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Apple is Going Out of Business ... Again
gsfprez writes "Its been a while ... and strangely, the world almost seemed empty without the constant drumbeat of how Apple is on the verge of going out of business. If you're a fan like i am, then you're in luck, because this Canadian tech journalist didn't get the memo that Apple's been going out of business longer than most tech journalists have been in business. And besides, someone needs to let Robert Thomson know: when writing a story on how Apple is about to die,
you have to
call
them "beleaguered". Come on, that's Tech Journalism 101, people. In any case, he brings up no new points to bolster his argument: he confuses his personal inability to use third-party software that works fine for most of us with legitimate bad third-party support, and uses this to draw his illogical conclusion. Illogical because it's the same reasons/unrealized conclusions that were the staple of tech journalism from 1985-1999."
Just when i wanted to get a 17 inch powerbook. Damn those rotten apples
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
Because it's based on *BSD, and as well all know, *BSD is dying.
The apple may be sweet at first, but it will forever be a curse on you and your children, and your children's children... dare you lock them into a computer platform where the owners, creators and maintainers of it have been on the verge of imploding since three months after they started?
Damn that iMac for being so irresistable!
-Mark
...and if you use it, it kills YOU!
(Especially in Soviet Russia.)
Boss: Robert, we need a sensationalist story that harkens back to the good old dot.bomb days. something to drive up sales.
Robert: I know, how about something about a really big company going under. That'll score big points.
Boss: Thats a good one. How about Sun Microsystems, or maybe Agilent?
Robert: Naw, I was thinking of the good old standby, Apple. I mean, most of the copy is already written and its bound to rile up the fanatics in both camps!
Boss: Good thinking, lets run it.
We never get memos in Canada..
First, we never got the "Mullets aren't cool" memo.
Nor the, "Thou shalt not eat massive amounts of poutine" memo.
and now this, the "Apple doesn't really ever go out of business" memo.
When will this appaling double standard of memo-sending end? Canadians are just as worthy of memos as the rest of the world!
"Peace, Love and Apathy"
If having $9 billion in the bank is going out of business, I'd like to be going out of business too!
He's just REALLY mad that he couldn't sync his palm pilot. When his temper tantrum is over he'll feel real bad for saying those things. His just a little sore right now. Just think of the article he would have written if he had bought a brand new PC with XP.
It is official; some noname journalist confirms: *Apple is dying
;-)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *Apple community when IDC confirmed that *Apple market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of any computer. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *Apple has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *Apple is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *Apple's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *Apple faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *Apple because *Apple is dying. Things are looking very bad for *Apple. As many of us are already aware, *Apple continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood (and when hasnt it?)
Apple is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Apple developers Some_Engineer#1 and Some_Engineer#2 only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Apple is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Apple leader Theo^H^H^H^HJobs states that there are 7000 users of Apple. How many users of Apple are there? Let's see. The number of Apple versus Wannabee posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Apple users. Apple posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Apple posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Apple. A recent article put Apple at about 80 percent of the *Apple market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Apple users. This is consistent with the number of Apple Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of nobody, abysmal sales and so on, Apple is going out of business and is being taken over by YetAnotherClone who sell another troubled OS. Now Apple is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *Apple has steadily declined in market share. *Apple is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *Apple is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *Apple continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *Apple is dead.
Fact: *BSD^H^H^HApple is dying
(baltantly ripped of the trolls
From the submission:
"If you're a fan like i am..."
Nice to see you've been so impressed with the iMac, iBook, iTunes, et al. that you've adopted similar punctuation in your everyday grammar.
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
Good thing he wasn't writing about Windows 95 with the release of Internet Explorer, otherwise he'd be crowing about Microsoft going out of business.
that's what iThink.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
This is kind of hypocritical. Haven't we been saying the same thing about Canada for years!? :-P
If this point has been made before in this thread, why is it rated Insightful?
Don't even start with the "Well mods should read comments at -1" argument.
Burp.
Mac sucks, it's all closed proprietary stuff. They should switch their operating system to UNIX or something like that. Then I think Macs could be really useful.
