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from the it-worked-until-it-didn't...-now-what? dept.
Apple has had an incredible decade. Since the iPhone debuted in 2007, the company's sales have jumped tenfold. The stock has soared over 700%. And up until last November, it was the world's largest publicly traded company. But two weeks ago, Apple issued a rare warning that shocked investors. For the first time since 2002, the company slashed its earnings forecast. The stock plunged 10% for its worst day in six years. This capped off a horrible few months in which Apple stock crashed about 35% from its November peak. That erased $446 billion in shareholder value—the biggest wipeout of wealth in a single stock ever.
[...] Despite the revenue growth, Apple is selling fewer iPhones every year. In fact, iPhone unit sales peaked way back in 2015. Last year, Apple sold 14 million fewer phones than it did three years ago.
[...] In 2010, you could buy a brand-new iPhone 4 for 199 bucks. In 2014, the newly released iPhone 6 cost 299 bucks. Today the cheapest model of the latest iPhone X costs $1,149! It's a 500% hike from what Apple charged eight years ago. [...] In 1984, Motorola sold the first cell phone for $4,000. The average price for a smartphone today is $320, according to research firm IDC. Cell phone prices have come down roughly 92%. And yet, Apple has hiked its smartphone prices by 500%!
[...] Twelve years ago, only 120 million people owned a cell phone. Today over five billion people own a smartphone, according to IDC. [...] now iPhone price hikes have gone about as far as they can go. [...] A publicly traded company that makes most of its money from selling phones is no longer telling investors how many phones it sells!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday January 22 2019, @08:33PM (12 children)
I remember when Apple was a great company. The classic Mac days. Apple led in technology. BYTE magazine wrote that the history of the microcomputer industry was an effort to keep up with Apple. Mac fanboys used to laugh at PCs. Dip switches? Motherboard jumper pins. Cryptic autoexec.bat and config.sys? The difficulty of what should be simple: memory expansion, hard drive expansion or addition, CD-ROM addition. Mice that plugged into the serial port and required configuration, didn't just work at boot time. The fact that there was a BIOS settings instead of just a happy mac face starting the boot with no opportunity to intervene. Drive letters? Really, drive letters? Drive C? Eight character file names, and no international character sets?
Macs that had a "cpu unit" with separate monitor could be taken apart with the bare hands. No tools. Where PCs often required tools, and I swear the manufacturers actually PAID someone to sharpen the metal edges inside the computer's interior.
Those were fun days.
Apple tried and failed three times to build its next generation OS.
They ended up buying NeXT. (I had been hoping they would buy BeOS which had an OS that IMO was a much better fit.) But No. NeXT had Steve Jobs. I guess Apple forgot that there was a reason why Steve Jobs was stripped of his power at Apple. . . Steve chose to leave Apple on his own. Once he left Apple, Steve built a computer (NeXT) that had everything that he wouldn't allow the Mac to have. Color. Separate cpu box from the monitor. Large memory capacity. Etc, etc.
Once Steve was back at Apple, thus was planted the seeds of Apple's eventual downfall.
Mac OS X based on NeXT. Very different, but was adapted to look more like a Mac. Incompatible with classic Mac apps. And in a single stroke, Apple abandoned compatibility with all of the expensive Macs (some were $5000 or more) that were in existence. Mac OS 9 was the end of the line.
Then came the iPhone. I thought it was great. But I noticed how Steve was going to repeat past mistakes and not license the iOS to other phone manufacturers who had been around for a very long time in the phone business before Apple joined. Sort of like if Apple had licensed the Mac OS in the 1980s there probably would never have been a Microsoft Windows. But OTOH, in hindsight, I think Steve Jobs with concentrated power would have been worse than Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer put together.
Then came the inevitable patent wars. Because patents could be had on things like bouncy scrolling, or slide to unlock. I could say more about the patent wars, but I'll draw to a close.
After the end of Mac OS Classic, I got interested in Linux and never looked back. I looked at everything that could eventually make Linux mainstream and successful. One thing I was interested in was any type of Linux powered phone. I liked Palm's Web OS, but Palm was too inept to even understand what they had. I settled for Android becoming the winner because I could do some of the things I dreamed of. Rooting it for example. I viewed the very closed iOS as something that worked against the rise of Linux. So I no longer thought so fondly of the classic Apple.
