Apple is so far behind in hardware design because they are really busy, you know, doing critically important work like removing earphone jacks and function keys and user-upgrade-capable features like RAM and drives and network ports and batteries and card slots and drive bays. That
Lacking a Product Refresh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, they managed to renew two models of Mac last year. The MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Everything else was stagnant. There was almost no reason at all to purchase a Mac. While the MacBook update was actually superior to the previous version, overall the update was pretty bland. It's like Henry Ford took over and said, I have the perfect car, why should I change. Granted, Intel's missteps hasn't helped either. They haven't exactly put out a homerun in the processor market since the days of SandyBridge. In the realm of the Mac Mini, their desktop actually regressed from the previous version in only have a dual core processor.
Maybe if they actually do something this year, we can get behind them and buy their products again. If not, I am certain they will continue to slide down to the level of other vendors.
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Soldering RAM and SSD to the mobo is an instant "no-go" for a workstation for me. The goofy function row display just adds cost for a feature I didn't ask for. Sure, I'm not everyone, but I can say out of the dozens of macbook wielding "startup entrepreneurs", no one has upgraded to the new generation and those that need replacements are scouring Craigslist and the like for used ones (my favorites are from 2012). I hope Apple is leading us to the future of computing, but I don't like what I'm seeing so far.
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Apple used to be known for quality hardware. My 2012 MacBook Pro was quality hardware, and I could get to the parts to replace and upgrade them. It's turning into the ship of Theseus, and it keeps on chugging, doing everything I need and doing it well. It was a Pro machine for Pros, distinguished from the consumer line.
Apple is now known for chintzy tricks like the touch bar and for hardware that can't be upgraded: all their hardware is now consumer-commodity grade, essentially disposable hardware with p
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The question is what should they do for a refresh? They've been waiting for processors from Intel but it almost looks like the bad old days of the PPC at the moment with Intel dialling right back on improvements, I mean an i7 processor from five years ago is still a pretty good chip all things considered. Hard to sell new computers to people who don't need them and I know from my history of Macs that three years is far too short a time for me to get maximum value out of them. More like 6 in fact. My current
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New features+specs are nice and definitely drive a majority of sales. But don't forget they are forcing obsolescence by having non-upgradeable RAM and SSD in the latest machines. And that's not just requiring signed SSD drivers so you can't pop a cheaper Micron in it, SSD is now a soldered component. For anyone who cares about upgradability, you have to go (less than or equal to) early 2015 to get a machine with both non-soldered RAM and SSD. Those folks are pretty much shut out from purchasing a new ma
30 bps (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks summary and article for quoting "30 bps" seemingly without knowing what it means.
Anyway, I looked it up. It is a financial term [wikipedia.org], not a bandwidth one.
A basis point (often denoted as bp, often pronounced as "bip" or "beep") is one hundredth of a percent.
I don't know how 30bps is easier to understand than 0.3% but there you have it.
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Thank you, I was wondering what that abbreviation was as well. Now I'm wondering which economist defined "basis point" to mean "a percent of a percent".
Maybe it's a metric prefix we just didn't know about.
Re:30 bps (Score:4, Informative)
Thank you, I was wondering what that abbreviation was as well. Now I'm wondering which economist defined "basis point" to mean "a percent of a percent".
"Basis point" is a finance term used by traders, not an economics term. Economists rarely use the term. Traders say "basis points" because they don't really understand percentages or fractions or other advanced math.
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They understand math just fine. They also understand ambiguity. What is the difference between 1% and 1.5%? 0.5%, 50%, or 67%? On the other hand, 50bps makes it perfectly clear to everyone who knows what basis points are.
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If you have a 12% share (or interest rate, or anything else expressed as a percentage), and it goes up 2%, what does that mean? Is your new share 14% or 12.24%? If your 12% share goes up 200 bps, your new share is 14%.
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For what it's worth, it was a quote from Bloomberg, which is a financial publication.
The intended audience probably got along with the abbreviation and term just fine.
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Which the article barely acknowledged - without even a link to the source.
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Thank you.
I couldn't understand why they didn't just say "30 baud" instead of "30 bps".
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LMGTFY:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-difference-between-baud-rate-and-bit-rate
Literally the second hit when searching for "the difference between baud and bps".
