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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=-
What you're saying is there's a problem with stupid media journalists attempting to create FUD that apple is going to go out of business simply by stating they will, and people buying it becuase they have this perception of apple on shaky ground simply because they've heard that same thing stated frequently in prominent media positions?
Is giving this front page coverage on slashdot.org going to help things?
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.)
These articles are almost as silly as the old argument that increasing S/N ratios on Usenet are killing the Internet.
This sig no verb.
If the article is considered irrelevant and incorrect, why is it being posted as news?
:)
Don't even start with the "Well it's Slashdot, think about it" arguments
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.
Last time I checked there were several million mac users who range from professional graphic artists, web designers, professionals in the teaching and medical field, the occasional average Joe, and now a new player to the mac field: geeks.
Also to boot the mac has way more software than people give it credit for. It doesn't have half the games as windows, but that's not it's strong point. And with fink and an X11 server i instantly have a BSD machine that can run thousands of qt/gtk apps.
Their desktops are probably loosing tons of market, but they still make the best laptops on the planet.
- tristan
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
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"
4 billion in the bank.
Yeah... pretty low.
If having $9 billion in the bank is going out of business, I'd like to be going out of business too!
...I'm laughing so hard. He spends two paragraphs being mad at his Palm m515 (Software that was not written by Apple) so it MUST be Apple's fault.
I wonder if he is being paid by Microsoft as part of the new "UnSwitcher" campaign? I'd say he should take the fork he was going to stick in Apple, and...well...you get the idea.
In all actuality, I'm curious as to what Apple's market share is now? I don;t know that it has ever been as low as 3%. More like 5%. But I'd venture a guess that with OSX converting Linux users left and right that it'd be around 6-8% by now. Thoughts?
My
This betrays the same sort of misguided thinking that caused the internet tech crash.
Market. Share. Is. Not. Necessarily. An. Indication. Of. A. Company's. Success.
Why can't people understand this? Why do they keep clinging to notions that have been disproved time and time again, are intuitively wrong, and yet people still believe them?
Apple doesn't have to beat PCs in market share. All they have to do is make a profit. That's it. And they don't even have to make a profit every quarter, as long as their cash reserves are large enough (and they are). They just have to over the long run bring in more money than they spend. It's so simple, why can't these people understand it? Why do they insist that "market share" has something to do with it? Enron had a sizeable market share. So did Worldcom. What they didn't have was profitability.
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
Apple is a strong brand, and they're also about more than computers. The iPod is not the last Cool Portable Device (tm) we'll see from them. There's been going some rumours around regarding Apple and Sony Ericsson or just Sony in general. Anyway, I'm waiting for the iPhone.
Apple and Java could also become a strong combination on the desktop. The Apple isn't rotten yet!
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
Based on what he said:
"Crashes and screen seizures were regular occurrences. And the iBook doesn't play well with a lot of things that are part of the Microsoft world."
It sounds like he might be booting up in OS 9 instead of OS X, and he probably didn't fork out any money to upgrade his MS Office suite.
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.
So this reporter is comparing his clearly outdated Powermac and his new iBook (the weakest, speed wise, branch of the Apple tree) to regular PCs. And the main complaint is that Palm software doesn't work? And Apple created Safari becuase there is no development for browsers on the Apple platform? Please, no one tell the folks reponsible for Chimera, Navigator, Omniweb, et al, about this. If this was a post it would be an obvious -1 Troll. Even IE has an update in the wings. Jeez, with my 6 years life out of each of my Macs (one desktop, one notebook) I only have 3 yeras left until my laptop stops functioning, and 6 years left on my new iMac. Maybe they can oust Steve Jobs, and bring him back again.
Things aren't all bad. It's wonderful having Unix with a really nice GUI. Apple is filling in some of the gaps by writing software like Safari, iMovie and Keynote themselves. The boxes are physically beautiful. But it certainly isn't nirvana. The Mac is in a very difficult transition between OS9 and OSX and it needs to pick up market share before application developers will take it seriously. Dependence on Microsoft is an ongoing problem.
Cause it's full of 99% opinion that doesn't matter, and the 1% of news isn't remotely useful.
that's what iThink.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
As the owner of a Sony Clie, I do agree that sometimes hardware manufacturers forget about Mac owners. Of course, then someone steps in and creates the excelent program like TheMissingSync, which allows mac users to sync with their unsupported Clies.
Apple, in the meantime, realizes there is a problem with Palm support on the Mac, and creates iCal and iSync.
Imagine that - I have choices when syncing my Clie. I can use Palm Desktop (which I rather like) or I can use iCal/iSync.
Choices are good!
Some argue this is a result of Apple trying to ween itself off of its reliance on Microsoft. Imaging that - Apple big enough that it is willing to start taking on Microsoft. Keynote, which he ignores, can also be seen as a shot across Microsoft's bow. If nothing else, it can at least be seen as Jobs telling Bill to make sure and continue development on the Mac platform.
The Mac platform is a huge money-maker for Microsoft. Safari and Keynote are a win-or-win idea for Apple. Either it provokes competition from Microsoft and others in the field (competition being good for the consumer) or it eliminates some of the reliance Apple has on Microsoft right now. Both of these outcomes are good for Apple.
I notice that he conviniently neglected to give sales figures for all Macintoshes, and ignored Xserve and the Powerbook line, both of which are doing well for Apple. The computers he mentions are also nearing the end of their life cycle. The iBook is in need of an update, and the PowerMac line has not seen a huge jump since the first Quicksilver machines (yes, they have done things like dual optical drives and faster memory, but when it comes down to it, they are very similar). Only recently were the PowerMacs updated with Firewire800 and Bluetooth.
He also neglects to mention that, according to most analysts, Apple is weathering the recession a lot better than most other tech firms.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Maybe the public is realizing you can get a very formidible windows based computer for half the price of a cheap mac.
