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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: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 30 2016, @04:45AM
Sometimes, the car analogy just makes things more confusing. Macintosh was a Scottish clan name, and then an apple variety, before computing was even a glint in Charles Babbage's eye. But then there is the Mackinaw, which while sounding similar, is either a coat or a type of boat used on the Great Lakes. Macaws, on the other hand, are only birds, and not coats or computing devices at all. All those car companies, of course, were originally independent. GM bought up DeSoto, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Hupmobile. Chrysler bought Dodge, Plymouth, and something else. AMC bought Studebaker, and Packer and Duesenberg just faded away. Some of these claims may be post-factual. Ford bought Lincoln Motors, but they produced the Mustang, which is like how Apple bought, . . . no, what, Microsoft bought CP/M and produced DOS, so Apple is just like that, only they didn't buy anything, until they didn't by BSD. See, car analogies, sometimes they really just Tesla the whole point.