On Friday, 10 November 2017 at 11:28:41 UTC, Joakim wrote:
It would either be you and Jobs, or just you, letting them
rebel. I would keep the line.
That's funny, as I was responding to your statement above,
"So, let them rebel." :D
"Let them rebel" was with regard to your point of view. As
demonstrated by the sentence I put after it: "You said that
they would like to see it go away, and/or they want to milk
it." You said that Apple would be happy to see it go away.
Then you added that they were "milking" the line while they
could. Satisfying rebelling users doesn't jive with either
position. They rebel and you want to get rid of it - and you
get rid of it. They rebel wanting changes, and you only want
to keep milk it while you can - then you get rid of it,
because you can't milk what you have.
Your logic is extremely confused. Let me spell it out for you:
the Mac is all but dead, particularly when compared to the
mobile computing tidal wave, since they sell 10 iPhones + iPads
for every Mac, according to the sales link I gave you before.
They have cut investment in that legacy Mac product, but they
would like to keep selling a lower-quality product at high
prices to the few chumps that still maintain the old Mac aura
in their heads.
You have little company in thinking the Mac line is a
"low-quality product". The computer magazine writers gush about
the Macbooks.
As far as "all but dead", in the most recent quarter, that line
did have declining sales from the previous year, but it was "5.6
billion in revenue in Q3 — over 12% of Apple’s total for the
quarter".
So that is what they do, milk the suckers still paying high
prices for a rarely refreshed product with a lot more bugs. I
don't know what's hard to understand about this for you. When
the Mac userbase rebels, they try to calm them down and say
they're coming out with a new Mac Pro _next year_, five years
since the last one!
Your logic seems extremely confused. If they aren't changing the
product it won't have a "lot more bugs". With no changes you get
less bugs over time.
Apple is a business. As long as the Mac faithful are still
willing to pay a lot of money for lower-quality products, they
will gladly take their money, even though it's now just a
sideline for their real business, the iPhone. Of course,
they'd rather just focus on the iPhone, but if they can take a
lot of devs off macOS and still milk those suckers, why
wouldn't they?
What does "take a lot of devs off macOS" refer to?
Apple is all about making money, which is why they're the
largest company in the world, with some forecasting that they
will soon be the first company to have a market cap of... one
trillion dollars!!! insertDoctorEvilPinkie();
Very few companies are not "all about making money". That is why
Americans were laid off by the millions and replaced by workers
in countries with much cheaper labor rates. Bad for the workers,
good for "making money". Apple isn't unique in making all it's
products outside the USA.
I don't see where it makes sense to call people who buy Mac
products suckers (they seem especially popular with software
developers) who pay extra for what you call "low-quality
equipment" without saying the same thing about the people who buy
iPhones. Your mantra is "people need so much less than they are
buying". Well, that applies as much to iPhone users as it does
Mac users. People don't need $1,000 phones and they don't need to
upgrade a phone every two years.
The large Apple profit comes from offering quality products
and then pricing them at the highest gross profit margin in
the industry. In order to get people to pay a premium for
their products it helps to have a mystique or following, and
the macOS line helps to maintain their mystique and it is
small potatoes next to their phone business.
I've already said repeatedly that they're not going to drop
the Mac line anytime soon, so I don't know why you want to
write a paragraph justifying keeping it.
My post was in response to this statement of yours "Simple,
they see the writing on the wall, ie much smaller sales than
mobile, SO THEY WANT THE LEGACY PRODUCT TO GO AWAY, which
means they can focus on the much bigger mobile market." That
seems to be a contradiction to "they're not going to drop the
Mac line anytime soon".
No contradiction: they want the Mac to go away, but are happy
to keep supplementing their bottom line while pulling engineers
off of it, just like the iPod Touch.
If somebody wants something to go away and they can make it go
away, they make it go away. It is most certainly a contradiction
to say "they want it to go away" and they "want it to not go away
so they can milk it".
You seem to be confused by the fact that a business sometimes
has contradictory goals- should we focus exclusively on the
iPhone and make more money there or keep the Mac limping along
too?- and tries to balance the two as long as it makes sense.
That doesn't look like contradictory goals. It looks like two
choices. Only iPhone or iPhone + macOS. They chose the latter.
What exactly would Apple do, if it didn't make Macs, with regard
to iPhone development, that would allow it to make more money
from the iPhone? Their revenue from iPhones is 10's of billions
of dollars a quarter. I doubt that there is any focus that the
iPhone is missing.
If people ever get so cost-conscious that they decide to buy a
$150 companion for their phone, instead of a $400 laptop, it's
unlikely they will be using iPhones. You can get a nice
Android phone with plenty of RAM/ROM for half the price of an
iPhone.
Sure, the hypothetical iPhone with multiwindow/dock and the
iPad Pro replace the expensive Macbook or Surface Pro, while
the Android phone you already have along with something like
Dex/Sentio replaces cheaper Windows PCs. I already made this
point earlier.
So Apple users need a tablet and a phone but Android users just
need a phone? There are Android phones just as expensive as
iPhones, in addition to the ones that are 1/10th to 1/2 the price.
Why are you talking about iPads? Why would a $649 and up iPad Pro
be something people need when you say they can use their phone
instead of a $400 Windows laptop? That is something I would
expect Tim Cook to claim.
