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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 Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:14PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday November 30 2016, @02:26PM
Once you attach a keyboard, mouse, and use a stand for your tablet you've effectively created a laptop.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @04:40PM
"What creation do you think that most people do on a laptop or desktop that they can't do on a tablet?"
In the absolute sense, not much.
In the sense of practicality, plenty. Creation requires entry and management of information. Rapid, accurate entry, and ideally with a good view of the data at hand because current entry is based on current state.
Even granting that modern tablets are powerful enough for major work in CPU terms, they are often IO constrained both in terms of internal architecture, and in terms of their connection options.
Now I do observe that you weasel-worded "most people" so you can always mumble something about emails with funny cat videos being easy on a tablet, but the constraints of the tablet will also keep them there. Writing a novel? Terrible on those crappy tablet keyboards. There goes NaNoWriMo. Want to use your lovely MIDI keyboard with all the bells and whistles? At the very least you need the USB dongle and a MIDI interface attached to that. Want to do serious video rendering? Hope you have your power cord, because this will take a while. A long while.
But hey, if you want to keep the monkeys pulling the lever ... I mean, the turtleneck wearers sipping their espressos while telling themselves how creative they are, tablets are great!