The public are mostly morons-- and since when have they ever done anything but look for the absolute cheapest of [product]? Quality and longevity are of little or no concern.
They don't realize that while the Mac costs twice as much, it also remains a viable computer twice as long (or longer) and in the long run provides a fraction of the aggravation that comes with dealing with computer problems (thanks to Windows not being in the equation). I'm a system integrator, and I've seen the ugly Windows problems that just occur out of nowhere, and dealt with the people who can't do more than turn their PCs on and type Word documents because the machine intimidates them.
I got more than six years out of the last brand new desktop Mac I bought (a Power Mac 7600, with a few modest upgrades sprinkled into it over the years to keep somewhat current), and could've gotten more but I wanted a machine that would run OS X capably and without me having to resort to any hacks to get it installed and make it work. Now I've got a G4/733, and it will likely last me just as long.
~Philly
macromedia and adobe both commit to the mac, and both have major upgrades of their flagship products, all designed to run on os x. even ms office is native to os x, and is superior by many reports to office xp (though i cannot attest to this, my office experience stopping around 97/2000 era). isync works very well with the palm. but maybe the fact remains that palm is having some problems competing against the pocket pc and other pda's. CS departments are adopting macs, er, pretty unix boxen, and there are plenty of apps. windows is full of crappy, vb shareware apps. (and yes, linux has its share of crappy gpl apps) but, for serious work, the mac is not only equal, but far superior to windows in several categories.
The problem with lacklustre third party development has prompted Apple to create its own browser, which it calls Safari.
pure FUD. apple has decided not to put its lot with m$. IE is full of holes, even on the mac. keynote is designed to take on powerpoint, and apple is even pushing OO.org/X on its site.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Apple likes it when journalists claim Apple is going out of buisness. It rouses fan loyalty, raises Apples underdog image, gets other journalists to praise Apples good financial management and gets people nostalgic about their old Macs.
They haven't yet updated the counter for this paper, so that makes it 23 times in 7 years.
http://www.macobserver.com/appledeathknell
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.
Damn, you beat me to it, I was going to point out iSync. Palm is a special case, their engineers are primarily some ex-Apple employees, and they hate Steve Jobs. They deliberately botched Mac compatibility. So Apple stepped in and fixed the problem with iSync. And it's FREE.
But it doesn't seem like iSync is this guy's solution, he sounds like he's running OS 9. Yes, OS 9 is dying, but not Apple. By this same logic, Microsoft is dying because Windows 95 is losing market share.
--No, author used old PowerMac until the day his iBook came in.
Author gets new iBook.
--Just so; very good!
Author can't run Palm 515 software on new iBoook.
--Correction: author can't get Palm 515 software to run properly on new iBooook. But he sees enough to know it doesn't "just work".
Author sees release of Safari. Author extrapolates that since Apple is releasing own web browser, Apple can't get decent third party software support.
--Actually, author sees that Apple can't get decent third-party support, considers Safari evidence that Apple sees same problem.
Author sees this as imminent demise of Apple.
--Right again! But it's only one man's opinion.
It's interesting that so many true believers rise to the bait yet again. Don't you people have any faith?
To paraphrase the article:
I don't know how to use the computer that my company bought for me, so l'll go write an article about how Apple is going out of business. That'll teach 'em.
Losing. Market. Share. Is. An. Indication. Of. A. Company's. Failure.
.5% or even lower, but that doesn't make it a non-issue.
Why can't you understand this? If Apple loses all of its market, it will no longer be in business. Profit isn't some magical thing that comes from the profit fairy, it's produced by doing business. If Apple stops selling stuff, it will go under.
They can't make a profit otherwise. Furthermore, there is a limit to the minimum profit a company can have in the computer industry because expenditures aren't zero, so there is a minimum market share.
The question, as always, is how close Apple is coming to that line such that they will no longer have the funds to compete?
I personally think it's closer to
Also, there's the question of third-party support which is invariably tied to market share, except for in a few cases. Take Linux, for example. How many software manufacturers put out a Linux version? Very few because there is a negligable market share in Linux, but its usually the apps that make the system desirable.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I figure many people are going to say "what the heck, why is this news??"...but I enjoyed gsfprez's writing there (and the topic, too).
You know, I always thought it was kinda a funny thing. Long ago I was a Mac developer doing shrink-wrap stuff. Apple was at it's peak, and still people said they had 10% of the market share. They said that was pathetic. But, from my perspective it was always encouraging. Because (anecdotally, I know) when I looked around...schools, banks, businesses, friends' houses, etc... I almost never saw Macs. I would have guessed 2%.
I wonder where they are now? I know that a few years ago the flavored iMacs sold like hotcakes and yet did nearly nothing to bolster Apple's percentage. That's partly because each flavor had a different model # and the percentage stuff is tracked by model #. Apparently it was too difficult for IDC, or whoever it was, to add.
No, Macs are not blatantly overpriced, because PCs are a commodity whereas Macs are not. A commodity, as you and the entire Slashdot community are well aware, I trust, is a product differentiated only by price. Like PCs. Whereas a Mac is an entirely different beast.
must... stay... awake...
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 ;)
The average joe will never understand why he isn't getting a good deal when he spends less than $1000-$1500 on a computer. Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform. I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation. What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs. Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple? Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!" Microsoft is seriously underestimating how much its users like their freedom. We have a whole generation of up-and-coming users who will have major purchasing power in the next few years. Microsoft would do well to remember that most of the Napster crowd is in college now, getting ready to leave college or has been out for a while. Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have. I wouldn't go so far as to say they have a right to get them for free, but I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti the time of day when he says that I can't view my movies and music anywhere and however I choose to.
