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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: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday November 29 2016, @05:40PM
While I agree with you, Apple made a business decision to stop producing 17" screens for what I assume are solid business reasons. The consumer market, while in (sort of) decline, is still much larger than the professional and enthusiast markets (for Apple at least). Especially when you add the education market which shows no sign of slowing in its need for real computers. It's not a question of whether 17" screens are profitable. It's a question of whether they're more profitable than other things those engineers could be doing.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?