I suspect Apple will be around a long time. Hopefully a lot less powerful. If it passes, I will have some sadness remembering the good ol' days, but I wouldn't be too sad.
Do remember this: not so many years ago Microsoft was so powerful it seemed invincible. I recognized around 2010 that there was a day coming where Microsoft's best days would be behind it. And we have long since crossed that point now. Microsoft is trying to embrace everything open source. Who would have thought.
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday January 22 2019, @09:34PM (1 child)
For me, classic times were the days of the Apple II, not the Mac. In the early 80s, I had an Apple II+, with a 16K expansion for a total of 64K RAM. And then, I never made the jump to the Mac. Instead, seeing that PCs were everywhere, I switched to the PC, and that's where I still am today.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:42PM
I remember the Apple ][. We used the p-System (and Pascal language). On the Apple ][ and Apple ///, we used Apple Pascal which was extremely close, except the binary formats were different. (Apple Pascal was forked from the p-System 2, and we used the p-System 4 on all other platforms, IBM PC, Corvus Concept, etc.) But it was source code compatible, which was fantastic to build a commercial accounting system and sell it on multiple platforms.
Our favorite was the Apple /// over the Apple ][. The SOS (operating system) was really nice. Ahead of its time. The 3 was a great software design, plagued by a few hardware problems.
Alas, we had to give up on the Apple ][ due to limited maximum memory. But it was fun times. We looked at Lisa very carefully, but did not bite. When we saw pre-release Macs, and even had access to one ahead of release, we decided to get into Mac development -- which meant buying Lisa's because they were the development platform for the Mac at that time. Then we were pleasantly surprised that the Lisa Pascal, and later MPW Pascal were surprisingly compatible with Apple's p-system based Pascal. Once I was working on the Mac I never gave the PC another look. (But I had written 8086 code for the PC to do our fancy quick snappy text window scrolling and updating within 'windows' on the text screen. That x86 code was called from p-System pascal.)
It was sad to see the end of the classic Mac. I had my hopes on Apple's great new Mac OS which never materialized. Except in the ugly form of OS X.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 22 2019, @09:47PM (2 children)
I've generally assumed that the overall geek-friendliness of Apple started dropping more-or-less the day Woz stopped being part of the day-to-day. Woz was always more about making cool stuff than about making oodles of money, and it showed in what he was involved in designing.
But the obvious problem now is that Steve Jobs' reality distortion field is no longer in effect, and the iPhone never was even close to as insanely great as he was capable of convincing others they were.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday January 22 2019, @10:50PM (1 child)
To be fair, the original iPhone was pretty cool. I was supporting a bunch of Nokias and a couple of Windows phones (Win CE 6.5 maybe?) when they came out.
Setting up email for the user was an absolute doddle, and it was a huge amount better for the end user too.
The various Nokias we had were pretty good phones, but the "smart" bit was stupid as hell, and the displays were too small to do much with.
The other thing the iPhones did was show just how shit Blackberries were for the end users. We had one executive who demanded a new Blackberry every time a new model came out. After the other senior people all got iPhones they sniggered behind his back. To be fair he was an absolute bellend.
The Win CE phone (we had two I think) were shit from whatever angle you looked, poorly thought out interface, buggy as hell, they dropped calls, missed txts, and needed restarting every morning. Just rubbish.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday January 23 2019, @10:52AM
For business people (and especially those that travel outside the US) e-mail and BB PIN messaging were the killer apps. Nothing else was even worth wasting time on and while there was a lot of 'ooh ooh shiny' uptake and people 'demanding' iPhones because they were status symbols the bulk of the business world kept using blackberry because:
- e-mail arrived faster w/o blowing out the battery.
- unlimited data plans (including unlimited international data plans).
For people doing business (like your bellend) those e-mails *are* the business .. and for your iPhonys I would stipulate that there may not have been 'bellends' but they were most probably utterly useless middle management and it would take 6 months to notice if the just stopped showing up.
