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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, Interesting) by theluggage on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:57PM
Apple’s recognition that the PC market is declining also explains why the company has been slow in updating its laptops and desktops.
... which, of course, doesn't exactly do wonders for sales. However, to be fair, some of this has been caused by the slow roll-out of new Intel chips: if you ignore Intel's meaningless i3/i5/i7 branding and look at the bulk availability of the specific CPU models Apple needed - based on thermal rating and class of iGPU - the "2/3 year-old" chips in the previous MacBook Pros were still the best fit for the job until a few months ago.
However, Apple's problem is whether its new approach will have enough wide-spread appeal to maintain the Mac OS ecosystem - the new laptops aren't going down well with "power users" and, even if they don't dominate sales, those are the people providing Mac support in their workplace, evangelising Macs to their friends, family and colleagues, buying "professional" Mac software to make it worthwhile for firms like Adobe to support Mac or even creating software themselves. A few people with deep pockets buying expensive laptops for the bling factor (and, apparently, the touch bar is great for emojis) might bring short-term gain but won't help grow the platform.
One snag with the new MacBook Pros is that they have clearly been designed with a "prime directive" of "make it thinner and lighter with longer battery life & hang everything else". The result is a design that doesn't make sense: the thin-ness obsession has made them jump to all-USB-C/TB3 at least a year or so before the time is right. The new machines have an unholy amount of theoretical i/o bandwidth with 4xTB3/USB-C ports - but the CPU, GPU and RAM (Max 16GB) are too constrained by space, thermal and battery life concerns to appeal to anybody likely to use half of that connectivity. 4 x USB-C ports may be terrific in 3 years time when the standard is ubiquitous, but the non-repairable soldered-to-the-board RAM, SSD and ~meh CPU/GPU mean these machines are going to be landfill on that timescale.
In 2011, I invested a couple of thousand in a new high-end MacBook Pro because I could see that it would last me for 5 years. At the end of 2016, that has borne out - after a RAM upgrade, fitting a SSD, replacing the optical drive with a HD, replacing the original SSD with a bigger one, plugging in an expressCard to get USB3. No way will a 2016 MacBook have that kind of lifespan. As soon as affordable 5TB xpoint/memristor/unobtanium SSDs appear its landfill, and with the only two possible repairs being "replace the motherboard" or "replace everything but the motherboard", as soon as the Applecare runs out its got one foot in the landfill. Consequence: I'm far, far less inclined to blow a couple of grand on one (plus the couple hundred I'd need to replace cables, adapters spare PSUs etc. at home, work and in my travel bag - scary how that adds up unless you risk frying everything with no-name fleaBay cables).
Of course, some of this is the consequence of the "maturation" of the PC industry - my last two computers have each remained highly viable for 5+ years. Before that, anything over 18 months was a door-stop - including custom builds which could have been upgraded piecemeal but weren't worth it because there was a new, twice-as-powerful standard for every part.
Clearly the market is going to take a hit. You can see why Apple have been happy to strip out upgradeability and pursue thin&crispy in the absence of any day-and-night improvement in technology - the question is will all the good little millennials trot out and buy disposable laptops at heirloom prices (I thought our generation had hogged all the money so that the little beggars couldn't waste it on brand-named bling?)
Thing is... companies still make money selling fridges, cookers and stuff that last for decades and haven't changed much beyond using slightly less power. The PC industry might have to start managing its expectations and realise that the glory days are over. People who actually do things on computers will still need PCs - just not so often (and the tablet/phone market is probably saturating faster than the PC market, as people wise up and compare the price of a 2yr contract with a sim-free handset + sim-only service that you keep for 4 years). I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the tablet market dries up completely long before the PC market has stopped chugging along.
Maybe Apple should have the "courage" to slow down - people love the MacBook Air (which has been left to whither) and the classic Unibody MacBook - perhaps they could make them the "timeless designs" of the laptop world - the Porsche 911 or the Kenwood Chef Mixer of computing - with just minor incremental updates or (perish the thought) official aftermarket upgrades?
The other question is whether they should re-consider the "xMac" concept (basic Mac mini-tower cheaply developed using PC commodity parts) or some sort of limited, not-for-resale, official "Hackintosh" program - as a strategic move to stop power users leaving for Windows and Linux? There have been good arguments against this in the past, but maybe they've changed now. Would a $800 xMac decimate sales of a $1200 iMac when only a minority of people want a tower system - or would a build-it-yourself legal Hackintosh option even register with customers prepared to pay $3000 for a thin'n'crispy laptop with the all-important fruity logo?
Certainly, I'd see a Hackintosh + 12" MacBook for the road a better solution for my needs than buying a new MacBook Pro (or, dear Apple accountants, not buying a new MacBook pro and going with a Dell XPS instead).
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:34PM
The new machines have an unholy amount of theoretical i/o bandwidth with 4xTB3/USB-C ports - but the CPU, GPU and RAM (Max 16GB) are too constrained by space, thermal and battery life concerns to appeal to anybody likely to use half of that connectivity
The lack of a 32GB option is why I'm hanging onto my late 2013 MBP for a while longer, but I understand the reasons and I probably wouldn't have bought one that had 32GB of RAM with the current tech. The Skylake processors don't support LPDDR4, only LPDDR3 or DDR4. 32GB of DDR4 would bring the power consumption of the RAM up to about 10-20% of the total power consumption of the machine, and that's something that's still powered even in sleep mode. That would really suck for a machine where having it work over most of a transatlantic flight on a single charge is a feature. I suspect that they were aiming for Kaby Lake in these, but the delays meant that they had to release something. Kaby Lake still only has dual-core variants in the mobile version, so until the quad-core is out there's no Kaby Lake processor that would work for a MBP.
As soon as affordable 5TB xpoint/memristor/unobtanium SSDs appear its landfill, and with the only two possible repairs being "replace the motherboard" or "replace everything but the motherboard", as soon as the Applecare runs out its got one foot in the landfill.
With the speed of change these days, that's far less of an issue for me. I upgraded the RAM on my first few laptops, but after that it's not been cost effective: I just buy them with the most that the chipset supports, so even if the RAM is replaceable it wouldn't help much. CPUs and GPUs have been soldered to be board for a long time, and even before that it was quite rare for me to upgrade a CPU separately from the motherboard (GPUs were another matter, but the jumps from S3 ViRGE to VooDoo^2 to GeForce2 were all huge, whereas the jumps now are fairly incremental). I've thought that I'd upgrade the disks in my last three laptops, but I never have. Partly that's because I don't have anything useful to do with the old disks. A decade ago, I'd have had other machines that could benefit from the newly replaced disk. Now, that's far less true.
sudo mod me up