mainyehc

Not worried in the least. We've been here before, remember? Apple also got rid of the SE, only to resuscitate it later on in the form of the Mini.

Also, that sucker seems to have been extremely popular in some markets (really; just the other day I was at this store in Lisbon where I was told it was the best-selling model), and Apple would be completely idiotic if they left that money on the table or let Android phones eat their lunch…

I predict that in two, three years we'll see an iPhone 17 or 18 Mini, specifically tailored to keep all these users on a parallel upgrade path. Until then, I'll keep swapping the battery on mine. About the only product I'll hoard are MagSafe covers, those seem to be getting fairly rare lately.

charlesn said:

… I'm not sure the market for such a machine is big enough to justify that investment for a sprawling, $3 trillion company. 

  

Couldn't have said it better myself. That Apple behaved like a lean, mean startup for almost two-and-a-half decades after its brush with bankruptcy and Steve Jobs's return, I could perfectly understand and accept. Except they've been an absolute juggernaut ever since the iPhone became a thing, nearly fifteen years ago. Heck, they even design their own chips…

Apple is at this point where not only they can, but also MUST produce some inspirational, flagship, loss-leader products. Even if they had to sell a $5000 Mac Pro at a loss (yes, you've read it correctly; they might be taking a hit just due to how expensive designing a specific chip for it might be), if that's the only way they can keep the high-end markets which need obscene amounts of memory and graphics capability and make them them look cool (and actually be useful to society; scientific applications which deal with massive datasets come to mind), so be it.

Consider it a form of a still somewhat self-serving form of hardware philanthropy. They did it before, at a time when it made less sense from a financial or even strategic standpoint (remember the XServe, anyone?), so there's no excuse now. It only makes them look even more like bean counters.

nzhong168 said:

Wow, US is becoming such a place with hatred.  Apple CEO just visited China and praise workers are innovative and he became a target。 He didn't praise CCP, neither support human right abuse. He just said something not wrong. Chinese are innovative, just like American. now he is labelled as doing propaganda for CCP.  I see American become more like CCP, bully and harass anyone who isn't doing exact what they like.   It is like extreme right speaking to extreme left, both are very SICK people. If you don't like what the CEO said,  you can choose not to buy Apple product, they are mostly made in China nowaday.

Dude, his sense of timing was complete crap on this one and if this was just due to him being too busy to pay attention to the news (which I highly doubt, but anyway), someone in Apple’s PR and communications department – maybe the head herself, Kristin Huguet Quayle – may be in absolute need of being made redundant – or resigning; if this was indeed just Tim’s doing and I were in her shoes and had to deal with its fallout, you can be damned sure that I wouldn’t stay for much longer.

He did it right on the heels of Xi and Putin meeting, that’s what makes it a brain-dead PR blunder. With such high-stakes, life-or-death events – on a massive scale, mind you – going on in Europe, of all places, and China potentially becoming even more of an actor in them, optics are absolutely key, yes, even if Apple isn’t like a modern-day Krupp or IG Farben (heck, it could even be a Schindler, for all us common folk would care).

Even if what you said is 100% true, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a flustercuck of epic proportions. He could’ve canceled the visit over some scheduling excuse, and the factories would keep on working just fine, as would Apple’s relationship with them. And sure, he might just have wanted to signal to those suppliers that he would stay with them if they’re willing to move their factories overseas, but that’s the kind of thing you can, and in this particular case definitely should, do in private meetings.

DAalseth said:

A thousand dollars a month? I really hope that most if not all organizations decide it’s not worth it and drop their accounts. I mean I’d be pissed to find out that my Senator, Congressman, or agency was dropping twelve bills a year to keep a Twitter account. There’s better things to put tax money toward. 

Public officials should just show Phony Stark the finger and move to Mastodon altogether. Heck, the US Government should create its own instance for all its agencies, duh.

mattinoz said:

Meaning it is now cheaper to host your own add free social networking site than be on ad supported site as the product.

Precisely. With how cheap and efficient ARM-based boxes are getting, I’m *this* close to self-host a Mastodon instance, a WebDAV server for my Zotero library and a WordPress blog. 🙄