Apple is never going to be #1 in marketshare, so who cares. Making a nice profit is what matters, not making cheap junk and selling it to cheap people.
What's better? 100 pounds of feces or 1 pound of pure gold? Which would you rather have?
Except Mac profits are declining. Look at Apple's last earnings report. Mac sales were down 12% and revenue was down 9% YOY. And you can't really say they just shifted sales to iPhone and iPad as both those categories were down YOY as well.
Bought the top of the line Retina 15" MBP when it came out (in late summer 2012) and it still is my main machine – battery still has 93% capacity after almost four years, the display is gorgeous and it is fast enough for almost everything. (I could use more RAM sometimes, but even the current models do not offer more than 16 GB.) With machines that good, and the progress in CPUs being virtually zip... It is hard to deliver reasons for an upgrade. These dynamic function keys could be that reason, but without HDMI-out (something I need every day), not even that may be enough. I certainly will not buy more dongles – the amount of times I ended up somewhere without my Ethernet adapter and could not do nothing has taught me that.
I want an Ethernet port, a sleep light and an external battery indicator (the things my 12" PowerBook had over a decade ago)... Add in an option for 32 GB RAM and they can have my $4k+ today.
Worldwide slowdown affecting Apple? Well, it traditionally hasn't, despite the PC slump having been going on for years. What is impacting Apple is the lack of new MacBook Pros. What keeps Apple products of any kind popular despite high prices is innovation. You just can sell loads of what is perceived to be "old tech" though, so Apple needs to press its foot on the accelerator pedal. It's not like it lacks funds or engineers to do so. Where there's a will, there's always a way.
This is entirely understandable given that product life ownership of Mac is substantially longer than other PC products. People generally do not feel the need to change as the products are very robust, very reliable and the OS very useable.
Small but simple point. My MBP is now almost 4 years old, I use it 4-5 hours a day almost 7 days a week. It shows near zero signs of wear, not even a single slightly faded keyboard letter.
I have in the past had VAIO's, Tosh etc and not one last anywhere near so well.
Contrast this with most if not all other PC solutions from other vendors. I am not bashing them, just making the point. A aluminium solid build vs in most cases plastic and more plastic from PC vendors.
So, whilst units are steady this is more of a factor of good product just work and last so lets take things into context.
It not a port thing its a fact of engineering for long term use.
So I'm not seeing the "sinking" to 5th place or the "shedding" of market share.
Exactly right! The article starts with, "Apple's share of the global PC market took a substantial hit". What hit? And all the Macs are presumably about to be refreshed, which should give them a bump. Usually we don't come to AI for our daily dose of DOOMED!
I don't think this takes into consideration the cost of the lowest-priced Mac vs the average PC. The lowest-priced Mac is usually three times the cost of the average consumer computer. Besides, Macs have excellent build quality and last very long while that can't be said for most PCs.
I myself bought a crappy Lenovo All-in-One just this past Friday to wipe it off, install Linux and make it a router/server. The computer came with Windows 10 Single Language with Bing, in other words the free or almost free version they give to manufacturers, I'm not sure, I don't really follow Windows but I'm guessing the profit margins on the computer are next to abysmal. It really feels cheap, the hinge on the stand is sort of segmented and doesn't glide as the ones on my iMacs and Thunderbolt Displays, the area around the webcam looks like it's out of center and the keyboard is very plasticky and oversized, I have above-average hands but I feel it was designed for a gorilla or a pianist. I can't quite touch-type as I do on any of my Macs, notebooks or desktops. Surprisingly the area between QWERTY and the numeric keys, where key like Page Up, Delete, Home, End live, is compressed into two column, what gives. That's just stupid. The internals is what I care for and they were 3800MXN, around 200USD, a great price for a server, though.
So maybe Mac numbers are going down but at the same time in the last years Apple moved away from anything mechanical and now sells most of its products with long-lasting fast solid-state internals, so that's that.
Apple is never going to be #1 in marketshare, so who cares. Making a nice profit is what matters, not making cheap junk and selling it to cheap people.
What's better? 100 pounds of feces or 1 pound of pure gold? Which would you rather have?
I agree but still it would be nice to have a new computer option sooner than ever 3 years. Inagine iPhone sales if they happened only every 3-4 years? They would tank too.
For me it was killing off the 17" laptop. I'm sorry but we do music and video and we need the real estate. If they put out a 17" right now I'd plop down the money we'd jump to Windows but all our custom software only runs on OSX
I don't even want to think about what I might buy if my mid-2011 iMac dies. I won't buy an "all in one" that requires an external DVD drive, and I'll want upgradable RAM. There doesn't appear to be a product for me anymore.