Microsoft cannot and will not sell the average user on why they need DRM. If people really cared about audio quality they'd be using DVD-Audio over CD-Audio and would be ripping their own CDs at no less than 192kbps VBR. The content cartels and Microsoft as I said, will not be able to justify why the "sharecropper" model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
The last time I checked, the CBDTPA was not even before a committee to vote on because it still has such an extreme taint of public hatred on it that makes most Congresscritters squeemish about even looking at it. Palladium is a voluntary enforcement of the CBDTPA. It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft. And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter. I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop. RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater. Java on Linux compared to OSX? Puhlease! Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS. There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another. The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop. Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above. All too often I've found that the only people who really think that Linux or BSD is the universal hammer fit for every nail mankind encounters are people whose boxes are running Mandrake, with graphical login and never touch the command line. Don't get me wrong, Linux is great for a lot of things, but it shouldn't even try against OS X. It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I don't understand either. I'm currently looking for a notebook myself, and although people claim that a similarily configured PC is much cheaper then an Apple system I just am not finding those prices.
In fact, not only can I not find Windows based notebooks for half the price, but I'm not even finding them cheaper. I just priced a Dell for comparison. Even with Dell's rebates and free upgrades right now, their Inspiron 4150 sells for $1,813.00, compared to Apple's iBook for $1,728.00. And the iBook *still* has an extra 128 meg of RAM.
If you compare desktops the numbers are slightly in your favour. A comparetively priced Dimension 8250 is priced at $1,397 after all the rebates and free upgrades available. The G4 goes for $1,599. Although that's just a tad over $200, I would not consider that 'blatently overpriced.' Also, I would guess that the hardware that Apple uses is slightly higher-quality then Dell's hardware. Enough to make the $200 worthwhile anyways.
I'm not sure if I will buy an iBook, but based on price alone, Apple seems to stomp anything that the PC world can provide. I'd like to see Dell or someone massively undercut Apple, because I like good deals too, but until now I haven't seen it.
-BrentAnd because it doesn't have a girl on page three like the Sun! ;^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
They don't realize that while the Mac costs twice as much, it also remains a viable computer twice as long (or longer)
I'd like some justification as to why and how an Apple laptop remains viable "twice as long or longer" than a non-Apple laptop. The technology is going to get faster and larger no matter what platform you use. Furthermore, let's keep this non-OS specific.
"Schools are throwing out their apples..."
"...new computer users seldomly even think of Apples anymore;..."
"...the only new people moving to Apples nowadays are geeks..."... etc., etc., etc...
These statements are unsubstantiated to say the least. Where do you get your numbers? (2%, 10%, etc.)
Apple is in fact becoming more and more of a performance competitor for the PCs, they're getting cheaper (actually, pretty comparable in price to PC-clones considering what you get for your money in laptops: battery-life, design, weight, screens, well-functioning software, connectivity to external devices, etc., etc.); and with OS X and X11/fink/OroborOSX, it also has access to a vast amount of open source software (M$ doesn't).
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/
Newsflash: National Enquirer and Penthouse both have better journalists than the New York Times!
A columnist can say whatever he wants, but the best kind of journalist reports the FACTS. Too bad if it doesn't get read by the masses; more often than not the problem lies with the masses that anyway (proof: Joe Millionaire).
sigh OK, he said, drawing a deep breath, let's try this one more time. The 3% figure is derived from a subset of PC pollsters polling PC sales outlets that also may or may not carry some Apple equipment. Of that subset of reality, 3% is quoted back, and journalists run with it ever since, causing PC fanboys to gleefully shout, "You Apple fanatics only got 3% of the market. Talk to the hand!"
What is reality? Not sure. But let's now add in sales from the Apple retail stores. Oh yeah, let's throw in Apple web sales. Oh, and don't forget that Apple users routinely keep their machines longer than the Windows Users Uh Oh A New Version Came Out and I Have to Upgrade crowd. That's right, if you want to figure market share, you need to figure what is actually out in the marketplace. Not just what was sold from CompUSA that month.
But I realize this requires imagination and independent thought, and thus most computer journalists are exempt.
----
Thanks for the great laugh. Apple has $4.2 billion (4,200,000,000 = 10 digits) in cash and cash instruments. They have about $400M in obligations. They also own a big piece of Akamai, still have ARM Holding stock, and have small holdings in many other firms which may still result in something more than their minimal early investments.
If you take the last few recession years, Apple has, overall not lost money, even though they've had small profits some quarters and small losses others. Even during the time they were investing heavily in research and development.
So how long does it takes a company with four billion dollars and no losses to go out of business? My calculator can't figure it out, but I'm off to use iMovie and Safari and iSync and AppleWorks and figure it out.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
My experience in my first year of Apple ownership is that if the games any good it makes it to the Mac eventually. Maybe it's because I'm older (37) now and don't care about getting the game the day it comes out. Maybe it's because I'm playing fewer games altogether than I did ten years ago. Maybe it's the stack of crap Windows games I have sitting next to the much smaller stack of Windows games I actually still play and enjoy.
Whatever the reason I'm thinking that for every "good" game that hits the PC first and then the Mac sometime later there are a hundred lousy games I don't have to sort through to find the better ones. Lousy games that are packaged well with great art on the box and a bought and paid for kick butt review in some magazine but nevertheless still lousy games.
I don't miss them. The Windows crowd can do my beta testing for me. I'll buy the ones that pass muster and actually work.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I personally like the versatility of OS X...
I like the way it is based on UNIX (BSD) so that the *NIX gurus can use it comfortably, especially now with the addition of xfree86 with a quartz window manager.
The integration of the smb protocol allows easy integration into a windows environment. (or a *NIX environment running samba)
The programs are easy to use and the GUI is nice. The filemanager is certainly better than any GUI filemanager in *NIX that I've seen.
