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posted by janrinok on Friday November 25 2016, @01:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the stick-to-what-you-are-good-at dept.

Apple Inc. has disbanded its division that develops wireless routers, another move to try to sharpen the company's focus on consumer products that generate the bulk of its revenue, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple began shutting down the wireless router team over the past year, dispersing engineers to other product development groups, including the one handling the Apple TV, said the people, who asked not to be named because the decision hasn't been publicly announced.

Apple hasn't refreshed its routers since 2013 following years of frequent updates to match new standards from the wireless industry. The decision to disband the team indicates the company isn't currently pushing forward with new versions of its routers. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company's plans.

Routers are access points that connect laptops, iPhones and other devices to the web without a cable. Apple currently sells three wireless routers, the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme, and AirPort Time capsule. The Time capsule doubles as a backup storage hard drive for Mac computers.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday November 25 2016, @03:07AM

    by frojack (1554) on Friday November 25 2016, @03:07AM (#432723) Journal

    Why have they chosen, over the last few months to shut down every division that wasn't immediately profitable to concentrate on the one division that has run its course?

    No self driving cars, servers, home infrastructure. Just keep selling the same phones to the same fanboys over and over again?

    They are already taking in most of the profits in the cellar market by over charging for designer packaging of pedestrian devices.

    How much more profitable do they need to be?

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  • (Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday November 25 2016, @03:18AM

    by RedGreen (888) on Friday November 25 2016, @03:18AM (#432726)

    "How much more profitable do they need to be?"

    There are no bonuses paid out on flat profits no increase no fat bonus checks or stock pay outs coming the executives way.

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    • (Score: 3, Touché) by frojack on Friday November 25 2016, @03:33AM

      by frojack (1554) on Friday November 25 2016, @03:33AM (#432730) Journal

      There are no bonuses paid out on flat profits no increase no fat bonus checks or stock pay outs coming the executives way.

      What planet have you been living on for the bast 20 years?

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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday November 25 2016, @03:39AM

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 25 2016, @03:39AM (#432732)
    Flat profits = fllat stock price = unhappy investors. If it goes on long enough it can end up with a competitor buying you out, against your will if necessary. Not much of a threat to Apple right now but give it a decade of flat growth and it would be a different story.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday November 25 2016, @05:05PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday November 25 2016, @05:05PM (#432900) Journal

      Flat profits = fllat stock price = unhappy investors. If it goes on long enough it can end up with a competitor buying you out, against your will if necessary.

      Not to go too off-topic, but this pretty much sums up the fallacy of Wall Street concisely. Gone are the days when a local business might make steady profits year-after-year for decades, and the owners might be happy. Maybe some local investors might chip in to get it started, and get steady income for decades.

      Now, not only Wall Street folks and speculators, but also the general public, continuously chases after "returns" in the form of continuously rising stock price. And not just continuously rising, nor even "beating inflation," but "beating the market." If your company isn't beating the market, you're obviously not growing enough, not innovative enough... but of course that's completely unsustainable. A minority of companies manage to make it happen for a few years before either going bust or being sold to the highest bidder. A select few might manage to do it for a decade or so. Apple may manage to do it for several more years, but will it be able to do this for another decade or more?

      Anyhow, getting back to the point at hand -- one of the many problems with this system (other than the speculation and instability it causes in markets) is that it causes corporations to make poor decisions in terms of long-term health. Once you achieve product saturation, what do you do next? It drives things like outsourcing your labor and jobs, since at least you can post some gains there for a few more years, forestalling the inevitable stop of growth. Maybe you institute the razor/razorblades model of marketing -- nobody wants to pay $500 for a phone, so you tether it to cell phone bills and get kickbacks from contracts, thus allowing you to charge more for your product than people would pay at a single time. Maybe you start building cheaper products that will fail sooner, or make them impossible to service/repair, or maybe you keep introducing "system upgrades" that destroy performance on old devices, thus forcing people to buy another device. Or maybe you start removing ports and features arbitrarily from devices, requiring consumers to buy extra things to keep the functionality they want.

      Or, maybe you start shutting down whole profitable product lines, which aren't GROWING fast enough.

      The perpetual growth machine doesn't exist. Apple will eventually start to feel the pressure of investors expecting insane and irrational growing returns every year... so unless the future in a decade is that you have to buy a new iPhone every month because it just expires, it's going to be hard to keep it up, since they've already exhausted many of the other accounting tricks. A completely new product line could do it temporarily, so we'll just see if that happens.

      But this is all part of the larger unstable boom-and-bust cycle.

      • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Friday November 25 2016, @07:41PM

        by quacking duck (1395) on Friday November 25 2016, @07:41PM (#432979)

        Yup. I've been saying for awhile now that the beancounters have taken over Apple. Hell, Tim Cook might be one himself.

  • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday November 26 2016, @08:16AM

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Saturday November 26 2016, @08:16AM (#433158) Journal

    Just like MSFT without Gates at the helm Apple without Jobs equals a slow death.

    Love him or hate him as someone who has not and will not ever own an Apple product I will still give credit where credit is due and Jobs had a serious eye for spotting products with shitty UIs and taking the hassle out of using them. I had one of the first MP3 players but I'll be the first to admit that from those first MP3 players to models that came out years after the iPod the MP3 OEMs just didn't get it when it came to UI. I mean even my Sansa 240 from 06 still required no less than 6 button presses through 3 menus just to change the EQ, Jobs saw how shitty the UIs were and stripped out all the shit. The same with phones, those of us with early smartphones remember how shit the UIs were, remember WinCE and the teeny tiny desktop they stuffed onto phones? Again Jobs stripped out the shit and focused on ease of use.

    But now that Jobs is gone? They just don't have anyone with that kind of eye to spot new products with crap UIs and the ones they have from Jobs time are dying simply because the hardware has reached "good enough" for the majority. Sure they'll have the iFanboys that will wait in line to buy anything with a lowercase "i" in front of it but the days of growth? They are truly over and the fact they are killing pretty much any new product that doesn't make iPhone money? Just shows how short sighted they are.

    It will be interesting to see what comes along to replace them as Apple and MSFT fade away, lets face it it always happens when a company gets too big and too scared to try radical things that some young upstart comes along and flips the table. After all that is what Gates and Jobs back in the day did to IBM who had grown stagnant and so too will it happen to them.

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