It wan't until Android matured enough to have push gmail that blackberry actually started to lose market share. That caused BB to try to 'catch up' to Android/iPhone by being more of an app-phone (like iPhone/Android). At that point their devices necessarily got data hungry which cause the unlimited plans to go away. All that was left was the PIN-PIN messaging. WhatsApp happened to be where everyone went and at that point the deal was sealed and the rest is history.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:52AM (1 child)
I don't agree with your assessment of Steve's return to Apple in the 90's. That Sculley guy almost destroyed Apple by releasing mediocre and overpriced products, like Cook is doing now. People stopped buying Macs. OS9, or OS8, or maybe both I don't remember, was a disaster. They didn't respond to Windows 95 properly. Win95 offered good enough plug-and-play that worked (most of the time), good enough stability, good enough memory management, and for $2000 you could get a high-end Pentium 200 PC that outperformed and was half the price of anything comparable that Apple had. Almost all software companies were jumping ship and developing Windows software. Apple was dying and had just enough life left to maybe barely survive into the early 2000's.
If Jobs didn't come back then Apple and the Mac would be just a memory today and would be in the same "What if..." category of the Amiga. Microsoft even invested a few hundreds of millions into Apple in the 90's, just to keep the antitrust people off their back.
(Those were exciting times in personal computing....god I miss those days.)
I'm not a Jobs fanboy at all, but he is the reason why Apple went from a niche, almost bankrupt company in the late 90's to the richest company in the world based on stock valuation.
I must agree that BeOS 4 was an amazing OS. If it just would have been released 5 years earlier...who knows what might have been?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:51PM
As I seem to recall, and from regular MacWEEK issues of the day, was that Apple was almost destroyed by Scully's successor. Can't quite remember his name.
Apple was pushing the PowerPC as the future. First they had to convince developers. And they did. Then they had to convince customers, and slowly, they did.
But Apple didn't believe it themselves. So they made a billion dollars worth of 680x0 Macs that -- surprise -- nobody wanted to buy because PowerPC was the future.
That billion dollar writeoff was part of what brought Apple to its knees. Along with failures in developing it's next generation OS.
Mac OS 8 and 9 came out. But clearly the new OS was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile Apple's Mac PowerPC hardware ran BeOS which was looking pretty cool.
I do have to agree with you about that. But by that time I had seen through the reality distortion field and saw Jobs for what he really was. A huckster, IMO.
It is amusing that when Jobs returned he had given up on the errors that got him stripped of his power by Scully. He no longer put such ridiculous artificial technical limitations on products. Like the original Mac having only 128 K and never to ever have any more than that. Forever, amen. And never ever to have color. And never to have a separate cpu box and high quality monitor. And never to have expansion slots. None of those things came until Jobs was gone from Apple. Apple might have also been a distant memory if Scully had not taken action to limit the damage Jobs was doing. Developers were screaming for memory, powerful CPUs, high end color graphics and monitors. Expansion slots. In fact, it wasn't until the Mac II (post Jobs) that the Mac really came into its own.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @06:15AM (2 children)
CMP killed BYTE.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
What is CMP? An assembly language instruction? Or some kind of PC magazine I never heard of? (But I was a Mac fanboy by then.)
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:11PM
CMP Publications, I believe is what the poster was referring to. Now a part of UBM Technology Group.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday January 23 2019, @08:41AM (1 child)
You remember differently to I, or we had very different experiences.
The 80's - Apple was non-existent. I don't remember a single mention of them until I saw one guy who had a Macintosh (128Kb). The ones with the tiny integrated screen. I was mad-keen to have a look at it because it was unusual, and I had no idea what it was. The screen seemed ridiculous even back then. It was, I realise now, a status symbol. Everyone else who had a computer (which commercially wasn't many people, admittedly, unless you count those home computers we all had that plugged into the TV) thought it ridiculous. Nothing serious was ever done on it. I mean... you couldn't. Squinting at that thing for hours on end was silly. And the cost was exorbitant.
The 90's - Pretty much Apple-less. The iMac G3 was the highlight and the only thing Apple that I remember at all. It seemed a nice idea - integrate that TV that we'd all been using into the computer itself. However, PC's suddenly were everywhere. There was only a clear distinction between those people with "a PC" (meaning an x86/IBM-compatible) and those people who only had non-computers (games consoles, etc.). That was it. That was the difference. The average person didn't have a computer unless they'd used them for work. The G3 highlight was "look how pretty it is". That's why they put it in movies in kid's bedrooms, and why it came in 20+ colours. I literally never knew a single person who owned one, but I helped one friend throw one away years later. I have absolutely no memory of them ever owning it. This was still the 68000-era. Macs were completely different architectures. My university had a single Mac suite on site. And no less than four PC suites (at least, that's as many as I had access to), and thousands of PCs everywhere. The Mac suite was full of graphics and multimedia students, and serviced by a guy who did nothing else but Mac because the normal tech support wanted nothing to do with them. Not one lecturer had a Mac, everything was done on PC.