I've had many windows users ask me for help installing drivers that conflict with other drivers. While the mac typically doesn't work well with older hardware it usually works well with new things.
I got a powerbook G4 and I love it, it runs OS X well (not slow) and when I got a digital camera, I just plugged it into one of the USB ports, iPhoto opened, I hit the import button and it downloaded all my pictures.
However when I got a new scanner, the software that came with it was confusing and a little buggy. An update fixed most of the problems but it still isn't as userfriendly as most of the apple programs.
This has been my only bad experience with hardware/software on the mac so far. I primarily use Linux but I couldn't pass up the powerbook when I looked at laptops. While I wish I had a new one with a better resolution screen and the superdrive, I still like it. I also couldn't pass up getting an ipod as well. Now I wish I waited for the 20gb iPod, I didn't know it was coming and instead got the 4gb one. While iTunes doesn't have the nice skinning support that X11amp (or winamp) has, it's nice and the browse feature is really nice when you have a large collection of music and it integrates well with the iPod.
I haven't had any problems with the Palm Desktop software though I can't seem to sync it with the iCal program. (Though Palm Desktop works well and easily syncs my Palm 515)
-Chris
2) Intellectual Property and Brand Name recognition - Apple holds a magnitude of patent and liscensing rights. Firewire, Quicktime, FileMaker, PowerBook are just a few NAMES they make substantial money off of just liscensing the name, not to mention royalties they recieve for intellectual/distribution/use/etc. The brand name would ALWAYS exist if even if (doubtful) they ever decided to eliminate the computer hardware biz.
3) Apple has partners, advocates, millionares, billionares, maybe the largest support base of any company that has ever existed - this base would come to the rescue of Apple if the impossible happened.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
10/6/1997 - Sybase's Chief Exec Says Microsoft Faces "Crossroads Crisis" - TechWeb, by Steve Burke (Negative Comments from Dell CEO Michael Dell) Relevant Quote: Faced with a similar question on what he would do if he were acting chief executive Steve Jobs, Dell chief executive Michael Dell said, "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."
Of course now, Sybase has released several OS X products. Super funny.
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
Slashdot critisizing bad tech journalism? Talk about the speck in your brothers eye! I can't count the number of biased, duped or outright false submissions slipping past the editors during the last months. Makes me wonder about what submissions they reject.
Honestly, I'm mostly here for the comments. For tech journalism, see El Reg
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
My new iBook won't crash ever, it works perfectly with Microsoft Word and my Palm worked first time I plugged it in. Software support for it also seems to be on the increase. Therefore, due to this "great" journalists help, I have come to the conclusion that my iBook has something seriously wrong with it. Oh well, I'm off to call Apple and get them to break everything for me! :-)
... was this statement:
Unlike competitors Hewlett-Packard Co. or even Dell Computer Corp., Apple relies primarily on personal computer sales, often to graphics and business professionals.
OK, I buy this for HP because they make a ton of crap from test equipment to computers. But Dell doesn't rely primarily on personal computer sales? Let's see about that...
According to Dell's 10-k for fiscal year 2002 (page 54 in the PDF version, page 53 here we see the following (total net revenue broken down by product group):
Desktop computer systems: $ 16,516
Notebook computers: $8,829
Enterprise systems: $5,823
Wow, you're right Robert. Dell doesn't rely on PC sales. And 2+2=5.
Apple put out Safari to show the finger to Microsoft in not one but three ways: 1) It's not OS X that causes crappy IE performance. 2) We don't need you to make our browser for us. 3) BTW, it seems a vendor of proprietary software CAN INDEED benefit from using software released under GPL. I suppose the clueful may read in there something to the effect of M$ can't even write tight code on a good OS. Anyway, all three of these fingers are designed in a very calculated way to discredit Microsoft and send their PR guys scurrying back to their secret contingency regroup coordinates. That's the real story here.
cat
$150 million in NON-VOTING stock in 1997.
Check you facts.
Pooty tweet
...almost made me spew Dr. Pepper all over my monitor. I'm a PC user. I would've NEVER been caught dead with a crappintosh as recent as two years ago. I mean, you could have had a computer that was: a) faster, b) cheaper, and c) with a more stable OS that d) gave you more control over your own computer that was e) put together with the parts you, not the manufacturer wanted....or you could have a Mac. Microsoft's OS, in my not-so-humble opinion, peaked around about Win 95 OSR2 or a late stable NT4. Windows 98: still waiting on that beta. Windows ME: abomination. Win2000: 5 years later, and it's almost as good as Win95. WinXP: spyware. And then...Apple releases OS X. A stable, usable GUI on top of...my god...A command line on a friggin' MAC! Couple that with a G4 powerbook (yeah its slower than the fastest wintel notebook. But not nearly enough to offset unix vs WinXP) and you've got the best *ever*. If I wasn't a poor student, instead of upgrading my PC two months ago I would've gotten the G4 powerbook. But someday I'll finally escape grad school and I'll be able to afford one--provided Apple doesn't "go out of business" again.
They better still have the sexy titanium powerbook line...and by then it'll be at least a G6.
Cheers,
--Maynard
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.
And the iBook doesn't play well with a lot of things that are part of the Microsoft world.
I really don't want to turn this into an anti-microsoft rant, but here goes.
The reason that Mac products don't bode well with Microsoft stuff is not because Macs have a problem dealing with Microsoft but because Microsoft has a problem with dealing with everything else.
Let me give you an example:
I recently finished a course in Software Engineering. As many of you who actually work in the field of Software Engineering, it's basically teaching you how to cover your tracks whilst your coding. In essence, building a system for a customer, which requires Status reports, estimations, schedules, meetings, prototyping, etc. etc. etc. etc. Basically, a whole bunch of business stuff.