"I suppose at the time it was purchased, my beleaguered PowerMac was cutting edge, but in today's terms it was more powerful as a paperweight than a computer."
That's twice in one article. This guy is good.
Well it's Slashdot, think about it
"I can't drive 55. It only goes 38."
It wasn't posted as News, It was posted under the topic "Apple". They could have posted it under "It's funny. Laugh.". But then you would have complained: "I don't get it."
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I for one am sick of half-hearted, poorly researched , and blatently inaccurate news articles. I read articles from all over the place, including large newspapers and they seem to just get the wrong end of the stick. If the author had actually researched the articles, it would be clear: a) PowerMacs came out at about the Internet boom. b) The PowerMacs of this era were stable. (the performas were not as stable unfortunately) c) Word versions >6 etc work fine on all PowerMacs. d) Which latest software is he referring to exactly? e) has the author actually tried the latest updates, or did he just try the earlier ones that perhaps came with his PowerMac? f) Which other sales does Dell rely on? I only thought it sold hardware? If someone can enlighten me (I really can't be bothered to check, since this is what the author did!) then plesae do so. g) Well done for remembering the sales figures etc. They could well be wrong though since you didn't actually describe your sources. blah. Canada.com, get some decent writers. On a side note: I can see what the author means about Apple going down the pan. Before they do, can they sell the interface or something please? Thanks ;)
And because it doesn't have a girl on page three like the Sun! ;^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Apple computers have droped in price and increased in performance compared to last year.
:)
It must their going out of business sale.
Wouldn't it be very funny if the whole market would follow the furniture store business model?
I'd just like to take a moment to commend you on your outstanding journalistic ability, as displayed in your recent article regarding the future of a beleaguered Apple.
2 2/ 152252&mode=nested&tid=107
It seems natural to me that one would come to the conclusion that a beleaguered company was failing because they were having difficulty figuring out how to get their system to work.
Third party support for Apple's platform is of course, terrible. I mean, just look at Office X! It's clearly a horrible hack-job that Microsoft just tossed together in the middle of the night to shut up those whiney Apple zealots. Never mind those broken implementations of Photoshop, Illustrator, et al.
I commend your journalistic foresight, for despite the fact that Apple has forecasted a profit in the second quarter -- something pretty rare for this industry right now, they're apparently beleaguered, and going down in flames. The fact that they have become the world's largest provider of UNIX systems certainly tolls the bell for the beleaguered company. Who wants to use technology originally developed in the sixties? Those beleaguered Apple-hippies!
Your article has been noticed by the community, and it would seem they may not agree with us. They mentioned something about journalists predicting a beleaguered Apple's demise for the last fifteen years of the century past.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/
I suggest that you switch platforms. I've discovered a far more durable, user friendly, and powerful computing platform. You may find information and an emulator to evaluate it's capabilities at the following URL. Unfortunately, I believe it lacks a thesaurus.
http://www.speaknspell.co.uk/
He still only gets 50%, because he neglected to describe Steve Jobs as "mercurial".
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I remember BUYING an expensive, yet gorgeous laptop that I couldn't afford. Now, I shudder at the price of the 17", mainly because it's about $300 less than my TiBook was.
I'm such a fucking retard.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
So that's why they say that Apple users are people that need to be hand-held through their computer experience! ;)
-T
Stick a fork in 'em -- this Apple is cooked.
No, this Apple is cooked.
It's funny that any time apple comes up around here, there are at least 10 separte threads that start up on wheather or not Macs suck. It's always the same thing, over anf over agian. Macs are expenisve, Macs are nice macs are reliable, macs are shite. PCs are unreliable, PCs suck for graphics designers, PCs suck, Macs suck...
Well, I've got news for you.
It _all_ sucks.
Everything.
Everything sucks. Macs, PC's, Linux, BeOS, Amiga, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, VMS, CMS, VM/ESA, IRIX, HPUX, TOPS andf MULTIX. C++, C#, C, FORTAN, ALGOL, PASCAL, Perl, Python, Java, Lisp and Prolog. Word, StarOffice, Openoffice, WordPerfect, Latex, Tex, and troff. Emacs, vi, pico, notepad, wordpad and pico.
It all sucks.
