It is very simple, really. Apple produces beautiful looking products which work extremely well. They all operate with all other Apple products seamlessly. They are far higher specifications than any of the competition.
What drives their success? Nothing that anyone has mentioned yet; psychology. Apple does a phenomenal job of getting its employees on board, and they are brand ambassadors as good as any I've seen. It's a given that they have to have a good product, but to convert as many Windows users as they've done, and keep them coming back, takes a belief in the core product. Brand loyalty can't be faked, whether you're selling a car or an iPhone. I have to admit that I'm slightly prejudiced, as I worked for Apple for over ten years, but I also sold lots of DOS/Windows machines in the early days, from 1993 to 2000. The best cap to a long career in sales was with Apple. The best managers I worked with were at Apple (and that's not to say they were all great, as a few didn't belong in management anywhere, but fewer than in any other career I had).
There's an old saying in sales (an in life in general); you're not selling a product, you're selling yourself. It's how we make friendships, how we choose our partners in life, how we get along at work, etc., and indeed, how we get a job in the first place.
I would not have a use for a Windows computer if someone gave one to me. I spent too many years in the past having to constantly repair startup files just to get the damned thing to boot.
LOL. How many decades ago was that? Windows 10 is pretty much bullet proof on decent hardware.
I have heard that a number of times. As an IT tech, I've been doing deployments of Windows 10 for 6-8 months after the final approval from corporate that it was now mature enough to start using. In those past months, I have seen far more BSOD crashes than in the past three years of Windows 7. Even Microsoft has managed to cause their own hardware to BSOD on a constant basis with poor QA of patches. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/03/surface_book_2/
I hope that Apple never gets one. SatNad fired most of the Windows Testers and now we see that move directly affecting the quality (sic) of the updates that they foist on us poor users.
I could rant on for hours about how bad the windows update system is but I won't. After 20+ years of writing software for Windows and 45+ years of being in the IT Business I was not sorry to retire and leave all that pain (from fighting the MS overlord) behind me.
MS IMHO seems to still be in headless chicken mode. Yes, they want everyone and everything to be in the cloud but given the regular outages of Azure or Office, they can't get that right. I do not put anything in the cloud that I can avoid doing so. Clouds come and go and are not much more than vapourware.
WinTel hardware is still as much garbage now as it always has been when I was rolling with that crowd.
In case you missed the the mid-2000's, "Wintel hardware" and "Mac hardware" are the same thing. The only thing that keeps macOS from running on a Dell is a few DRM-esque bits of code Apple added to check the motherboard to see if it's an Apple product or not.
If you had bad experiences with your "Wintel hardware", buying crappy (likely mass-produced) systems was the cause. My home-built PC is almost 10 years old and has no hardware issues at all. It will outlive its useful life in the march of progress in power efficiency. And it's been supported on the OS side longer than any Macintosh system by Apple. It started life as a Windows XP (2001) machine, and is still supported under the current Windows 10 -- that will be over 20 years of Extended Support lifecycle even if Microsoft decided to make a new Win10 update tomorrow it couldn't run.
If you had bad experiences with your "Wintel hardware", buying crappy (likely mass-produced) systems was the cause. My home-built PC is almost 10 years old and has no hardware issues at all.
Hardly a ringing endorsement for Wintel.. I would not even know where to start to make my own machine and avoid ending up with crapware.. And pretty sure I am not alone in that regard..
You are basically proving Dan's point that if you want the most-balanced computer that fits in your budget that -- unless you are a die-hard hands-on PC hobbyist -- that you have to buy Apple, because their focus is on making you satisfied (and come back for more), so they make the tough hardware and trade-off decisions for you, so you can get the best bang for the buck..
If you had bad experiences with your "Wintel hardware", buying crappy (likely mass-produced) systems was the cause. My home-built PC is almost 10 years old and has no hardware issues at all.
Hardly a ringing endorsement for Wintel.. I would not even know where to start to make my own machine and avoid ending up with crapware.. And pretty sure I am not alone in that regard..
You are basically proving Dan's point that if you want the most-balanced computer that fits in your budget that -- unless you are a die-hard hands-on PC hobbyist -- that you have to buy Apple, because their focus is on making you satisfied (and come back for more), so they make the tough hardware and trade-off decisions for you, so you can get the best bang for the buck..