Now, Our professor wasn't actually a professor but a sessional lecturer who regularily works as a Software Engineer with IBM. Great! No problems there.
The one thing that bugged us was his preoccupation with Microsoft formats. We were told our coding could be done in any format we wanted to... whatever language we wanted... In the interests of our team (consisting of 3 Windows users, 1 Mac user and 1 Linux user) we decided to develop in Java what with it being cross-platform and everything.
The catch was all our documents had to be handed in in Word format.
Now, in most cases, this shouldn't be a problem. The three windows users each had respective versions of Office, the Mac user had Office for Macs, and the Linux user could make do with OpenOffice and just send documents to the others to verify that it looked good on their comps.
Great, wonderful... no problem whatsoever.
So we get going into the term, and eventually the assignments (paper-deliverables in the Word format) get more and more complicated and demand more and more of Word's "features" to get the right look.
About halfway through the semester, the lecturer puts up an example for one of the assignments and says "Go at 'er"
So we download.
4 different versions of Office gave 4 completely different looks of the same document. The Mac version was different than Office2k, which was different from Office 7 (I think) which was different from OfficeXP... And apparently this was written in some version of office. The most annoying thing about it was the fact that nobody got a perfect representation of what the lecturer had originally intended. In fact, the closest to what was intended (and still not perfectly accurate) was the OpenOffice version.
What did we learn from this? Microsoft file formats bite because they don't like communicating with Microsoft products even well. We tried to configure some of our files to look nice despite the Office version, but the only program that would allow anything like that was in fact OpenOffice...
Now I'm not here to sing the praises of OpenOffice at all... The point I'm trying to make is that saying that a product is bad because it can't interface well with Microsoft products is like saying someone is a bad parent because their kid has down's syndrome.
Anyways. I'm sure I'll get a bunch of "Typical slashdotter Anti-Microsoft propoganda" flames, but this isn't based out of my pre-biases with Microsoft (of which I have many). This is very simply an experience I've had that was made ten times more difficult than it had to be thanks to Microsoft.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Honestly, I don't care for that naming technique either, but it's a lot less widespread and a the names end up being a lot more descriptive for Apple's iApps than k* for KDE programs or g* for all kinds of GNOME programs.
Learn to Play Go
The average joe will never understand why he isn't getting a good deal when he spends less than $1000-$1500 on a computer.
.NET development for much longer than everyone else has been. MS has the jump here, and it will be tough to catch up in both performance and compatibility.
Err...yes, for some things a $1200 computer is insufficient. For other things, it's a very good deal. As a matter of fact, given the continuous and rapid increase in bang/buck, there's a reasonable argument that deviating too strongly from the increasing value curve (i.e. spending a relatively large amount of money on a computer when the value rapidly depreciates) is a bad idea.
Furthermore, simply because Apple does not cater to low-cost computer buyers (nothing wrong with that -- you don't hear me going after Porche or Rolex) does *not* imply that one cannot purchase a high-end x86 machine. There are very, very many systems builders that will be happy as a claim to throw as much money as you want to into a computer. Want three times as much power as you need, with redundant power supplies? Quad processors? A UPS? Hardware SCSI RAID, Firewire, 8 USB 2.0 ports, a GeForce 4, 2 gigs of RAM? Perhaps large plasma gas or projection display? Enormous speakers? Joysticks that are clones of their fighter-jet originals? Whatever demands you have can pretty much always be met.
Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.
You know, "inexpensive" does not necessarily imply "shoddy".
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
[shrug] So your parents made a choice that you feel was suboptimal for your situation. That may certainly be true, but it has little bearing on whether the product you want is ideal for everyone else.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform.
You *do* mean Windows, not "the PC", where I'm assuming that "PC" refers to "x86-based machine", right?
OpenOffice will help level the playing field. And Microsoft will have to compete more on price, features, and service more than it did, and give up some reliance on "compatibility".
I don't think that you can simply claim that OS X is the end-all and be all of desktop environments, disregarding Linux, BSD, and yes, even Windows. Apple's always had some good ideas and some completely stupid ideas (stupidity ratio increasing in recent years with many of their UIs (think Quicktime) and Jobs' insistence that people were *still* sufficiently unfamiliar with two-button mice to be allowed to purchase machines equipped with them).
I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation.
I hope so. OTOH, let's break this down:
OpenOffice is a major jump, and the beginning of a war on features more than comptibility. However, the onus will be on the OpenOffice folks to prevent Microsoft from successfully creating format compatibility issues, which they are *sure* to start doing.
Mono is a nice idea, but a long, long way away from where Microsoft is. Microsoft purchased some very good languages and compilers people, started design well before everyone else, and has been putting resources into
Java is interesting (and certainly useful against Microsoft in some areas), but has long since turned out to not be what it once was billed as -- a write once run anywhere solution for all applications, including desktop computing. There is a very obvious lack of horizontal-market Java applications, stemming from issues with the Java standard itself, including a lack of templated container classes, and poor performance and memory footprint. Remember that Corel spent a *huge* amount of money porting their suite to Java, and at the end (and I'm *sure* that after that kind of resource expenditure, this was not done without much agonizing consideration) the entire thing was scrapped.
As for Mozilla -- Mozilla is very nice. It was pushed into a production a bit early, but still a major strike against Microsoft. However, it is *not* the impossible-to-quash piece of software that some other projects are turning out to be. AOL/TW is undergoing a lot of upheaval, and funding and support for Mozilla may not be around forever. Apple has already distanced themselves from the Mozilla project and gone the way of KHTML (the cynic in me wants to think that this necessity was a result of Apple wasting so much memory and so many cycles on the basic UI that they needed to cut corners in the area of their browser).
What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs.
