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The Macintosh line of personal computers will soon be 32 years old. It has a venerable past… but what kind of future does it have in a declining market?
On the surface the Mac appears to be thriving. If ‘Macintosh Inc.’ were an independent company, its $22.8B in revenue for Apple’s 2016 accounting year (which ended in September) would rank 123rd on the Fortune 500 list, not far below the likes of Time Warner, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon
But there’s more to the Mac’s future than its current good numbers. After enjoying a good time in the sun, the Mac is on the same downward slope as the rest of the PC market.
[...] Instead of racing to the bottom as the market plummets, Apple appears to be taking the “high road”, in a sense: They’re taking refuge at the high end of the market by introducing new, more expensive MacBook Pros, with a visible differentiating feature, the Touch Bar. This is known, inelegantly, as milking a declining business, although you shouldn’t expect Apple to put it that way.
Apple’s recognition that the PC market is declining also explains why the company has been slow in updating its laptops and desktops. The iPhone, with $136B in revenue for 2016, is a much higher priority and gets more development resources. In a war, the top general puts more and better troops on the most important battle.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:59PM
Agreed on all counts. The vast majority of people would have enough power in a Raspberry Pi for everything they need a computer for, ever, full stop. We're there or past there for phones/tablets as well; the 2nd gen iPad Mini and current flagship phones basically have no reason to be replaced except when taking damage or their batteries falter.
There will be a stable PC industry for the foreseeable future. Emphasis on stable. Of course, the business suits don't like stability - if it isn't growing at an unsustainable pace, the sky is falling in the bubble economy. This should be viewed as normal in a maturing industry.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday November 29 2016, @05:11PM
The vast majority of people would have enough power in a Raspberry Pi for everything they need a computer for, ever, full stop.
Provided the developers of the vast majority of proprietary applications and free Win32 applications are willing to port these applications to an operating system that runs natively on the Raspberry Pi. For example, ModPlug Tracker, FamiTracker, FCEUX (debugging version), and NO$SNS work usably in Wine even on a dinky little netbook with an Atom CPU. But because Raspberry Pi is not x86, Wine doesn't work.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 29 2016, @07:01PM
The vast majority of people would have enough power in a Raspberry Pi for everything they need a computer for, ever
Yeah my son has one. Watches youtube fine, checks his email, some social media stuff. I guess he can access his google drive to do his school homework although I've never seen him do that LOL.
You have to realize the specs for a pi are the specs for a desktop circa 2005 or so and nothing has really changed since then for the vast majority of the population. Web pages are a little bigger and slower, whatever. Thats about it.