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from the have-you-tried-programming-on-a-tablet? dept.
Christopher Mims writes at the WSJ that Apple like all ambitious companies occasionally strays from its focus. According to Mims the iPhone is just coming into its prime, the iPad is an immature platform and the iWatch is in its infancy, yet Apple continues to invest in one-of-a-kind feats of engineering like the Mac Pro, which ships in volumes that are a rounding error on pretty much everything else Apple makes. "Something's got to give," writes Mims. "Showpieces like iMacs with screens that have more pixels than any PC ever (and four times the average selling price of a PC) are impressive, but what is Apple trying to prove? Is it really a good idea for Apple to continue to put resources against being king of a last-century technology?"
According to Mims the world's best tech companies can be the best at two things at once, maybe three and even a company as mighty as Apple gets to be the best at only a handful of things. "In a world in which the cloud is increasingly the hub of everything individuals and businesses do, and our mobile devices its primary avatar, what on Earth is Apple doing running victory laps around a dying PC industry? Personally, I'd rather see Apple push the envelope on what's next."
takyon: Paywall buster.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Wednesday July 01 2015, @12:20PM
"Showpieces like iMacs with screens that have more pixels than any PC ever (and four times the average selling price of a PC)
Or, to put it another way, that cost less than a 5k PD display on its own [dell.com]. Any PC maker with a full range is likely to offer a model that costs 4x the average (mean) selling price of a PC. Averages are a bloody useless statistic for this sort of comparison.
Meanwhile, the Mac allows Apple to offer a seamless PC/phone/tablet/watch/set-top-box platform (yeah, its not perfect, but it makes trying to interoperate between, say, Windows and Android a joke). The "halo" effect - originally referring to the way iPods helped raise the profile of Macs - cuts both ways: now they're selling popular and attractive PCs which, incidentally, are at their best if you buy an iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch to go with them...
I'd agree that the Mac Pro is a bit of an oddity, that really doesn't make sense unless you're doing pro 3D or video editing... but it doesn't hurt the rest of the brand to have the odd movie made on your kit.
what on Earth is Apple doing running victory laps around a dying PC industry?
...hedging its bets against the possibility that the PC industry is only "mostly dead" and might get better soon. I'm sure tablets and phones are going to be big business for the foreseeable future, but its far less clear that PCs are going away in the medium term - sometimes, you just need a decent sized screen and a proper keyboard. Phones are probably here to stay but tablets could easily be squeezed out between large-screen phones and sub-ultrabooks.
Lots of people want to follow the narrative that mobile has killed the PC. The alternative viewpoint is that the PC reached maturity and, instead of adapting to a market where people's PCs weren't obsolete after 18 months, the industry were distracted by the tablet fad and ignored the PC or, worse, wrecked it by trying to turn PCs into tablets (*cough* windows 8 *cough*). Only Apple has been continuing to innovate in PCs: nothing ground-breaking, but they've pushed up screen resolutions, done a hard sell on replacing spinning rust with SSDs, pretty much invented the ultrabook format and challenged the need for internal expansion now that everything is hooked up with packetised serial interfaces.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 01 2015, @07:19PM
They didn't invent the ultrabook format. They may have a great entry in the area, but they were far from the first to try.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Thursday July 02 2015, @09:31AM
They didn't invent the ultrabook format.
Well, the term "ultrabook" wasn't coined by intel until after the success of the Air... and read any review of a PC ultrabook and see what they compare it to.
The Air was, pretty much, a new format: there had been ultra-portables (like the Vaio 505) and netbooks (like the eeePCs) but they tended to have tiny displays, miniature keyboards and pretty feeble processors. The Air had an almost full-pitch keyboard, a reasonable sized display, was comparatively powerful, but really went for thin-ness and dependence on wireless connectivity.
Anyway, the whole concept of the modern laptop - with the set-back keyboard and the pointing device in the middle of a wrist-rest - dates back to the Apple/Sony collaboration on the original PowerBook.