Ridiculous. A lack of Palladium support makes zero difference to the end user in an environment where it exists at all. It can be disabled by the end user. You feel that content will *require* Palladium to be used, and that content distribution companies will be comfortable leaving Palladium-disabled users out of things, perhaps? The same goes for the Mac. If such costs are deemed acceptable by content distribution companies (and Palladium *is* such a crucial issue), then the DRM-less Mac runs precisely the same risk -- of being ignored by said content distribution companies.
Frankly, I don't think Palladium will ever take off -- that's essentially a placebo to allow Microsoft better political positioning in the lucrative content distribution and management field with a horde of increasingly desperate content distributors. It only takes a single break in a Palladium-enabled system for *all* content distributed up until them to be redistributed in a DRMless manner. x86 architecture hardware has never been designed around being particularly secure. We will, of course, see, but my bets are that Palladium is going to be primarily useful from a political standpoint, not a technological one.
Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple?
Well, resource requirements generally increase so much over new releases of Microsoft software that one is required to purchase new hardware anyway. Such is life. A major difference is that Apple charges much more for their hardware than x86 manufacturers.
Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
Do tell? Perhaps you'd like to explain the presence of the "Copy Protection" flag that Apple introduced *long* before MS was trying to do DRM. It was unpopular, and fell into disuse -- much as I feel Palladium will (and this is in a world where the company trying to impose DRM controls both the hardware and software platforms).
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!"
Did you *really* explain this to them -- that by disabling Palladium, you have (at least from a DRM standpoint) nothing more and nothing less than a Mac? No?
Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have...I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti
Uh, huh. I don't see even the evil-mogul-looking Valenti trying to prevent *anyone* from listening to MP3s that they have. As a matter of fact, Phillips (frequently cited as a "good guy" in the DRM wars) did actually pursue this patch.
no less than 192kbps VBR.
Bit of a nitpick, but this makes no sense.
model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
I'm sorry? The "classical liberal" system that you're talking about certainly does *not* give you ownership of said IP. Try running off 10,000 copies and selling them on the street tomorrow and see how far you get before getting handcuffed. That's nothing new at all.
It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft.
Yes, yes. Microsoft is full of hype and deliberately misleading when it comes to DRM. This is nothing at all new. Microsoft does this with *all* of their new products, and has for years. Most software companies do--heck, most *companies* do, though not as much.
And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
I think you've got a few misconceptions. You can certainly use a non-Palladium-aware device in a system and use Palladium -- you just won't be able to use Palladium features with it. [shrug] Same was true for old PCI video cards (couldn't do AGP texturing), old sound cards (couldn't do digital output), old mice (no scrollwheel -- couldn't use scrollwheel features), yadda, yadda, yadda. This applies to every PC component I can think of.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter.
Well...yeah. No kidding. They actually have a modern OS, after six years of false starts. They couldn't *possibly* be worse off than they were.
I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop
I'm not a tremendous fan of KDE. I do like a few things about OS X, but I really don't see the overwhelming advantages you're claiming. OS X's primary interesting feature is a significant amount of eye candy. While once I was deeply impressed with the HCI strictures Apple laid on their platform, more recent ones (one-button-mice only, Quicktime's interface, etc) are less impressive.
RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater.
Mmm...Apple's bundle packaging system is kind of interesting, though retrofitting it onto UNIX would be ugly. I personally wouldn't give up RPM, which offers a wider array of analysis and ease of automating tasks, but I can see how many less technically adept users would prefer the simpler UI to their package system Apple exposes. You are certainly right that I'm not a tremendous fan of Red Carpet, but that's a Ximian thing, not a Red Hat thing -- I believe you're thinking of up2date, which sucks very, very much. However, apt for rpm is available (try Freshrpms), and the even better yum is also available. And yum really *is* stupendously good.
Java on Linux compared to OSX?
I tend to feel that Apple's rather behind Linux in this field, actually. The best performing of all JRE/JDK implementations that I know of (*including* native code compilers, surprisingly) is IBM's JRE/JDK. This is not available for OS X, though it is freely downloadable for Linux. Cocoa is nice, though, I will give you that.
Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS.
[shrug] I know a bunch of UNIX geeks, and none of them are particularly interested in switching to OS X. As a matter of fact, I know very few technically oriented people on OS X (though I certainly expect plenty exist, they aren't present where I live).
There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another.
Oh, for Chrissake. A *Windows* user can do that. That's not much of a metric.
The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Uh, huh. Aside from the "what about the actually *mainstream* WMs you left out like metacity and kwin (forget the current KDE WM)" argument, what then is your criteria for a "real desktop platform"? A "genie minimize"?
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop.
OpenBeOS is an interesting project. I kind of wish I had been able to play with BeOS at some point. It's also much, much farther away from being competitive than Linux native desktop environments.
Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop
Okay, now that is just ridiculous. From an application standpoint, and ignoring the fact that OS X generally runs on slower software, no, there is no hard restrictions. However, OS X has the heaviest GUI overhead of the three, in cycles and memory. If you're trying to sell OS X, resource usage is not a stance I'd try taking.
and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above.
Uh, huh. Ignoring the question of exactly *what* the relationship is between "architectural superiority" and "end user appeal", why do you like BeOS so much?
It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Well, it stands to be interesting, atthethethe least.
May we never see th
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."
As a fairly non-political news junkie in Canada, I can say that the National Post has been factually erroneous (eg. here) more often than any other paper I've ever read here, has never declared a profit since it's conception, is declining in circulation (used to be #3 nationally), and this is all probably resulting from the fact that their news & editorial pieces are generally out of touch with the opinions of most Canadians. Near-xenophobic opinions on refugees & immigrants, (see here and here, for example), as well as intolerant & exclusionary views on the issue of Quebec are all examples of this.
I wouldn't be too worried about yet another jump-to-conclusions inflammatory article from someone at the National Post.
