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posted by n1 on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the year-of-the-linux-desktop dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:57AM (#434755)

    Scaling a 2880x1800 Retina display to 1920x1080 instead of the default 1440x900 may afford comparable resolution to what was achievable on the 2010/2011 17" MBP, but the the extra inch-and-a-bit of diagonal physical screen space would be appreciated. 1680x1050 is comfortable on a 15" display; 1920x1080 starts to get a little small. Been there, done that. I didn't regret a 15" 1920x1080 display, but I would have appreciated a slightly bigger screen.

    Given the way Apple has slimmed down the 15.4" MacBook Pros, they should be able to produce a reasonably slim 17" MBP with a 4K (or even 5K) display for effective 1920x1080 or slightly higher res Retina mode. It doesn't have to be MacBook Air-slim, but something comparable to today's 15" shouldn't be unreasonable.

    From the lessons learned with the MBA, they should be able to put slimmer, lighter batteries in a 17" chassis. Given the physical capacity of a 17" chassis, the battery should end up fairly large/high-capacity, so no need to wimp out with a 16GB RAM limit. Better still, offer sockets. Solder-down some base RAM if necessary, maybe cap that at 16GB if absolutely necessary, but allow pros to throw in an additional pair of 8GB or 16GB SODIMMs, accepting the fact that doing so will have some impact on battery life.

    By excluding an optical drive, there should be plenty of space available for at least two solid state storage devices, maybe one or two M.2 and one 2.5" for easy upgrading.

    The 17" chassis's size should brook no excuses for not including at least one USB-A connector and an SD-Card slot along with today's obligatory multiple USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. A Magsafe power connector and a gigabit Ethernet port would be appreciated, but not expected of today's Apple.

    The whole thing should be buildable with a weight that's less than a 2010 17" MBP and probably even a little less than a 2010 15" MBP.

    I'm not willing to shell out over $5000 for a maxed-out-because-I-have-no-choice 2016 MBP, even with the new emoji-bar. That's just insane. I might consider paying that for a proper UHD/4K/5K Retina 17" MBP, though; one that I could add RAM to later; one that I could replace or supplement the onboard solid-state storage with something bigger later.