Athlons, PIIIs, P4's, Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC and mainframes. RISC, CISC, VLIW. USB, PCI, AGP, SBUS, ISA, EISA, Firewire, SCSI, IDE, Fiberchannel, Microchannel.
They are all either overpriced, shoddy, bloated, underperforming, overpowered, hard to use, featureless, poorly designed, poorly executed, shoehorned, mis-marketed, non-compatible, rushed out the door, late or all of the above.
So stop arguing! It's all the same crap anyway, and they all of the same problems. They're all too expensive because they're all worthless. And they're all hard to use because they're designed and built by morons!
As far as I'm concerned the last decent piece of technology is the door stop. It's easy to use, always works, inexpenisve, and never gets stolen. And if by some wild chance it's not properly stopping doors, you need only get a heavier one. All this and they come in any variety of colors.
I bet you get even get one in friggin' translucent blue plastic.
Yeah, I can hardly get anything done on my Macs for lack of software.
I mean, I can't edit video in FC Pro / Premiere/ iMovie. Can't do Photoshop / Fireworks / Illustrator. Can't do databases with Filemaker / mySQL.
No good text editors like emacs/VI/BBEdit. And Excel isn't available on the Mac after all. Can't get my Epson / HP scanners to work or my Olympus / Epson / Kodak digital camera. Too bad there's nothing like iPhoto on the Mac.
No Toast for burning CDs, no support in OS X for CD burning. No DVD burning support - no Windows emulation.
And worst of all, there's no command line!
And don't even get me started on OS X LAG on my 500 mHz Powerbook G4. I mean, it takes at least 1 second for Safari to load! And I can only run ten apps concurrently before I start to notice performance degradation.
Need I go on?
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
its not, they want you to email the lamer
iBankrupt
Well, I've seen Steve around the Apple campus from time to time, and I've never noticed any wings on his sandals.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
See? What could be sillier than an increasing s/n ratio killing the 'net?
This sig no verb.
> A lot of which you can get for free.
I tried both of them and they didnt seem that impressive...
(It was a joke.. laugh!)
Turkey today stated that it was willing to support Microsoft's attack on Linux and Mac OSX, and sign on as a switcher, but due to the expected loss in productivity they will experience, they would need $26 Billion up front. Microsoft, in a fit of rage, "this is extortion", stated that they will find another country, if the current offer of $40 Billion in MS software products is not excepted. Officials familiar with Turkey's parliament state that the cash bargaining position is in reality a move to force Microsoft to part with large numbers of Xboxes. Sources further state that they believe that these will be dumped on the Kurdish population in Northern Iraq, with a note that if they allow Turkish control, that these will be replaced later with PS2's. Parliament is expected to vote on Microsoft's offer Tuesday.
Dammit. I'm a geek (at least by the standards of everyone I know) and I've been in the Mac market for years. At least as my primary desktop system. Now they're good for everything. Muahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Various sources show Apple's market share to deviate between
h tml tells us that Apple shipped
2.8% market share and
and 10%
Now, let us analyze these numbers in order to form an educated opinion on the matter.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/01/19.1.s
roughly 1.5 million computers. Let us realistically look at this number.
Assume
that 1.5 million computers were shipped to 1.5 million unique customers, so there are
at least 1.5 million Apple customers for the year 2002.
The truth is, the way technical progress is going, most customers upgrade their computers
at least twice a year, so now we only have 500,000 unique customers. However, if you
spend some time on the apple use groups, you will realize that out of 7000 people registered
in those groups, four out of five users only pretend to be Apple users for the coolness factor.
So, applying the same logic, gives us 100,000 true Apple users out of 500,000. The number of shipped
computers does not reflect the simple reality, that about 20% of all bought computers are
returned back to the company, so that makes 80,000 unique customers left. The people who buy
Apple computers and actually use them is even lower. Only about 70% of all bought computers are
put to some real use, which leaves us with 56000 customers. Out of 56000 50% are constantly stoned,
you can confirm this with the Switch testimonials from the Apple site, just look at their faces,
listen to what they have to say.... Ellen Feis, need I say more?