One of the most successful software development firms in history, Borland, was supposed to die multiple times over the past decade. And it's still here, producing incredible development tools.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
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.
This article is the journalistic equivalent of flamebait. Pay no heed.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
If there's one group of people that would be especially sad to see Apple's demise, it's the music industry. Due to stability and management of multimedia, the vast majority of composers, producers, engineers, film scorers, and even wannabe dj's tend to choose Apple OS over anything else. Two of the most popular music sequencing programs - Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer and eMagic's Logic - are Mac-only. If you ever catch a live electronic band in action with laptops, chances are those laptops have a big blue piece of fruit on the front of them.
The big news about the music world this year is OS X, which included MIDI drivers built into the computer's capacity so that the consumer doesn't need to play with the bulky OMS (Open MIDI System) freeware commonly used by most programs. New MIDI-run synthesizers can be created with OS X in mind to optimize compatibility with sequencing programs. On the one hand, every company who wants to produce music software for the Mac has had to rewrite their best software to take advantage of this fact, but now that most of this software is coming out and running smoothly, most users are extremely pleased with the update. And Apple has solidified their support for the musician by purchasing the aforementioned eMagic, a company that makes several unique and useful products for the musician. Logic was one of the first major music programs to have an OS X upgrade produced.
The professional music world is a fairly small market in comparison to the standard consumer world that the PC dominates, but its a professional world that relies on Apple almost exclusively. There's gonna be a major outcry if Apple really starts going under.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
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.
And as important for Apple, the niche market Apple has has been slowly eroding. New customers didn't appear at a high enough rate to compensate for those that disappeared. So growing into new markets is not al luxury for them - it's a necessity, both to get customers in new markets, but also because the perception of growth is necessary to keep the customers in their current niche.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
At the end of last quarter, Apple only had $2,612,000,000 in cash. That's nowhere near $9 billion. Did you really just make up "$9 billion" off the top of your head?
My favorite line from the article:
...appears to have no influence on the market...
After the success of the initial iMac, EVERY DAMN THING came in 5 plastic fruity colors that, oddly, matched the origional iMac colors. You could not escape Apple's market influence. Even now their design's are copied. XP looks like OS X if they just ass slacked on it (And has that edgy X in the name), Vaio's have tended to look like PowerBooks, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Tux gets a Aqua makeover... No, wait, to late.
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
I think there are a few possibilities:
1) Newer Apple stuff does run on older hardware
I think that basically anything with an older G4 might run OS X, though sometimes in an unsupported way and might be slow. But a lot of older slower users (like 333mhz users) seem fine with running OS X.
2) Hardware quality is high so components last longer
So the machine is probably going to be in a better condition to sell.
3) Early adopter (some would say driver) of new standards. Apple is a lot of times the first company to push new standards like USB and firewire in a big way. So even a mac from a few years ago will probably have decent options for interfacing with newer peripherals. In my opinion, that might even be the primary reason why older machines sell so well.
4) OS does not degrade much over time.
This might not be true of Windows 200 or XP so much, but older versions of Windows simply get more broken over time, as evidenced by my old Win98 box at home... I also have linux in it and that at least as remained usable over the years while the Win98 side is barely functioning. Sure you can reinstall and reimage, but as a seller why would you bother (if you can find the software) and as a buyer you are probably looking for something that works for you as-is.
People ignore the resale factor, but I find it nice to know that if I do decide to buy a newer Powerbook someday, I'd be able to sell my current one and not loose too much money... PC's depreciate at a worse rate than cars.
You could also probably learn something by examining the sales for other sorts of computers - a few years ago a friend of mine was lamenting she couldn't even give away an older 486 PC she had, while I was able to sell my old Atari Falcon for a few hundred bucks to a musician. And from the look of things it seems to be selling for about the same price still!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
$150 million in NON-VOTING stock in 1997.
Stock which was sold by Microsoft at a large profit. AFAIK, Microsoft no longer holds any Apple stock. At the time Microsoft was the second largest holder of Apple stock. I wish I could remeber where I saw those little facts.
I've been using Linux since '94 too, but always in conjunction with another desktop OS, since at work I've always needed to run certain proprietary software apps that don't run under Linux. My transition has been Linux plus OS/2 then Windows NT then Win 98 (thanks to a job change) and now OS X (thanks to a job change that let me get a whole new system). I still use a Debian Linux box as a server, and for running various apps that haven't been packaged for Fink & that I don't have time to adapt and compile.
The combination of OS X + Linux is a pretty unbeatable work environment. I'd guess there are a lot of Linux "adders," maybe more than "switchers."
You're misreading their financials. If you read their SEC filings which rely on GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) it's $4.2B and $400M.
If you read the link you pointed us to, shows $2.6B in cash/cash equivalents and $1.9B in short-term investments. I apologize for conflating short-term investments and cash/cash equivalents. Short-term investments are categorized that way as there is little risk or cost in liquidating those positions.
If you want to avoid GAAP and look at overall short-term money and expenses it's about $6B plus and $2B minus.
How are you getting your numbers from that link? By ignoring everything you don't like?
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Well, where do you begin to argue with him?
He appears to be totally unaware that Apple is actually one of very computer makers that still turn a profit despite the recession, and draws his conclussion solely based on bad experiences with a Mac "built before the Internet" and the buggy Palm software.
I have been using Mac OS X on 2 iBooks for over 2 years now and can't remember when was the last crash. It's quiet, light, stable, cheaper than a similar Wintel portable, definitely the best system i have ever used.
They did give back...all the code changes they've made they've submitted back to the KHTML community.
And you can already play quicktime movies on Linux, just not the ones that use certain third-party codecs.
Really, in the big picture, it'd be nice to see more companies adopting open source to the level that Apple has...
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Uhm, no shit. Hence "News for Nerds," not "News for Economists." Think before you post.
