SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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).