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Apple Reports Q1 Loss
Amsterdam Vallon writes "Apple recently reported an $8 million loss, its second straight loss, compared with a $38 million profit a year ago. It seems that upbeat laptop sales weren't enough to get this company out of the Wall Street basement. Hopefully, with increasing Mac OS X and wireless-related sales, we'll see a nice increase come next quarter and after that, perhaps a jaunt toward profitability!" The back was apparently tipped into the red with one-time restructuring losses, else there would have been a modest profit; Apple expects stagnant revenues for the near future.
Their standards are too high, and the rely on their fervrent followers to support them.
Recipe for financial mishaps (ask the Roman Catholic Church, it happened to them too).
Apple needs to SELL OUT. I want 3rd party PPC motherboards. I want OSX on x86.
Or they'd better introduce a heftier server line than the Xserve. That's too much money to spend on hardware which management equates with the cheap 1/2U Dells (which is WRONG but happens anyway).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The reasons more slashdot readers are not buying Macs are fairly obvious to me, the biggest reasons I mention here:
1. You have to buy Mac hardware to use MacOS X. There is no way around this and there probably will never be a way around it. Apple makes a lot of money off hardware which means you are restricted to what Apple is making at the moment. Slashdot readers like choice, and the best deal, and you don't always get that with Apple at all levels.
2. As recent events have shown us Apple makes proprietary software and hardware and it sometimes bites you in the a$$. If thye don't like what you are doing they have much more power to stop you when you are running Apple software.
3. Part of the reason Apple's marketshare is slipping is because people are afraid to buy because Apple's marketshare is slipping. It's Catch-22. Why invest in learning new OS' and hardware when it could be gone in a few years. Apple needs to do a better job convincing people marketshare will go up by marketing better to users who have windows computers.
4. The processor issue. It's been beat to the ground, but 1ghz laptops don't impress people at the store when you have an intel based computer sitting next to it with double the processor for less money. The quality of the hardware may be less, but it's still a big issue for people. You can distract them with cool lights on the keyboard for only so long before someone is going to start complaining again about processor speeds. They need to work this issue out, and hopefully the Power4 or similar will be the answer.
No, seriously. They're annoying as hell and it seems like they pretty much make EVERYONE want to put his or her fist through their hip Steve Jobs wire-rims.
... how the hell can you react? With pity?
Is it because they're so clueless? It can't be, because there are plenty of other clueless losers hanging around Slashdot... Windows users, fourteen-year-olds, people who think Segways are cool. What it must be is that they insist on hanging around a geek web site like Slashdot, even though they're definitely not wanted. Somewhere where they're continually laughed at as the techno-wannabes they really are. Man, people who want to pay double for hardware so they can use software they can get for free (*BSD)