This isn't actually true. You can walk into many component stores and have them build a machine to your liking or let them build a machine for you based on their knowledge.
You have the store warranty and it is the store who manages the problems if they occur.
Often you will see the support plans they offer far more support options than Apple does.
Not only do you get bang for your buck but excellent flexibility on services.
As with everything (Apple included) there are potential drawbacks but those are universal to the business.
I would not have a use for a Windows computer if someone gave one to me. I spent too many years in the past having to constantly repair startup files just to get the damned thing to boot.
I suppose your past experience with Windows was many years ago. In my experience, Windows have been very stable since Windows 7, at least when it's running in good hardware.
You didn't actually address anything in the article, you just wrote your own in response. But it's easy to point out what's wrong in your own "piece" however.
Google is an advertising company. Pixel phones and Chromebooks are a dot on the balance sheet. Microsoft is a cloud services company. Windows on PCs is no longer the big driver of MS profitability and Office is now a subscription service agnostic to platform. Apple has been a hardware company that is trying to transition to a services company as there is a limit to how high you can drive the average selling price without hitting the point of demand destruction.
Quite obviously, if Google or Microsoft had created iPhone-sized hardware businesses, their efforts wouldn't be "a dot on the balance sheet," but like Apple they'd have the majority of their revenues coming from said hardware! How incredibly ignorant that you don't understand this.
Both Google and Microsoft desperately tried to get create their own iPhone business over the last decade, spending incredible billions to buy Motorola and Nokia, but failing to matter. And now in hindsight of their failure you excuse them by saying Google is fine selling ads and Microsoft cloud, even though both deliver a fraction of the revenues of the iPhone business they tried and failed to develop. Are you really that blind to the words you are expressing? They make no sense at all! Using bold type isn't helping. It just makes you shout your nonsense rather than speak it. Apple isn't "trying to transisiton to a services company," it's simply adding a massive new revenue growth segment to its existing business. If you are deceived by unit sales figures, take note of the fact that Apple is now selling customers who once bought a Mac and a couple iPods every 5 years, then that plus a new iPhone every couple years, now a couple Watches, a couple iPhones, a HomePod, a Mac, and a series of annual services and apps. That's growth, duh. Why is it so hard to understand? It's not failure. It's not Google desperately prying into people's lives to force more commercials into them, knowing that it totally failed to counter Facebook with G+ and is now "transitioning" to a failed future where costs of ad views is going up and price of ads is collapsing. It's not Microsoft "transitioning away" from its monopoly controld over platforms and its attempt to get into device sales because it totally failed to develop anything like Apple has for consumers.
iPhones continue to be the monumentally profitable segment across all of consumer electronics, and everything else Apple does is just more success frosted on top. You paint success as failure and failure as success. Why do you hate reality so much?
Going forward Apple is counting on a growth in services and some advertising to offset the plateau in hardware sales. The question regarding Apple is can they make serious inroads selling services- an area where their record is less than stellar. What Apple makes on music rentals probably could not pay the company’s light bill. Where is Apple’s platform agnostic equal of Office? Where is their equivalent of and MS Azure? Or AWS?
If nothing ever changed and Apple totally saturated the market for "high end, mainstream" mobile and wearable computing, then what happens is that everyone else is starved while Apple uniquely earns all the money available in the entire industry and continues to develop advanced tech for China to try to rip off, without much success and without sustainable profitability. Nobody in 10 years of iPhone has disruprted Apple's profit train.
That has nothing in common with the plateau in Windows PCs, where PCs stopped growing becasue growth shifted to mobiles owned by Apple! Or the plateau in Android growth that is occuring among Google's licensees who have similarly run out of customers to shovel their profitless hardware on while Apple eats away at their high end sales.
The first is a massively successful enterprise, the former two are failures. The fact that Apple is uniquely developing a Services business on top, while Google, Microsoft and China are failing to create something nearly as profitable, is not a sign of failure but of continnued competency and success. Why is that hard for you to understand?
After how many years and how much money, Apple has not been able to translate almost a billion iTunes accounts to 1/10th of that for Apple Music. Is iCloud ever going to move beyond the small potatoes it currently serves? Even Apple uses Amazon to host iCloud.
