ne1

Eric_WVGG said:

neilm said:

#237  12" MacBook. Well, outside of a store I've never seen a 12" MB in the wild. Not one. Not Ever.

So "adorable"? Apparently not by many.

Sorry man, I see them all over NYC. Huge with sales, marketing, executives. 

I've been thinking about getting one for my significant other, who suffers from ME/CFS and finds her 13" Pro a bit too much to haul around. Just wondering what the best way to work out a trade with someone might be, or if she should just be on an iPad Pro.

Mike Wuerthele said:

rogifan_new said:

As I posted in another thread... How much money is Amazon making off original content? People keep talking about growing services revenues. Apple doesn’t break down the components of services revenue but it’s a good bet the majority of it comes from the cut Apple takes on IAP. Secondarily would probably be things like iCloud storage, MFI licensing fees, Apple Care. All of those are tied to hardware. We’ve never heard in the past that iTunes was much of a money making business. Maybe Apple has these grand video plans that will blow everyone out of the water and be hugely profitable but I’m skeptical. I know Wall Street is obsessed with the services narrative but what good are services (as a stand alone product) for Apple if they’re not very profitable (if at all). Looking at Netflix’s last quarterly earnings filing their net profit was around $400M. And that’s off of a subscriber base of around 137M. What would Apple have to charge for its video service to pull in decent profits?

Well, the video will cost what it costs to generate. Putting it in front of a larger user-base paying for it, by opening it up to non-Apple hardware is logical.

The magnitude of it remains to be seen, of course.

colinng said:

From 2011 through 2017, many so-called analysts who didn't understand Apple, said that Apple stopped innovating, and the other players in the market caught up. They said Apple could not innovate without Steve Jobs. 

It turns out that you can innovate without Steve Jobs (look at WayTools, Telsa, and other companies). You just really have to want it. Referring to what Steve said, R&D isn't about writing a cheque. You have to think on behalf of your customers' best interests, all-round, including fairness and providing value. 

When the original iPhone dropped in price the year after it was released, Apple issued a $100 refund for every single early buyer. Apple took a small hit on the bottom line to be loyal to their customers. And that's why the Apple brand name was so strong in 2012. 

2018 rolls around and finally the so-called analysts are right. Apple now increments but charges category-defining prices. iPad Pro 12.9" (512GB LTE) went from CA$1606 (2017) to over CA$1900 (2018). The damn pencil went up by 50%!!! Same goes for iPhone, Mac mini, MacBook Air - just about everything Apple makes. 

If it was $1000 or more, it went up by $200-$300. Overnight. If it was under $1000, it went up to nearly $1000. Base model Mac mini went from $499 to $799. And all they did was put back the quad core that the 2012 model had that they took out in 2014. And the audacity to shout on stage at the keynote, "more cores is faster." No shit? 

Is it a mystery that people aren't buying? 

Steve used to say that Apple's customers were smart. If you want to lead, you got to make things for the leaders. i.e. artists, musicians, directors, and other professionals who do amazing things with their systems and push the boundaries. 

But instead Apple is fooling itself thinking it can chase easy money. They send demo units to "influencers" i.e. people with YouTube channels. They hope that Apple customers are truly sheeple who just buy what "influencers" show off. 

Apple is failing because it is pandering to fools, hoping that "a fool and their money soon part." They forgot their customers are artists, creatives, directors, engineers, authors, teachers, scientists. 

We can easily see Intel is polishing a turd when they are at 14nm+++ (i.e. didn't do 10, 10+, and certainly didn't do 7). Nobody is going to buy their crap. Everyone is pissed off at Intel, to the point they are booting up their own silicon teams. 

Perhaps the only area that Apple is leading in right now - is the A-series silicon. They used to lead in development tools too, like Swift. But hey, they pissed off the people who made Swift so they went elsewhere.