Thank you for saving me from having to post that.
Re:30 bps (Score:5, Interesting)
A number like 12.345% is then ambiguous across the two systems. In the U.S. it would mean twelve and 345 thousandths of a percent. But in Europe it would mean twelve thousand three hundred forty five percent.
If you just call hundredths of a percent a basis point, you avoid this problem. (A programming analogy would be assigning a unit to the smallest number you'll ever use, so that you can use ints instead of floats, thereby eliminating the risk of errors due to misplacing the decimal.)
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If your sales go down by more than 100% in a year, you have bigger problems than arguing decimal places.
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I think it's much more to to with margins and spreads often being sub-1%, so talking about them in 'bips' is easier...
Rgds
Damon
Re:30 bps (Score:5, Informative)
It is to remove ambiguity, but not that one.
If you have 12% market share, and your share goes up 2%, what does that mean? Is your new share 14% or 12.24%? On the other hand, if your 12% share goes up 200 bps, your new share is 14% - no ambiguity.
Linux desktops moment to shine? (Score:2)
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I heard this morning that Apple wants to start making movies
I hope they're not going to try to edit those on a new Macbook "Pro"
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I heard this morning that Apple wants to start making movies
I hope they're not going to try to edit those on a new Macbook "Pro"
Why? I have heard it handles 4k (actually 5k!) video editing smooth as glass [huffingtonpost.co.uk].
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after decades (30+) of Mac use.
I call BS. 30 decades is three centuries, and Macs have only been around since 1984.
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after decades (30+) of Mac use.
I call BS. 30 decades is three centuries, and Macs have only been around since 1984.
You haven't seen my kerosene-powered Apple 1, have you?
self-inflicted category killer (Score:5, Informative)
I tried to procure Mac Minis for a small office in angel-finance reboot mode—it was a blank slate for changing the mix—and Apple had neutered the quad-core mini with the expansion RAM slot so badly, we bought refurbed Windows 7 boxes instead.
Worse machine, twice as much memory, half the price.
One key executive who has cold feet about making the jump, and you're not going to risk a castrated revamp. So it goes.
The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster [tekrevue.com]
I had 100% buy-in for the Apple solution, had we still been able to get the 2012 spec. Mac mini.
My office mate had brought his own 2012-era Mini into the office and everyone loved it, which is how the option to jump ship from Microsoft entered the conversation in the first place.
Then *bam* the anvil behind the velvet curtain when we specked out the crippled revamp.
I can only imagine that Apple kind of wants to kill off the PC category altogether. Insufficient lock-in. Choice remains.
Re:self-inflicted category killer (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to procure Mac Minis for a small office in angel-finance reboot mode—it was a blank slate for changing the mix—and Apple had neutered the quad-core mini with the expansion RAM slot so badly, we bought refurbed Windows 7 boxes instead.
Worse machine, twice as much memory, half the price.
One key executive who has cold feet about making the jump, and you're not going to risk a castrated revamp. So it goes.
The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster [tekrevue.com]
I had 100% buy-in for the Apple solution, had we still been able to get the 2012 spec. Mac mini.
My office mate had brought his own 2012-era Mini into the office and everyone loved it, which is how the option to jump ship from Microsoft entered the conversation in the first place.
Then *bam* the anvil behind the velvet curtain when we specked out the crippled revamp.
I can only imagine that Apple kind of wants to kill off the PC category altogether. Insufficient lock-in. Choice remains.
I honestly think that Apple was running into significant cooling issues with the Quad-Core mini. Now that there are quad-core Skylake's out that are MUCH lower-power, perhaps this year's (2017) minis will be quad again...
That is so weird... (Score:2, Funny)
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>Sean Spicer just said that Apple had "sold more Macs last year than ever before".
It's an 'alternative fact'.
Apple's Missteps (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has made a lot of missteps in the past few years, ostensibly in the name of innovation, without really considering how their products are used and the role bits and pieces of their product line reinforce the brand. Particularly Mac fans have felt it, and now it's hitting home.
Regressions in software, elimination of Apple tools that add value to their platform, allowing hardware to go stale yet designing them to not be modifiable, going style over ergonomics, etc. Jobs had a knack for ignoring the user but delivering something he could make the user feel that they wanted. The current Apple doesn't have that. When they drop the ball on something, they take a ding.
