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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: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:34PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:34PM (#434892) Journal

    The new machines have an unholy amount of theoretical i/o bandwidth with 4xTB3/USB-C ports - but the CPU, GPU and RAM (Max 16GB) are too constrained by space, thermal and battery life concerns to appeal to anybody likely to use half of that connectivity

    The lack of a 32GB option is why I'm hanging onto my late 2013 MBP for a while longer, but I understand the reasons and I probably wouldn't have bought one that had 32GB of RAM with the current tech. The Skylake processors don't support LPDDR4, only LPDDR3 or DDR4. 32GB of DDR4 would bring the power consumption of the RAM up to about 10-20% of the total power consumption of the machine, and that's something that's still powered even in sleep mode. That would really suck for a machine where having it work over most of a transatlantic flight on a single charge is a feature. I suspect that they were aiming for Kaby Lake in these, but the delays meant that they had to release something. Kaby Lake still only has dual-core variants in the mobile version, so until the quad-core is out there's no Kaby Lake processor that would work for a MBP.

    As soon as affordable 5TB xpoint/memristor/unobtanium SSDs appear its landfill, and with the only two possible repairs being "replace the motherboard" or "replace everything but the motherboard", as soon as the Applecare runs out its got one foot in the landfill.

    With the speed of change these days, that's far less of an issue for me. I upgraded the RAM on my first few laptops, but after that it's not been cost effective: I just buy them with the most that the chipset supports, so even if the RAM is replaceable it wouldn't help much. CPUs and GPUs have been soldered to be board for a long time, and even before that it was quite rare for me to upgrade a CPU separately from the motherboard (GPUs were another matter, but the jumps from S3 ViRGE to VooDoo^2 to GeForce2 were all huge, whereas the jumps now are fairly incremental). I've thought that I'd upgrade the disks in my last three laptops, but I never have. Partly that's because I don't have anything useful to do with the old disks. A decade ago, I'd have had other machines that could benefit from the newly replaced disk. Now, that's far less true.

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