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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 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