Apple is never going to be #1 in marketshare, so who cares. Making a nice profit is what matters, not making cheap junk and selling it to cheap people.
What's better? 100 pounds of feces or 1 pound of pure gold? Which would you rather have?
Except Mac profits are declining. Look at Apple's last earnings report. Mac sales were down 12% and revenue was down 9% YOY. And you can't really say they just shifted sales to iPhone and iPad as both those categories were down YOY as well.
Ouch. Yeah, there hasn't been a lot of good news on the earnings front in a while. This is a make-or-break summer and fall for them, I think. We need to see some groundbreaking new releases. The company is at real risk of losing the coolness factor they rely on to get their niche to pay top dollar.
I don't even want to think about what I might buy if my mid-2011 iMac dies. I won't buy an "all in one" that requires an external DVD drive, and I'll want upgradable RAM. There doesn't appear to be a product for me anymore.
I feel the same way. I've been limping along with a 2011 MacBook Pro 13" and need an upgrade but can't bring myself to pay for something I won't be able to upgrade myself. I can't afford a new Mac with a 1GB SSD like the one already in my aging MB.
This is entirely understandable given that product life ownership of Mac is substantially longer than other PC products. People generally do not feel the need to change as the products are very robust, very reliable and the OS very useable.
Small but simple point. My MBP is now almost 4 years old, I use it 4-5 hours a day almost 7 days a week. It shows near zero signs of wear, not even a single slightly faded keyboard letter.
I have in the past had VAIO's, Tosh etc and not one last anywhere near so well.
Contrast this with most if not all other PC solutions from other vendors. I am not bashing them, just making the point. A aluminium solid build vs in most cases plastic and more plastic from PC vendors.
So, whilst units are steady this is more of a factor of good product just work and last so lets take things into context.
It not a port thing its a fact of engineering for long term use.
Build quality may have something to do with it, but it's not why I'm still using my 2011 MB Pro. I'm still using it because I upgraded the RAM to 16GB and drive to a 1GB SSD myself, and I can't afford a new MB with comparable Apple-installed specs to match. I'd have to spend $700-$1000 more than it would cost me to upgrade those things myself (since I already have the drive). That's not chump change.
Apple isn't helping things by taking so long to release updates to its Mac hardware lines. Mac Pro (a joke by now). MacBook Pro and no recent updates to the Air. At least show you care or change colors of the Airs and sales will increase. The Mac Pro needs to be redesigned again as it's limited upgradability makes it age even quicker than before. Go back to a box with removable drives and graphics cards - it's what pros need and want.
Joke? I love my Mac Pro and can't imagine going back to that old way of working. I also love the smaller boot drive although it took a while to get used to not having almost limitless internals on my old Cheese Grater Mac Pro. Now I can keep multiple SSD clones of the boot drive made in minutes with CCC. All data is now on RAID 0 TB externals. I made my own symblinks for many things that want to be in the user Library and have the real files on the RAID and they've worked flawlessly, even through many OS X upgrades and even macOS Sierra also on a 256 GB external clone of my boot drive simply updated (by the way everything works!). This has left well over 100 GB free on the 256 GB internal SSD even with all the pro apps and so much more. Photos, Aperture, Logic Pro, FCPro etc. all very happy with this set up, i.e. their data all on the RAID 0 (which is mirrored). OWC have most things as upgrades if you want them, although GPUs are not available yet I don't think but I bet they will be. I particularly love the fact I have Window 10, 8.1 and several Linux SSDs as well as many of the OS X versions like this. It takes seconds to reboot to a different OS / SSD. The 256 SSDs are all on $7 USB3 connector cables I picked up from Amazon, I don't even need docks! This entire set up can be moved from one room to another easily or thrown in the back seat and taken on a long stay in our second home unlike the Cheese Grater that weighed more than my Jeep and moving it usually resulted in a slipped disk! Now I can use one hand to move it.
This worried me for a second, until I remembered that the numbers these firms come up with are usually far from accurate. Some of the complaints people have here may be real, but it would be silly to lose any sleep or judge Apple's performance by the shot-in-the-dark estimates here. Didn't one of these two firms also predict that Windows phone should have overtaken iPhone years ago?
Very sorry to see this, but not surprised. The last time I recall Apple doing anything really impressive with the Mac was when they introduced the 5k iMac, but that's been a while now. The laptop lineup is stagnant; the Mac Mini and Mac Pro are pathetic. I just don't get it.
It is called poor management and no vision. I actually see the Mac Pro as the only decent machine that Apple sells. The iMac doesn't have a fast enough GPU for the display. The Mini has been a joke for sometime though in part that is Intel's fault.