The 2000's - Again, Apple-absent. This is the decade they copied PCs and became incredibly expensive x86 PCs. They grew in terms of mobile devices and iPods, but I still didn't know anyone who had a Mac for anything more than show (i.e. they did no real work on them, and when they tried they weren't even aware that Apple Pages etc. wasn't the format to send stuff around in - which shows that they rarely, if ever, exchanged documents with the wider world). Yet by now everyone had a PC even if it was a big clunky thing in the corner of the living room. This is where Macbooks started to come out and were just incredibly expensive toys that only students seemed to be able to afford (which, having graduated before then, I found very odd as I'd literally not been able to afford even a basic laptop for my courses in the 90's).
I've never seen them as anything more than a status symbol. People buy them because other people buy them. To a man, the people who buy them I rarely witness using them as a tool. Merely a gadget. A TV-watching browsing device. They are big iPhones, basically, same as the iPad. Even the "creators" and arty people have moved away from them.
I manage IT in schools. We've ditched all Apple technology and are just using what remains on site until it dies (not just "no plans for replacement" if they break but "deliberate plans to get rid of them all and replace with something else that isn't Apple"). The only Macs in real use are in the hands of people who tell me they "trained in design". These people can barely adjust a photo in Photoshop despite literally elbowing others out of the way to "show them how its done" because they trained on Photoshop. A few of the young kids who work for the schools (on their gap-years, teacher-training etc.) have Macs that - and I know this for a fact as I have their web logs - get used for Chrome, Netflix and iTunes. That's it. The biggest use of them is "opening things we've been sent in Apple Pages" (I kid you not) and "video-editing" using iMovie. I introduced VSDC video editor three years ago and iMovie literally died there and then. Finished. Done. Game over. Because of a bit of freeware. Not least because freeware-on-the-oldest-business-PC without any graphics acceleration literally wiped the floor with iMovie on any Mac we had.
I don't get it. Apple's "revolution" happened far away and out of the public eye, in my experience. I have seen / touched / used literally a thousand times more PCs than Macs. But, hey, I only work in IT. About the only "common" item I see is iPhones. I joke - but have also as part of the joke started to keep count and take notice - that every iPhone I ever see has a cracked screen. I think the running total (of unique iPhones that have come to me for anything - wifi settings, app install, etc.) is currently up in the 50's. That's literally 50 different devices, on the trot, without seeing one that didn't have a cracked screen. By comparison, other brands (which has included Windows Phones!) it's the opposite - it's 50-something before I *see* one with a cracked screen. Given that I get to see everyone's devices before they can join our networks, that's rather telling.
I never got it. I never bought the hype. And everything they sell is at least 2-5 times more expensive than it needs to be. I think there is a literal "I've paid the money now, I need to tell people it wasn't a waste" element, as well as a "Look what I have" and even a "I don't know how to use it, and I have no idea what I bought, but isn't it pretty?" factor. And that has applied to every Apple device I've ever seen in my life. Which is less than one percent of all the computers that I've ever dealt with in my life.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:57PM
We do have different experiences. Once I got started on the Mac in late 1984, I never looked back. I lived in an entirely Mac centric world until 1993 when I did go back to doing some cross platform work with Mac and PC Win 3.1. But I thought of Win 3.1 as quite an inferior toy. In every possible way.
But . . . I was impressed with VB and Access at that time. I even suggested to the company president that maybe we should not do cross platform development any more and our next platform should be VB / Access or something similar. We surveyed our customer base and even at that time it was 56 % Mac. That was because our accounting system was one of the very few that ran on the Mac, so naturally we got a lot of the Mac customers who needed our system.
So we continued to be cross platform to this very day where everything is now web based. :-)
But I stopped being a Mac fanboy in about 1999 when I got my first Linux box with SuSE 5.1.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.