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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: 1) by jman on Wednesday January 23 2019, @07:56PM
In Q4 2018, Apple computer revenue - around seven and a half billion dollars - was nearly twice their tablet sales, but only around twenty percent of what the phone brought in.
That doesn't look good for them; with the planet fairly saturated with cell phones, Apple, may need to consider alternate revenue streams. They should remember that they were born as a hack-friendly hardware company, and try selling some products that weren't internally glued together. It might be fun!
Last summer, my '09 MBP - a then "top of the line" Core-2 Duo running at 2.8Ghz, which had cost around twenty-five hundred - started getting "tired", and that now relatively "slow" cpu, combined with a max of 8gb memory, was making Adobe - and thus, me while operating it - unhappy. I'd gotten a lot of good use out of that laptop, but decided it was time for a new box. Nine years was the longest I had ever gone with one main rig; surely a testament to the quality of their crafstmenship.
One nice thing about that laptop was that I could service it myself. The very first thing I'd done to it was spend another $200 to upgrade from the four gigs of memory it originally had.
This time around, there was just no way was I going to spend anywhere near what I did on the old machine and not be able to upgrade ram or storage, or perform repairs as needed.
So, I let Amazon hit me up for a little over four grand (using a new credit card with 18 months zero interest), and built a Hackintosh desktop running High Sierra.
Hardware-wise, it's comprised of:
Case: Cooler Master HAF XB EVO
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370N
CPU: Intel i7-8700K CPU (3.7Ghz, 6 cores)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H115i (Liquid)
Memory: Corsair 32GB LPX DDR4
Power Supply: Corsair RM850x
Storage: Samsung 970 Pro 512GB (NVMe M.2, not available on the iMac)
GPU: nVidia Titan XP (12GB DDR5. iMacs use the Intel Iris 640, meaning no dedicated GPU, which for a supposed high-end graphics machine is just plain dumb)
Monitor: Not one, but two 28" 4K Asus PB287Q monitors (I use them in landscape mode, but they can swivel to vertical if one prefers that view)
Keyboard: Matias FK488TS (Wireless Aluminum Silver, Bluetooth)
Mouse: Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Mouse 3600 (Bluetooth)
Speakers: Elegiant USB Powered Sound Bar (Convenient volume knob, mic & headphone ports, sits comfortably beneath and between the monitors)
Backup: Western Digital 8TB My Book Desktop (USB "spinning rust", very reliable, have used their products for years)
The board has four SATA ports, so I re-purposed the MBP's 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD for additional storage, and installed a couple of other drives that had previously been intermittently connected to the laptop via USB:
A 2TB "spinning rust" drive (one of LaCie's "Rugged" orange-cased portable units) holding music, video, ISO's, etc. I'd purchased it as a companion to the laptop while on the road, but it kept losing connection. Turned out that was due to it having no external power supply, so gave up on it being a travel drive and opened the case to find a 2.5" Seagate inside which, once properly powered, has worked flawlessly.
A 512 GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD for WinDoze and Linux VM's, Docker containers, etc.
Don't use WiFi as the board has dual Gig Ethernet ports - not to mention that unless you really can't get a wire there, there are very few times you'd need WiFi on a desktop (how many times does one have to say: "Oh, the internet's down, and I REALLY need to finish that download. Let's just tether the desktop to my phone!") - but did spring for a Broadcom M.2 WiFi/Bluetooth card (BCM94352Z, around forty-five dollars) so the keyboard and mouse would not have to be tethered. Got the Broadcom as there were no Mac drivers for the Intel M.2 card that came with the board. Thankfully it was not soldered on, and easy to swap out.
As keyboards go, this one was fairly expensive; a little over a hundred dollars. I settled upon it after test-driving models from several different manufacturers at a local consumer electronics store, and found it felt most like that of the MBP, to which my fingers had grown very accustomed over the past nine years. I do a lot of typing, and didn't want to get used to a new feel. The mouse was nothing special. (I don't go crazy over mice. Use them for GUI work, sure, but coming from the Mainframe days still prefer the keyboard. Chose the Dvorak layout around 30 years ago when deciding to learn touch-typing. The fingers thank me.)
Haven't gotten a blue-ray burner, but that would only add another hundred or so, and am not sure I need one. I do have a USB optical drive, and realistically the only time I use it these days is to rip CD's I've purchased from the local record store. My current favorite USB stick, normally with no plug showing, can slide out front or back to present either a traditional A plug, or a Micro (the latter of which allows me to copy files to and from many mobile devices), and besides holding handy Windoze virus fighting tools and various scripts is loaded with multiple bootable distros (SystemRescue, CloneZilla, WinDoze recovery, and so on).
How about that horribly expensive GPU? Cinebench shows 130+ on OpenGL (the Titan XP is a 6-core running at 3.7Ghz. A 4-core Quadro K4000M running at 2.8 Ghz runs at half that). (For CPU, it shows shows 1400+, while a 12-core 2.6 Ghz Xenon X5650 would run a little under 1300) Yes, the system is fairly snappy. Adobe is *very* happy, and it returns the favor to me.
When running Adobe, the canvas of whatever program is active takes up one whole screen, its tool panels the other. It's very handy not having to close panels all the time so as not to obscure what you're actually working on.
So, I spent four grand on a new computer, which is blazingly fast, has an inordinate amount of screen real estate, and runs the OS I've been using as my main one for almost ten years. BSD under the hood, done Apple-style, so beautiful graphics and an actual *nix toolset - the best of both worlds!
Then again, when first acquired, the MBP appeared to be just as blazing, and when needed I was fine with plugging a 1920x1080 monitor into it for added real estate.