I expect that they are waiting for all the hardware required to gel but the other problem is Apple is trying to engineer the market. This is why MacBook Air hasn't been upgraded and why we have the throughly stupid design in the Mac Book. Apple need to realize that they need to give people what they want and more so what they need even if they don't know that they need it. They could easily engineer themselves out of the Mac Hardware market.
If you don't want to take these dodgy firm's stats for it you only need to look at Apple's last quarterly earnings report to see Apple has a mac problem. Why pay a premium for old tech?
It's because many anticipate a new mac coming this fall.. Sales always lag at this time of year.. they fell last year this time to zero growth in anticipation of new Macbook.. With everyone expecting a complete redesign on the Macbook Pro.. Not sure how anything but the media to be surprised.
I'm not surprised sales aren't growing anymore. Macs are no longer good value for money. This is partly due to the dollar being strong, (though it's cheaper for Apple to manufacture products so that offsets it quite a bit), and partly because Apple's become even more greedy, with no cheap Macs available. The Mini used to be great value, now you get a slow, expensive small computer for twice the price of a PC. The Mini was a great lure to the Apple ecosystem.
Another reason is because the Macs they do have are updated so rarely without a mid-cycle price drop. Who in their right mind would buy a MBP that's not been updated through two generations of Intel chips, is over a year old and costs just the same as release day? Granted processing speed isn't following Moore's law anymore but it's not halted completely. You can get a same spec PC with a 3 year warranty for half the price of a Mac with a 1 year warranty.
Part of of the cost was always justified by Windows' perpetual failings, but - unfortunately for us & Apple - it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
Oh and don't get me started on the also stagnant Mac Pro.
[Edit]: Christ this forum's editor is f*cking awful. Jumps around everywhere and can't quote properly, ugh.b
Actually processor performance increases are worst than Intel wants you to believe. In the case of the 15" MBP last years processor was a null even as far as CPU performance goes. Almost all Intel effort went into the GPU. Intel has really struggled at 14nm, basically giving up process leadership. Moores law has certainly hit physical limits. But I do believe they will make it to 7nm at that point new tech will be required.
Im not worried about the Mac Pro it is still a good design. The machine needs to transition to all 14nm hardware and that will come shortly if the GPU folks can get their acts together. Just imagine a Mac Pro with double or more performance from each GPU. The reality is the GPU manufactures have been stuck for a long time now and we should see a new generation of processors in this machine.
As as for this forum, yes the software sucks, It is very much crap and frankly I can't understand why AI switched to this software abortion. If you look at forum usage it is preset clear they drove away users.
Comments
I myself bought a crappy Lenovo All-in-One just this past Friday to wipe it off, install Linux and make it a router/server. The computer came with Windows 10 Single Language with Bing, in other words the free or almost free version they give to manufacturers, I'm not sure, I don't really follow Windows but I'm guessing the profit margins on the computer are next to abysmal. It really feels cheap, the hinge on the stand is sort of segmented and doesn't glide as the ones on my iMacs and Thunderbolt Displays, the area around the webcam looks like it's out of center and the keyboard is very plasticky and oversized, I have above-average hands but I feel it was designed for a gorilla or a pianist. I can't quite touch-type as I do on any of my Macs, notebooks or desktops. Surprisingly the area between QWERTY and the numeric keys, where key like Page Up, Delete, Home, End live, is compressed into two column, what gives. That's just stupid. The internals is what I care for and they were 3800MXN, around 200USD, a great price for a server, though.
So maybe Mac numbers are going down but at the same time in the last years Apple moved away from anything mechanical and now sells most of its products with long-lasting fast solid-state internals, so that's that.
For me it was killing off the 17" laptop. I'm sorry but we do music and video and we need the real estate. If they put out a 17" right now I'd plop down the money we'd jump to Windows but all our custom software only runs on OSX
There's no way to spin that as a positive.
I expect that they are waiting for all the hardware required to gel but the other problem is Apple is trying to engineer the market. This is why MacBook Air hasn't been upgraded and why we have the throughly stupid design in the Mac Book. Apple need to realize that they need to give people what they want and more so what they need even if they don't know that they need it. They could easily engineer themselves out of the Mac Hardware market.
Im not worried about the Mac Pro it is still a good design. The machine needs to transition to all 14nm hardware and that will come shortly if the GPU folks can get their acts together. Just imagine a Mac Pro with double or more performance from each GPU. The reality is the GPU manufactures have been stuck for a long time now and we should see a new generation of processors in this machine.
As as for this forum, yes the software sucks, It is very much crap and frankly I can't understand why AI switched to this software abortion. If you look at forum usage it is preset clear they drove away users.