The Apple I invested in years ago was a very different company from the elephant Tim Cook has created that has a lot of tail and not much tooth. The rent is paid by things inherited from Steve Jobs tenure and innovation has been largely replaced by iteration and imitation that makes the company look increasingly like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer.
So who is Apple’s Satya Nadella?
Apple using Amazon and/or Google to host elements of its cloud stratagy is an example of using a commodity provider to accept its risk for a much lower cost than doing it internally. It's good business practice. Nobody using iCloud knows what service is underlying it, they simply pay Apple for it. When the risk subsides, Apple can transition to its own services or play whoever else who wants to provide a commodity service at a lower cost. It's like Samsung components. Apple haters like to point to that, not aware that they are an example of Apple avoiding risk and making a lessor company do the work for them. Until it identifies an area it wants to own, as it did in moving from Samsung chips to its own A-series SoCs. Why is that so hard to understand?
Apple is quite successfully growing Apple Music, and there is no "problem" with how many iTunes accounts it has ready to buy songs, apps and subscriptions like Apple Music. That's evidence of massive growth potential, not a sign of failure.
Failure is when Google, Microsoft, Samsung and others roll out music services and nobody cares and they go out of business.
Apple looks nothing like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. if you were paying attention, the growth under Tim Cook has been fantastically greater than it was before his tenure.
And whether or not you are impressed by Apple developing its own world-leading silicon; growing Macs in an erosion of PC demand; increasing demand for high end products while the rest of the world desperately tries to get by selling loss leader lower end stuff; successfully introducing massive new businesses including Watch and Beats/AirPods.... that's still the reality. You clearly just prefer repeating hollow media narratives and hate intelligent, critical thinking that explains what's actually occuring in the world you misunderstand to greatly.
I would not have a use for a Windows computer if someone gave one to me. I spent too many years in the past having to constantly repair startup files just to get the damned thing to boot.
LOL. How many decades ago was that? Windows 10 is pretty much bullet proof on decent hardware.
My Mac is the best Windows 10 machine I've ever owned. I'd never go back to a Windows-only PC. Running Windows as a virtual machine on MacOS is the best thing ever for those very rare times I need to run Windows.
WinTel hardware is still as much garbage now as it always has been when I was rolling with that crowd.
I suppose you haven't heard of Lenovo Thinkpads or HP Z workstation, which are miles ahead of what Apple offers.
I would not have a use for a Windows computer if someone gave one to me. I spent too many years in the past having to constantly repair startup files just to get the damned thing to boot.
LOL. How many decades ago was that? Windows 10 is pretty much bullet proof on decent hardware.
I have heard that a number of times. As an IT tech, I've been doing deployments of Windows 10 for 6-8 months after the final approval from corporate that it was now mature enough to start using. In those past months, I have seen far more BSOD crashes than in the past three years of Windows 7. Even Microsoft has managed to cause their own hardware to BSOD on a constant basis with poor QA of patches. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/03/surface_book_2/
It looks like Apple recently has quality issues too, even though they control hardware and software.
Google is an advertising company. Pixel phones and Chromebooks are a dot on the balance sheet. Microsoft is a cloud services company. Windows on PCs is no longer the big driver of MS profitability and Office is now a subscription service agnostic to platform.
In other words, as DED stated, both Google in mobile hardware and Microsoft‘s attempts to leverage Windows onto mobile, were significant failures. I’m always amazed by folks who cite other successes to detract from abject failures, as if to say, “we never wanted to win in that arena anyway.”
It’s not difficult to be an Apple eco member and also be budget conscious. 2018 iPad $329 and often available for much less is a great example. Non flagship but very powerful iPhones are available new for much less than the top tier. A brand new nice MacBook Air is not off the charts expensive.
I have never bought a Mac laptop brand new, had six over the years, and presently have a 2008, 2009, and 2011 that never fail. By staying just a few years behind in the used market one can have a reasonably powerful Mac for a fraction the cost of new. This customer is very much valuable to Apple. We subscribe to Apple Music, iCloud storage, and purchase apps through the App Stores.