28000 sober users is still a
large number, Apple should be proud of the numbers of their true followers. Of-course, you have to
take into account that about a third of all Apple computers are sold outside of the USA, which
makes it impossible to say anything reliable about the customers outside of the country, so lets just
discard these, and this leaves us with a healthy 20000 customer user base. About half of all
computers are connected to the web, which makes them the true computer users (the rest are superficial
and do not deserve our time) so 10000 still sound pretty darn good for a company named after a fruit.
About 10% of all Apple users leave in Texas and 10% in Utah, and since we do not consider these
people to be civilized enough to use anything more complicated than a toaster, let's only focus on
the true, sober 8000 power users. Out of these 8000 customers about 20% has switched to Microsoft
products after success that MS displayed with their innovative and pattented UnSwitch compain.
So
we still have 6400 users. In general, Apple users to be very vocal in expressing their opinions, which
puts their already fragile health in strenuous conditions, such that they seem to have a
disproportionaly high number of heart attacks and strokes when compared to the general population.
So, out of the surviving 400 users (which is still a great user base and a market share) 50% are
female, and seriously, seriously, can females be considered computer users? I mean they must do
something with the computers they bought, probably most females bought their Apples as gifts and
decoration items.
Out of the remaining 200 men, US-Statistics Office reports, 120 were charged with
criminal offences of varying gravity, 40 were found to be linked to Al-Qaeda and a group of 12 were
last seen four months ago going North.
28 people left to account for. I personally know 20 Apple
users, out of which I consider 10 to be total A-holes, so they don't count.
18 rock-solid, head-strong
Apple followers, of-course from this number we have to exclude the blacks, the atheists, the homos,
the vegetarians.
This leaves us with 1 user. We have identified this truly great, unique individual
who, on his tremendously powerful sholders carries gigantic burden of sustaining profitability of this
money making machine, who some of us love to hate and the rest call Apple corporation.
We are here
to conduct an interview with this incredible person, with this true follower. He gratiously accepted
our interviewer. The interview took place in the house of this incredible person, the spectacular
97,000,000 dollar mansion located on the shore of the lake
Washington.
-I really like Apple, I use iMac and PowerBook daily, they never failed me. - These are the customer's words from the interview. -The only thing I don't like about the Apple computers, is that their keyboard lacks the Windows button on it, everything else is great!
You can't handle the truth.
I agree! Buy me a BMW and I'll run over him. I would use my Mercedes-Benz, but the police are holding it.
-Clara Harris
Ron Paul 2012
Uhm, no shit. Hence "News for Nerds," not "News for Economists." Think before you post.
Apple Computer Goes Out of Business For the 478th Time
Stable OS, user satisfaction sited in computer giant's demise
CUPERTINO, CA. -- Apple Computer, Inc., the company often credited with launching the personal computer revolution in 1979 with the Apple II, has gone out of business for the 478th time, according to a recent report from acclaimed jornalist Robert Thomson.
In his latest article for the National Post, Thomson states "Stick a fork in 'em -- this Apple is cooked." Upon reading this, long time Mac users across the world knew it was time to give up.
"I've been an Apple user since 1983," said Jason Haas. "Ever since our Apple II Plus with two Disk ][ drives, the green screen, and 48 kilobytes of RAM came into the house, I've been in love."
Haas, who once assisted in the development of the Linux operating system for the Mac before returning to the Mac OS, went on to say "They really took a chance going from ProDOS to the graphical system in 1984, and I guess that never caught on. That's a shame, as I guess I'll just have to go back to ProDOS. Fortunately I can emulate that on my Mac's dates PowerPC G3 processor. VisiCALC, here I come!"
Thomson agreed. "That makes it official. This user was so unsupported by Steve Jobs that he had to go back to an operating system made in the 1980s -- and made by Microsoft. Apple really is toast."
Apple CEO Steve Jobs could not be reached for comment at press to,e. ø
-- haaz.
Fun with tweaking.
--j
From the article: "...but in today's terms it was more powerful as a paperweight than a computer."
Given the sheer weight of the beasts, I'd say that was true of every computer I've ever seen. I mean, hell my P2 is about 300 times as powerful as any other paperweight I've ever used...
Oh wait, that one laptop I saw once...
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009