They are also taking far too many cues from Google that are producing terrible (worse, anyway) UIs and UXs. Their products are slowing becoming more awkward and less consistent and coherent. These are minor things, but they add up.
That's what happens when you're offering 1 product (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has simplified their product parts bin so that everything is using laptop parts designed for their thinness at all costs product goals. This means even their desktop units are constrained by the same thermal throttling that kicks when put under load.
It's compounded by them taking forever to update their product line, some of which is outside their control. However, the RAM constraints put on them by their CPU constraints are a self-inflicted wound when it comes to their desktop products. In this sense, they're only offering one product -- old laptop parts -- just in different cases, including the Mini and the iMac.
I understand that simplifying their parts bin does make some things easier but please stop trying to sell me an economy car when I want an 18-Wheeler.
Where is my Mac Pro Tower with dual ethernet and room for six internal volumes? The Mac Pro was the Empire Strikes Back of cases. Will we ever see its like again? If people like us have noticed the lack of a full ecosystem of hardware from Apple, what do you expect us to recommend to our businesses, family and friends?
Oh, and as an aside, they really, really need to be taken to task on their irreparable computers. Want to extend the device's lifecycle by swapping the HD, adding ram or upgrading the internals? Screw you buy a new machine and throw out the old one! Apple should be given a medal by the landfill owner's association.
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Apple has simplified their product parts bin so that everything is using laptop parts designed for their thinness at all costs product goals. This means even their desktop units are constrained by the same thermal throttling that kicks when put under load.
That was REALLY true with the 2015 MacBook Pros [notebookcheck.net]; but isn't at ALL a problem with the 2016 MacBook Pros. That is one of the biggest reasons why the 2016 MBPs are actually MUCH faster than the 2015's [notebookcheck.net], even though the CPU is slightly slower at max. speed.
Of the 2015 MBP:
"Once we had noticed some occasional GPU throttling, it is hardly surprising that the losses in the stress test are even more dramatic. After our one-hour stress test with Prime95 and FurMark (Windows), the CPU runs at only1.2 GHz, while th
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The iMac and Mac Mini are laptops being sold as desktops instead of being engineered to be what they are —desktop products.
I don't see the problem with that, since the iMac + Mac Mini are severely space-constrained, just like a laptop. My AOpen MiniPC from 2009 uses what are, effectively, laptop parts.
If you want to go after Apple, look at their soldering of memory and (especially) SSD parts to the chassis.
Apple doesn't care (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to say it, but Tim Cook is just destroying Apple. At the Apple store in our mall now, they have just two tables devoted to MacBooks. On the walls, they have a Mac Mini, a tower, and a couple of iMacs. It's obvious that it's simply not something they're pushing hard. The extra tables that had MacBooks on them last year now have phones and tablets. And Apple TVs - they're pushing those hard. They are showing less than half the Macs that they were showing a year ago. To put it into perspective, the Best Buy has nearly as many MacBooks on display as the Apple store.
Now, you could say they're responding to lowered demand, but they really need to get their shit together. The proper response is to figure out why the demand is lower (hint: no significant upgrades since Jobs died 5 years ago) and fix it. It's really not that difficult for them to maintain their market position, it's amazing that they could screw it up this badly.
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Don't agree with the strategy, but it makes business sense.
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The market is changing though, and with the phone and tablet, Apple capitalizes on that change.
Don't agree with the strategy, but it makes business sense.
I don't buy it. iPhone sales aren't up, and I'm pretty sure tablet sales plateaued a few years ago. The Apple Watch was pretty much DOA, and they give it a table in the store. They really just need to get their shit together, upgrade the macs and macbooks, and start marketing them again. Again, I have no idea how they can botch this so badly. I don't expect them to come out with another iPhone-type success, but it shouldn't be that difficult to maintain standard upgrade paths for the few products that
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I am all for not killing the goose that lays the golden egg... just not sure that Tim Cook's Apple sees the Mac as the goose, which might go down in Apple's history as a mistake.
New campus might help? (Score:2)
The *one* remaining hope I have for Apple is that huge new "spaceship" campus they're building. I mean, if you look at all the office space that gives them? That could represent an opportunity for Apple to finally employ enough engineers, developers and designers to really plow forward with some innovation.