I would not have a use for a Windows computer if someone gave one to me. I spent too many years in the past having to constantly repair startup files just to get the damned thing to boot.
Agreed...I have a refurbished SE ($200), a series One AppleWatch, bought new ($279), an iPad mini 2 bought new ($279), an Apple TV bought new ($150), AirPods (a gift) and a 2017 MacBook bought new ($1,200). I've always bought the 'consumer' level products from Apple not the more expensive Pro versions.
To me mobile devices are all about low weight and small size. Hence, the SE, iPad Mini2 and the 2017 MacBook!
I've considered making a complete conversion to iOS with only a new iPad and a new iPhone 7 for abut $700 total and recycle my 2006 iMac and MacBook. I just have not been able to give up the MacOS laptop experience. Probably never will.
The MacBook (rose gold). It's the finest piece of engineering and design I ever owned. I thought the original intel white MacBook was beautiful in 2006, but the 2017 MacBook at 2 pounds is just off the charts!
I really only use my iPad mini 2 when I travel by plane and if Apple updates the Mini, I may consider that purchase for the same weight saving reason.
I would not have a use for a Windows computer if someone gave one to me. I spent too many years in the past having to constantly repair startup files just to get the damned thing to boot.
LOL. How many decades ago was that? Windows 10 is pretty much bullet proof on decent hardware.
Ooooof! I get a queazy feeling just looking at Windows! Sorry, no offense.
Really? So where are the next billion iPhone sales? When is Apple Music going to begin to equal the success of iTunes? When does Tim Cook's services company begin to make competitive software offerings that run on everything? When will Apple create an entire cloud platform?
Google has figured this out. Microsoft has figured this out. Amazon has figured this out.
Apple? Not so much.
Tim Cook is chasing a very crowded field of content creation in an industry with a very limited talent pool. Disney just bought out 20th Century Fox, Amazon is spending more than Apple and has more to show for their efforts already, AT&T just took over Warner studios and a stable of TV Chanels including HBO and CNN, Comcast owns Universal and a stable of channels, Famous Players owns both Viacom and CBS- including Paramount. Netflix Is spending mad and snapping up some of the best creative talent in the business.
On the distribution side Apple has nothing. AT&T has DIRECTTV, DIRECTVNOW, & U-Verse in addition to being a nationwide wired and wireless ISP- they are laying fiber in my area to the doorstep currently. Comcast is a large ISP and is preparing a streaming service. Disney has their own service plus control of Hulu. Dish has Sling TV. Sony has PlayStation Vue. CBS is moving to a streaming model with ad supported free News and Sports channels and a paid entertainment service- they soon will be offering regional streaming news channels like the CBSN New York. All are large content creators with large libraries of stuff.
Maybe you do not want to think about peak Apple, but the company faltered before and it will eventually join the long list of world beaters that is no longer a world beater. Ask General Electric- currently selling the silverware to keep the wolves at bay, General Motors- once the largest corporation on earth , RCA - the "it" stock of the Roaring 20's, Sears- once the largest retailer in the world, etc.
Some companies are able to turn it around and reinvent themselves- Microsoft is an example. Toyota is another- they once were known for making sewing machines.
Every company is subject to disruption as is every industry and every product. When you look at Apple do you see a roadmap to a dominant future in any area where they currently compete other than phones which is a mature market?
Tim Cook is betting on services and media- two of the most competitive industries existent and both are full of well funded and deeply established companies. Excepting Netflix all are highly profitable. Apple is not doing a one on one against a Steve Ballmer Microsoft- they are taking on a collection of some of the best run and funded companies on the planet and I do not see them bringing their A game.
So you may not like what I have to say (block list), but why don't you tell me what I have said that is wrong?
Google is an advertising company. Pixel phones and Chromebooks are a dot on the balance sheet. Microsoft is a cloud services company. Windows on PCs is no longer the big driver of MS profitability and Office is now a subscription service agnostic to platform. Apple has been a hardware company that is trying to transition to a services company as there is a limit to how high you can drive the average selling price without hitting the point of demand destruction.