If KDE is so damn usable, how come people have to try hard to get anything done? Did you even read your own post?
Don't get me wrong, I like KDE. Use it all the time in fact, but a gleaming example of usability it isn't.
-73 It's about prime
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.
One thing I never see tossed around, when discussing just how pitiful Apple's processor speeds are, is that the license for OSX allows for up to *5* machines. This means that a small office, currently running OS 9, can upgrade *1* machine for $1000 to a new G4 running OS X, and the rest (well, 5) of the machines in the office (assuming they're G3s with sufficient memory, or some old G4) are free to join in. This means your hardware investment of 3 years is still valuable. I don't think (but please correct me if I'm wrong) that Microsoft offers the same kind of licensing terms for Windows XP. One copy per CPU, and legal threats if you violate the license agreement. Apple's liberal licensing terms allow for a certain amount of guerrilla installs, which can only increase their mind share, if not their actual measured market share.
Forgive me if I am incorrect, however I believe your real gripe is about the missing Sorenson codec for Linux. If this is the case, I suggest you take up your gripes with Sorenson. They're the guys with the patent.
cat
beleaguer
1. To harass; beset: We are beleaguered by problems.
2. To surround with troops; besiege. See Synonyms at besiege.
his old mac is being attacked??
Fun with tweaking.
--j
Ok, so he's using an outdated PowerMac for who knows how long. Then he gets a spanking new ibook and has problems. Welcome to the world of computers. Many still use and rely on Mac's wares with similar issues and manage to solve them - did he see if there were any OS updates or patches before we decided to go on this journalistic tirade?
.com scrap heap? If a buggy OS were a reason for product extinction then Microsoft should have completely fossilized by now.
Apple is still very much on the NASDAQ radar considering what other high profile computer and technology companies are doing- Apple isn't doing that bad.
So, this guy is basically whining that he bought this ibook, didn't check to see if it was compatible with his pim, or whether any of the software he want would run on it? Sounds more like his firm bought it for him and he didn't want it so he'll write a column to bash it.
And his assertion that due to his experinces, not full compatiblity with previously owned products and buggy OS, is reason that Apple is destined for the
Lovely, now journalist are using their forums to troll - pffft!
What a dweb!
He inadvertantly brings up one decent point although he did this indirectly: The "average" person just cannot keep up with computer technology. I mean, we laugh at the fact that this guy can't even operate a Mac but there are a lot more of him than there are of us.
It is still not fair to pick on Apple for his ineptitude. I'd hate to see him try to run MS or Linux. I would sure hate to be his neighbor or pal he uses to fix his problems. He seems like a needy kind of PC guy
Mac is definately the closest thing that a consumer can get to easy to use. But when I talk to my elderly aunt she just wants something where she points at something and it works. She does not need the configuration options we techies want. When are the PC companies going to realise that there is a huge market out there of guys like this weiner who want a PC black box. Just a simpe to use, flip it on and go sort of machine. I would not even say this type of thing would be a computer. Rather more of a PDA style box that allows internet, word processing and maybe a few other things like picture and video viewers and allow him to Sync his Palm.
Maybe it sounds stupid to us but my aunt would buy it in a second.
I know there were things like the Audry but I guess I mean something with a little more beef than that. I am sure she wold like to write a few letters once in a while and put some pictures in it but not much more than that.
Maybe some thing like an embedded Linux set top box. But the interface is the main thing. I mean she can't even program her VCR and her DVD player has dust on it because she can't use it so this thing would need to just be turned on, have like 4 or 5 huge icons that told her what she could do, she pushes them and then it just does its thing.
"Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Cry, and they still think its funny." - Mr. Boffo
If you mail columnist Richard Thompson ( rthompson@nationalpost.com ) regarding his article predicting Apple's "fade to nothingness", don't forget to at least CC: the Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran ( tcorcoran@nationalpost.com ) too.
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
No Wintel box makers have the Apple style drive for perfection and attetion to details - they may use similar components but Apple products always looks and feels better.
...
People are willing to pay extra for a Mac because it just works and makes you more productive. And now Macs are actually cheaper than many top brand Wintel machines.
For me, there is an ethical dimension: Apple has been contributed more to the world than companies that are 10 or 20 times bigger. In fact, Apple is probably the only computer maker left in the industry except perhaps IBM that is still actively innovating, often for the benifit of parasites like Dell. Just look around to see how many things are either invented or first adopted by Apple years before the Wintel crowd: GUI, mouse, color display, laser printer, plug-n-play, speech and hand writting recognition, PDA, digital camera, QuickTime, USB, Firewire, 802.11b, 802.11g, gigabit Ethernet, Rendezvous,
Compared to Microsoft, Apple has a 20 times smaller market share, probably makes 100 times less profit, and yet its software portofolio puts Microsoft to shame: Mac OS X - the best GUI with rock solid Unix, Darwin - the first open source OS by a main stream computer maker, QuickTime Player - grandad of multimedia players, Darwin Streaming Server - the only multiplatform open source media server, WebObjects - the first application server, FileMaker Pro - powerful and easy to use database software, AppleWorks - small and powerful office package, FinalCut Pro - the choice of Holywood movie editors, iLife - the best free software for managing music and photos and movies and DVDs, DVD Studio - professional DVD authoring tools, Shake - leading edge compositing software, Safari - faster and smaller than MS IE, Project Builder and Interface Builder - free and powerful IDE and GUI tool for developing Java or C/C++ or Objective C/C++ or AppleScript applications, and the list goes on.
Dell is a shameless parasite, and by its own admission relies on other companies R&D budgets and then undercut their prices. I will not spend my money to help a clueless box maker like Dell gaining more market and to produce another ruthless monster like MS that would eventually destroy the ecosystem in the computing industry.
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.