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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: 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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.