Going forward Apple is counting on a growth in services and some advertising to offset the plateau in hardware sales. The question regarding Apple is can they make serious inroads selling services- an area where their record is less than stellar. What Apple makes on music rentals probably could not pay the company’s light bill. Where is Apple’s platform agnostic equal of Office? Where is their equivalent of and MS Azure? Or AWS?
After how many years and how much money, Apple has not been able to translate almost a billion iTunes accounts to 1/10th of that for Apple Music. Is iCloud ever going to move beyond the small potatoes it currently serves? Even Apple uses Amazon to host iCloud.
The Apple I invested in years ago was a very different company from the elephant Tim Cook has created that has a lot of tail and not much tooth. The rent is paid by things inherited from Steve Jobs tenure and innovation has been largely replaced by iteration and imitation that makes the company look increasingly like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer.
So who is Apple’s Satya Nadella?
So much ignorance, so little time. Iterative product development is how Apple rolls, has always rolled. Here’s an article from 8 years ago:
Google is an advertising company. Pixel phones and Chromebooks are a dot on the balance sheet. Microsoft is a cloud services company. Windows on PCs is no longer the big driver of MS profitability and Office is now a subscription service agnostic to platform. Apple has been a hardware company that is trying to transition to a services company as there is a limit to how high you can drive the average selling price without hitting the point of demand destruction.
Going forward Apple is counting on a growth in services and some advertising to offset the plateau in hardware sales. The question regarding Apple is can they make serious inroads selling services- an area where their record is less than stellar. What Apple makes on music rentals probably could not pay the company’s light bill. Where is Apple’s platform agnostic equal of Office? Where is their equivalent of and MS Azure? Or AWS?
After how many years and how much money, Apple has not been able to translate almost a billion iTunes accounts to 1/10th of that for Apple Music. Is iCloud ever going to move beyond the small potatoes it currently serves? Even Apple uses Amazon to host iCloud.
The Apple I invested in years ago was a very different company from the elephant Tim Cook has created that has a lot of tail and not much tooth. The rent is paid by things inherited from Steve Jobs tenure and innovation has been largely replaced by iteration and imitation that makes the company look increasingly like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer.
So who is Apple’s Satya Nadella?
Troll drivel. Welcome to the block list.
Yeah I've seen enough from this amateur troll, too. Can't even format his post correctly. PLONK!
Google is an advertising company. Pixel phones and Chromebooks are a dot on the balance sheet. Microsoft is a cloud services company. Windows on PCs is no longer the big driver of MS profitability and Office is now a subscription service agnostic to platform. Apple has been a hardware company that is trying to transition to a services company as there is a limit to how high you can drive the average selling price without hitting the point of demand destruction.
Going forward Apple is counting on a growth in services and some advertising to offset the plateau in hardware sales. The question regarding Apple is can they make serious inroads selling services- an area where their record is less than stellar. What Apple makes on music rentals probably could not pay the company’s light bill. Where is Apple’s platform agnostic equal of Office? Where is their equivalent of and MS Azure? Or AWS?
After how many years and how much money, Apple has not been able to translate almost a billion iTunes accounts to 1/10th of that for Apple Music. Is iCloud ever going to move beyond the small potatoes it currently serves? Even Apple uses Amazon to host iCloud.
The Apple I invested in years ago was a very different company from the elephant Tim Cook has created that has a lot of tail and not much tooth. The rent is paid by things inherited from Steve Jobs tenure and innovation has been largely replaced by iteration and imitation that makes the company look increasingly like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer.
So who is Apple’s Satya Nadella?
Troll drivel. Welcome to the block list.
A bit rash to silence? Some interesting counterpoints at the very least. Perspective is important in any conversation.
Not when it's ignorance nonsense. If one doesn't understand Apple, one is in a poor place to critique it.
If AI tells us that the Apple products are affordable luxury, what excuse does anyone have to claim that they are unaffordable luxury?
Do yourself a favor and look up what "affordable luxury" means. A Rolls Royce is not affordable luxury for most people. These consumer electronics goods are.
I suspect that 2019 will be the year that Apple realises that their price rises went a step too far.
Wait, do mean like how the entry-level iPad dropped to $329? You do realize you're not entitled to the TOP-TIER offerings, at ENTRY-LEVEL prices, right? Right??
