Rogue01

22july2013 said:

The $599 price was with a two or three year contract, so buying it without a contract, if you could do that, would have cost about $1000, which would be worth about $1500 in today's dollars, due to inflation. Taking these two factors into consideration, the value of the unopened box has increased by a factor of 20. That's still pretty good. The stock has jumped by a factor of 50 since then, although I don't think that accounts for inflation (if you accounted for inflation, the stock jump is probably closer to 33.)

The $599 was the full price of the phone (8GB model, $499 4GB model), it was not subsidized with a two year contract.  The agreement Apple had with AT&T required the two year contract, there was no unlocked version of the phone.  So the phone would not have cost $1,000 at the time.  When the 3G came out, Apple and AT&T offered the subsidized price for $199 with the two year contract because Apple wanted to get the iPhone into everyone's hands for a lower price.

A better comparison would be the iPhone 13, still available in all capacities, and the nearly identical iPhone 14.  Since both phones are nearly identical, why would anyone spend more for the 14?  Of course the price difference between the Pro and regular model is so minimal, buying the 14 over the Pro is foolish too.  Same thing happened with the 12 and 13 models.  The price difference was only about $150 for the same capacities, so more people bought the Pro.

The chart is wrong for the Ultra.  It is only available in Titanium, and the chart indicates Stainless Steel and Titanium.  They were probably copying and pasting the columns and forgot to delete Stainless Steel from the Ultra.

I would not say the iMac is better than ever.  The 24" is a poor design.  No SD slot, headphone jack on the side, Ethernet in a power brick?  Limited to 16GB of RAM, limited to 2TB of storage, no dedicated graphics, and the M1 has slower multi-core scores than Intel.  Without improved graphics, the prior models with dedicated GPUs smoked the M1.  Once Apple makes an iMac with the M Pro and M Max CPUs, like the new MacBook Pros, then they will be worthy once again...and bringing back the 27" model.

darkvader said:

Dead_Pool said:

Many have no idea how close Apple was to going under when the iMac was released. There was virtually no chance it would survive in the face of the onslaught by industry-standard Windows, which had finally been able to copy the Mac’s ease of use after more than a decade of trying. Today, Apple is arguably the most powerful company to ever exist. Truly unbelievable, and all thanks to one man: Steve Jobs. 

All of that is complete bunk.

Apple was in no danger of going under.  Apple was consistently profitable, had a huge chunk of cash in the bank, and was making far better computers than everybody else.

Where Apple was struggling was with the development of the next generation operating system.  The NeXT purchase made sense for picking up a good UNIX-based OS, but sadly came with Steve Jobs, the man who was very justifiably fired from Apple in the early '80s.  Had Amelio been slightly more competent the first thing he'd have done after buying NeXT would have been to fire Jobs again, or at least contain him to the marketing department, with no influence on computer design.

Oh, and Microsoft didn't approach Macintosh ease of use for another decade and a half.  The ONLY release they've ever had that came close was Windows 7, what they had in the '90s was absolute garbage.  I know there were people at the time saying things like "Windows 95 = Macintosh 87" but the reality was very different, Win95 was still ultimately a shell on top of DOS.

Thanks for trolling with all your false information.  We get it, you hate Steve Jobs.  Apple was 3 months away from bankruptcy after filing a loss of $750M for the prior quarter.  They were not profitable, they were bleeding.  Ship with a big hole in it.  Apple had 32 SKUs of garbage products.  There is even a keynote that shows all 32 SKUs of Macs that made no sense.  Their Macs in the 90s were riddled with quality problems.  Bad PowerBooks and cheap PowerPC Macs running on a 680x0 32bit board for most models. And then the Performas added to the mess.  The iMac and Steve Jobs saved Apple.