I find it interesting that so far, I've heard that Apple intends to keep all of its existing office buildings after the new one goes online, too.
They don't do any manufacturing in any of these buildings .
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No pro equipment. (Score:2)
When you make a product that people don't want what do you expect? If Apple would listen to their professional customers and build products that they want then you would not be seeing this. The professionals are the group that drove adoption of the consumer products, don't forget that. As a IT specialist, people ask me all the time what to get and they usually get what I tell them to, so be cognizant of the consequence of pissing of your professional users because they are the group of people recommending y
Took them too long to update (Score:2)
Last year I notice the Dell XPS13 DE and it made my MBA look crap. There was no sign of a better Mac
Market prices for used Mac Pros (Score:3)
Man am I glad I abandoned the Windows world and bought my 12-core Mac Pro back in 2012.
Re:I don't think Apple cares (Score:5, Insightful)
They might not directly make much money from Mac, but they indirectly make shitloads of money from Mac, because Mac is the development environment for the iOS App Store.
Keeping macOS a going affair is a big piece of their product portfolio, unless they do a shit ton of work to port Xcode somewhere else.
I *know* Apple doesn't care (Score:2)
Honestly, as a MacOS user, I would welcome that day.
They sure as hell haven't shown they are able to make cutting edge products. Just (cough) "courageous" ones.
It'd be killer to be able to set up a legit MacOS system with the latest innards.
Re: I don't think Apple cares (Score:2)
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to charge manufacturers a bunch of money to have specific hardware configurations certified as OSX compatible?
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If you get a non-Mac PC / laptop, then suddenly you are a bit more interested in your phone being able to interoperate in a world that isn't 100% apple.
Something that is sub par within the walled garden forces people to venture outside the walled garden. Then they see it from the outside. On the
Re: (Score:2)
Something that is sub par within the walled garden forces people to venture outside the walled garden. Then they see it from the outside. On the inside the walls may be pretty. But from the outside, they see the barbed wire, machine gun emplacements, etc. They may also realize a whole world of other brands of products not made by Apple. Smart watches. TVs set top boxes. Home automation.
Nice hyperbole.
How is the Mac in the walled garden? (Score:2)
You can install software from anywhere on a Mac.
People in the Apple ecosystem are perfectly aware of products from outside the ecosystem--we don't like them. If you like them, then go buy them.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, wait. That has a minority share of the market. With Android you can buy any brand of phone. On any carrier. Any price range. Any feature set / price tradeoff that you prefer. Any color. So many colors, styles, features, prices, storage sizes, processor performance levels that it makes the iPhone look like the uniform droids marching over the cliff in Apple's 1984 commercial.
Complain that Android isn't perfect. It isn't. Really. But it's where the
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Furface (Score:2)
yes Windows 10 is good, the Furface family works for me
Has Microsoft been advertising its tablets to fans of fictional talking animals or something?
Re: (Score:2)
Timmy's hatred for computers and Steve Jobs are legendary. The decline of the Mac lines which have been preceded by the reductions in hardware capability and operating system capability are the plan to kill-off the Mac, iPod and iTunes. Back in the day, iPod and iTunes saved the Mac after their introduction.
Timmy's and Apple's next master-plan piece of innovation will be a the "Apple Tickle" a lesbian masturbation device tethered by blue-tooth and wifi to allow two or more lesbians to masturbate (the device is inserted into the vagina and controlled by iPhone) while playing masturbation games, in their home, on a bus, in a shopping mall or in their cars as such.
Apple with just "Partner" with Lovense [lovense.com] like they did with LG. Slap an Apple logo on one end and everybody is happy.
Re: Id love to upgrade (Score:2)
The 2012 model of the MacBook Pro is probably the best upgrade path. You get USB 3 which makes a big difference over the USB 2 in the 2011 model. Hard drive is fully upgradable and recently I found myself needing to use the optical drive. RAM goes to 16 GB. As long as you don't leave the laptop on in a hot car, the battery should go to almost 1000 full cycle.
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except In the ghetto.
And it's because of the Find My Mac feature that you can find out where in the ghetto your computer is.