Comments
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/03/surface_book_2/
If you had bad experiences with your "Wintel hardware", buying crappy (likely mass-produced) systems was the cause. My home-built PC is almost 10 years old and has no hardware issues at all. It will outlive its useful life in the march of progress in power efficiency. And it's been supported on the OS side longer than any Macintosh system by Apple. It started life as a Windows XP (2001) machine, and is still supported under the current Windows 10 -- that will be over 20 years of Extended Support lifecycle even if Microsoft decided to make a new Win10 update tomorrow it couldn't run.
You are basically proving Dan's point that if you want the most-balanced computer that fits in your budget that -- unless you are a die-hard hands-on PC hobbyist -- that you have to buy Apple, because their focus is on making you satisfied (and come back for more), so they make the tough hardware and trade-off decisions for you, so you can get the best bang for the buck..
You have the store warranty and it is the store who manages the problems if they occur.
Often you will see the support plans they offer far more support options than Apple does.
Not only do you get bang for your buck but excellent flexibility on services.
As with everything (Apple included) there are potential drawbacks but those are universal to the business.
Quite obviously, if Google or Microsoft had created iPhone-sized hardware businesses, their efforts wouldn't be "a dot on the balance sheet," but like Apple they'd have the majority of their revenues coming from said hardware! How incredibly ignorant that you don't understand this.
Both Google and Microsoft desperately tried to get create their own iPhone business over the last decade, spending incredible billions to buy Motorola and Nokia, but failing to matter. And now in hindsight of their failure you excuse them by saying Google is fine selling ads and Microsoft cloud, even though both deliver a fraction of the revenues of the iPhone business they tried and failed to develop. Are you really that blind to the words you are expressing? They make no sense at all! Using bold type isn't helping. It just makes you shout your nonsense rather than speak it.
Apple isn't "trying to transisiton to a services company," it's simply adding a massive new revenue growth segment to its existing business. If you are deceived by unit sales figures, take note of the fact that Apple is now selling customers who once bought a Mac and a couple iPods every 5 years, then that plus a new iPhone every couple years, now a couple Watches, a couple iPhones, a HomePod, a Mac, and a series of annual services and apps. That's growth, duh. Why is it so hard to understand?
It's not failure. It's not Google desperately prying into people's lives to force more commercials into them, knowing that it totally failed to counter Facebook with G+ and is now "transitioning" to a failed future where costs of ad views is going up and price of ads is collapsing. It's not Microsoft "transitioning away" from its monopoly controld over platforms and its attempt to get into device sales because it totally failed to develop anything like Apple has for consumers.
iPhones continue to be the monumentally profitable segment across all of consumer electronics, and everything else Apple does is just more success frosted on top.
You paint success as failure and failure as success. Why do you hate reality so much?
If nothing ever changed and Apple totally saturated the market for "high end, mainstream" mobile and wearable computing, then what happens is that everyone else is starved while Apple uniquely earns all the money available in the entire industry and continues to develop advanced tech for China to try to rip off, without much success and without sustainable profitability. Nobody in 10 years of iPhone has disruprted Apple's profit train.
That has nothing in common with the plateau in Windows PCs, where PCs stopped growing becasue growth shifted to mobiles owned by Apple! Or the plateau in Android growth that is occuring among Google's licensees who have similarly run out of customers to shovel their profitless hardware on while Apple eats away at their high end sales.
The first is a massively successful enterprise, the former two are failures. The fact that Apple is uniquely developing a Services business on top, while Google, Microsoft and China are failing to create something nearly as profitable, is not a sign of failure but of continnued competency and success. Why is that hard for you to understand?
Apple using Amazon and/or Google to host elements of its cloud stratagy is an example of using a commodity provider to accept its risk for a much lower cost than doing it internally. It's good business practice. Nobody using iCloud knows what service is underlying it, they simply pay Apple for it. When the risk subsides, Apple can transition to its own services or play whoever else who wants to provide a commodity service at a lower cost. It's like Samsung components. Apple haters like to point to that, not aware that they are an example of Apple avoiding risk and making a lessor company do the work for them. Until it identifies an area it wants to own, as it did in moving from Samsung chips to its own A-series SoCs. Why is that so hard to understand?
