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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, @09:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @09:03AM (#434844)

    This is because innovation has died in software in general.

    Not really. It's because there is a physical limit around 4 GHz, and making software more complicated simply means it will be slow on everything - even the developers and his boss' computers.

    Notice how the development lately has been towards more cores instead. The problem is that more cores doesn't mean faster in general. Only very specialized workloads can scale out to many cores, even games often only utilize a few (one for the rendering, one for the physics, one for the AI, etc).

    Even highly parallel workloads usually become I/O limited quickly, which is why systems designed specifically for those often have not just hundreds or cores, but also thousands of hard drives or SSDs.