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Christina Bonnington reports that the public is not gobbling up iPads like they used to. Analysts had projected iPad sales would reach 19.7 million but Apple's financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2014 show they sold 16.35 million iPads, a drop of roughly 16.4 percent since last year. "For many, the iPad they have is good enough unlike a phone, with significant new features like Touch ID, or a better camera, the iPad's improvements over the past few years have been more subtle," writes Bonnington. "The latest iterations feature a better Retina display, a slimmer design, and faster processing. Improvements, yes, but enough to justify a near thousand dollar purchase? Others seem to be finding that their smartphone can do the job that their tablet used to do just as well, especially on those larger screened phablets."
According to Andrew Cunningham the takeaway from Apple's sales drop in iPads is that Apple's past growth has been driven mostly by entering entirely new product categories, like it did when it introduced the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010 and that Apple needs an entirely new category to fuel future growth. "The most persistent rumors [of a new product category] involve TV (whether a new Apple TV set-top box or an entire television set) and wearable computing devices (the perennially imminent "iWatch"), but calls for larger and cheaper iPhones also continue."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28 2014, @04:06AM
Years ago, after learning BASIC, I tackled Motorola 6809 assembly language.
BOY IT WAS HARD!
But when I leard how to program on the 'bare metal', my subsequent programming skills benefitted.
I don't need a flowchart or a detailed outline to write code -- just a few notes if that.
I CAN write assembler if I HAVE to but I rather not anymore (except for amusement) thanks to Microsoft's IDE-driven high-level language programing language suites which sweep all the 'heavy lifting' under a rug so you can concentrate on your custom coding and not the boilerplated 'busywork' all such programs need to compile and run.
The code I write now is 'just enough' to get the job done as fast as possible. Take any code out and the program just doesn't run correctly -- no useless code at all.
When you learn assembly, you learn to be EFFICIENT in order to write as FEW lines of code as possible to solve a given task.
Now, however, I am in awe of Steve Gibsion of SPINRITE fame. He writes the Windows apps he has available at his website https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm [grc.com] in 100% assembler! o_O; They are so tiny yet feature-packed.