Apple is quite successfully growing Apple Music, and there is no "problem" with how many iTunes accounts it has ready to buy songs, apps and subscriptions like Apple Music. That's evidence of massive growth potential, not a sign of failure.
Failure is when Google, Microsoft, Samsung and others roll out music services and nobody cares and they go out of business.
Apple looks nothing like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. if you were paying attention, the growth under Tim Cook has been fantastically greater than it was before his tenure.
And whether or not you are impressed by Apple developing its own world-leading silicon; growing Macs in an erosion of PC demand; increasing demand for high end products while the rest of the world desperately tries to get by selling loss leader lower end stuff; successfully introducing massive new businesses including Watch and Beats/AirPods.... that's still the reality. You clearly just prefer repeating hollow media narratives and hate intelligent, critical thinking that explains what's actually occuring in the world you misunderstand to greatly.
To me mobile devices are all about low weight and small size. Hence, the SE, iPad Mini2 and the 2017 MacBook!
I've considered making a complete conversion to iOS with only a new iPad and a new iPhone 7 for abut $700 total and recycle my 2006 iMac and MacBook. I just have not been able to give up the MacOS laptop experience. Probably never will.
The MacBook (rose gold). It's the finest piece of engineering and design I ever owned. I thought the original intel white MacBook was beautiful in 2006, but the 2017 MacBook at 2 pounds is just off the charts!
I really only use my iPad mini 2 when I travel by plane and if Apple updates the Mini, I may consider that purchase for the same weight saving reason.
Best
Ooooof! I get a queazy feeling just looking at Windows! Sorry, no offense.
Google has figured this out.
Microsoft has figured this out.
Amazon has figured this out.
Apple? Not so much.
Tim Cook is chasing a very crowded field of content creation in an industry with a very limited talent pool. Disney just bought out 20th Century Fox, Amazon is spending more than Apple and has more to show for their efforts already, AT&T just took over Warner studios and a stable of TV Chanels including HBO and CNN, Comcast owns Universal and a stable of channels, Famous Players owns both Viacom and CBS- including Paramount. Netflix Is spending mad and snapping up some of the best creative talent in the business.
On the distribution side Apple has nothing. AT&T has DIRECTTV, DIRECTVNOW, & U-Verse in addition to being a nationwide wired and wireless ISP- they are laying fiber in my area to the doorstep currently. Comcast is a large ISP and is preparing a streaming service. Disney has their own service plus control of Hulu. Dish has Sling TV. Sony has PlayStation Vue. CBS is moving to a streaming model with ad supported free News and Sports channels and a paid entertainment service- they soon will be offering regional streaming news channels like the CBSN New York. All are large content creators with large libraries of stuff.
Maybe you do not want to think about peak Apple, but the company faltered before and it will eventually join the long list of world beaters that is no longer a world beater. Ask General Electric- currently selling the silverware to keep the wolves at bay, General Motors- once the largest corporation on earth , RCA - the "it" stock of the Roaring 20's, Sears- once the largest retailer in the world, etc.
Some companies are able to turn it around and reinvent themselves- Microsoft is an example. Toyota is another- they once were known for making sewing machines.
Every company is subject to disruption as is every industry and every product. When you look at Apple do you see a roadmap to a dominant future in any area where they currently compete other than phones which is a mature market?
Tim Cook is betting on services and media- two of the most competitive industries existent and both are full of well funded and deeply established companies. Excepting Netflix all are highly profitable. Apple is not doing a one on one against a Steve Ballmer Microsoft- they are taking on a collection of some of the best run and funded companies on the planet and I do not see them bringing their A game.
So you may not like what I have to say (block list), but why don't you tell me what I have said that is wrong?
https://www.macworld.com/article/1151235/macs/apple-rolls.html
...you are clearly new to Apple. The Macintosh 128 was an iterative improvement to the Macintosh...and it continued till we get to now.
Apple, and Cook, are the most successful of their time.
Do yourself a favor and look up what "affordable luxury" means. A Rolls Royce is not affordable luxury for most people. These consumer electronics goods are.
Wait, do mean like how the entry-level iPad dropped to $329? You do realize you're not entitled to the TOP-TIER offerings, at ENTRY-LEVEL prices, right? Right??