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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: 1) by redbear762 on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:43PM
I've be reading this kind of thing for the last 20 years and you'd figure by now that there wouldn't be any left anywhere. I mean, you can do all your stuff on your phone or pad, right? >.
I hear the same crap in gaming and it's just not true; console peasants may want it to be true but it never will be.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday November 29 2016, @04:15PM
I've be reading this kind of thing for the last 20 years and you'd figure by now that there wouldn't be any left anywhere.
One day, the guy with the "The End of the World is Nigh" placard will be right. Don't get complacent.
The End of the Mac will be Nigh when Apple decide that they're making enough money from iPhones that they can throw together an iPhone dev kit for Linux and call it a day. The CEO of Apple has already stood up at a launch and said how important the Mac is to Apple (the only reason any executive type ever says something so bloody obvious is when they mean the exact opposite and are trying to keep a lid on it).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Tuesday November 29 2016, @05:23PM
I've be reading this kind of thing for the last 20 years and you'd figure by now that there wouldn't be any left anywhere. I mean, you can do all your stuff on your phone or pad, right?
Good luck finding a 10 inch laptop nowadays that can run GNU/Linux. All you can find nowadays in that size range are tablets and Chromebooks. Tablets tend to run either only iOS, only Android, or only Windows, and Chromebooks beg you every time you turn it on to wipe the hard drive.*
* A Chromebook with Crouton displays this message: "OS verification OFF. Press Space to re-enable." Pressing Space leads to a second screen that tempts whoever turned on your laptop to wipe the drive: "Press Enter to confirm you want to turn OS verification on. Your system will reboot and local data will be cleared." This leads to the loss of any work not yet backed up and of the use of the device until you return to an Internet connection through which to reinstall the applications on which your work depends.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday November 29 2016, @06:31PM
How long ago did you last buy a new PC? How long before that did you buy its predecessor? How about the one before that? The computer I got in 2001 replaced one that I'd bought in 1998 and had so many upgrades by 2003 that it was effectively a new machine. The one I got in 2003 lasted until 2005 before being replaced. The one I bought in 2010 was replaced in 2012 primarily because I'd dropped it and didn't trust its reliability for work: it would still be fast enough for most things I do. The one that I got in 2012 is barely slower than a brand new one.
I started hacking on LLVM back in 2007. Back then, a rebuild on my laptop took about an hour and a half and an incremental build was often about an hour. With my last laptop, it was down to about 7-8 minutes. Now it's 4-5 with an incremental build often under a minute. Doing it on a server with 24 cores and 256GB of RAM gets it down to a bit under three minutes. The productivity change for a faster one is really small, whereas seven or eight years ago it was huge.
sudo mod me up