The MB/CPU/Mem portion of what I bought was under a quarter of the total system cost (150/350/420, respectively), so theoretically upgrading the core of the machine is possible while retaining most of the other parts, and repairing anything that goes out won't cost me the whole system again.
I know, this shiny new box will fade to a slow-poke down the road, but with what I put into it, hopefully that road will be a long one.
On the Apple side? Today you can purchase a 27" 5K iMac with just *slightly* faster CPU, the same 32GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD for around forty-five hundred; roughly ten percent higher than my cost. Not bad considering it's quadruple the base storage I purchased, though said storage is SSD, not NVMe (A 1TB Samsung 970 would have added around two-hundred twenty-five dollars to my cost; they don't make a 2TB - yet).
Add eight hundred to double the memory to 64GB, now making it twenty-five percent higher than my cost (with that crappy integrated graphics, you may wish to consider it). Seeing as how the nVidia I bought has 12GB all to itself - and DDR5 at that - my system actually has 48GB of memory, and the the flipside of the GPU having all that super-fast memory to itself means the CPU doesn't have to share any of its 32GB with graphics processing, either.
While the new 5K iMacs can go to 64GB, the Gigabyte board I chose only supports 32. The main reason for getting that board was its recommendation from many Hackinhosh websites. (Yes, before spending all this money, I did a bit of research to make sure the hardware would work with OSX!) Being able to quadruple my MBP's memory was certainly a bonus, but quite frankly, even with "only" 32GB, no matter how many programs I have running simultaneously, it hardly ever goes to swap (right now I have twenty-one programs running with those that can having files open: Activity Monitor, Adobe Acrobat/Audition/Bridge/Illustrator/Indesign/Photoshop/Premiere Pro, Android Studio, Atom, Chicken (Mac VNC client based on Chicken of the VNC), FileZilla, FireFox, Intel Power Gadget, iTerm2, LibreOffice Calc/Writer, Thunderbord, Vivaldi, and VLC(listening to a classical station out of Switzerland); swap is under two megs.
Note I usually don't have all those Adobe programs open at once, but do often have many of the rest, along with Illustrator and InDesign, plus often the Apple Script Editor. Almost always Atom/FireFox/Illustrator/InDesign/iTerm2/LibreOffice Calc/Thunderbird/VLC plus the two monitoring apps are open.
Not counting the WD Time Machine drive, I currently have a total of 4TB storage, and could easily expand that as needed. The most you can get on the iMac is 3TB, and that would be one of those horrible Fusion drives. Sticking with SSD, the most you can get is 2TB, and what you buy is what the machine will always have.
If the iMac has a hardware issue, let's just hope you have both Apple Care, the patience to trek into one of their stores at least a couple of times, and the serenity to deal with their "geniuses" without resorting to violence.
So, cost and power-wise, while you can get something from Apple comparable to what I built with their product being around ten percent more in cost, you would:
Never be able to upgrade it in any way
Lack an actual GPU
Be able to fix it yourself (unless, unlike me, you're as good as the super-talented folk over at iFixit)
Granted, it's no longer considered a "portable", but I never could have gotten anything like the power of that nVidia card into a laptop. The case - at 16"x17"x12" - resembles a Borg ship, but is super-easy to work with, and has convenient carrying "handles" built into the left and right covers (both of which sides, along with the top, being removable), so from a certain viewpoint, it actually *is* portable. I could see it being used for the server at a LAN party. It'll hold Micro, Mini, or full ATX boards, has two hot-swappable drive trays, and space for an additional four drives; more than the motherboard can accommodate, unless you were to add a PCI card for additional storage (which I could not, as the board only has one of those slots, and in my system it's taken up by the GPU).
So, Apple, you want to make more money? Go back to being "insanely great", and make it Apple-easy for end-users to perform their own upgrades and repairs. You could make a modular system and sell the parts for a tad more than one could get from Amazon, make a bundle, and maybe even actually get OSX market share up to respectable levels.
Speaking of market share, statcounter's website for December 2018 shows Android at almost thirty-eight percent, which is nearly two percent higher than WinDoze (thirty-six), which is nearly three times higher than iOS (thirteen), which is more than twice as high as OSX (six). Linux? Still under one percent, but that must mean they're only counting GUI installations. Seriously, if I, just a run-of-the-mill IT guy, currently maintain three CentOS boxes, the actual number must be *much* larger than that.
As phone and tablet usage goes, sorry, Apple, your stuff is very pretty, but no walled garden for me; it's Android all the way. Haven't done anything to the phone yet (it's not paid off) but on the tablet am running LineageOS (sucessor to CyanogenMod) with no Play Store in sight. It's a Samsung T813 10" with the keyboard/case, a few years old now. Tiny screen comparitively, but workable when on the road, and if I need something from home can always dial into the box. The current phone is a Samsung Galaxy 8. Used to really love my HTC One (had the M7 & M8), and hope that company can keep up, but when it came time for a new phone some years back, their M9 just couldn't match what Samsung had to offer, so ended up with a Galaxy S6+.
Would still be on the Galaxy 7 that I had in-between the 6+ and the 8, except that I stupidly left it on the roof of the car one day and took off, getting up to around 50 on the access road when I heard a little thump and saw what looked like leaves scattering behind me. Hitting the ground, it had come out of the case, along with all my credit cards. Walked up and down the road for awhile gathering everything back up. Never did find the debit card, which of course was where all the auto-draws lived.
The phone actually still worked for almost a week before the screen finally got to be too awful to work with. Naturally I had just paid it off less than a month prior.
Oh, that now going on ten year old MBP? Threw a 512GB SSD I had laying around into it, re-loaded El Capitan (last version that would work on that hardware), and for a utility box, so long as I don't really try to work Adobe, it's doing just fine.