A Look Back at Apple's 2003

Samvit writes "The end of the year is upon us, so it's naturally time for those retrospectives to start coming in. Ars Technica has a fantastic look back at Apple in 2003. 2003 was one of the biggest years for Apple, arguably the biggest in a very long time. Still, Ars is typically fair, so the author lays down not only the good in 2003, but also the bad and the ugly. There's a bit of prognostication going on too--a little something for everyone."

Comments

What about their bottom-line strategy?

[GeckoFood]

As I read through the article, I saw lots of ooh's and aah's over the cool toys and services they are offering, as well as the integration to certain systems. The iTunes service was acknowledged as their biggest gainer.

Ok, so they have all of this cool technology and neat services. So, now what? How are they working to increase market share and compete with the Wintel market? It's one thing to shore up the market you have, but when that market is relatively small, that leaves one to wonder how to expand. What do they intend to do about a limited market share? The article does not say that. iTunes might be making money for them now, but how will they keep it on top with new competitors emerging?

Re:What about their bottom-line strategy?

[GoofyBoy]

There are two ways to go about doing business.

You can be the big, for-the-masses, beat-them-with-price company. Examples of these are Wal-Mart and McDonalds.

You can be the small, speciality, beat-them-with-loyalty/quality company. Examples of these are Gucci and Apple.

As long as they steadly increase profit each year, why should Apple change their ways?

Re:What about their bottom-line strategy?

[Frymaster]

How are they working to increase market share

and market share is important because why?

the goal of apple is to be a successful, profitable company - not to "beat" windows. bmw and mercedes-benz are successful car companies. and you don't hear the shareholders whining that they're not beating ford on the market shart front...

Re:What about their bottom-line strategy?

[sbma44]

marketshare *is* essential. It puts you in control of your own destiny. You don't have to have >50%, just a competitive share.

Interoperability is essential for computing. It's like language: english may not be the most efficient thing we could use on slashdot, but interoperability is the deciding factor.

Given that, if you only have 5 or 10% of the market, you will always be at the big guy's anticompetitive whim as they decide on some new proprietary standard that locks you out. Then you suffer losses for 12 months until the courts tell them to stop.

Apple doesn't have to be bigger than MS, just big enough that MS has to ensure they're products work with apple, the way apple has to be sure their products work with MS.

G5!

[BWJones]

I must say the biggest deal for Apple this year has been the advent of the G5 with significant help from IBM. Throughout the G4's life, I had been a supporter of Apple and in particular OS X because of the efficiencies that the OS provides. However, in raw number crunching power, the G4 simply did not scale in performance leaving me to do much of my hard core scientific computing on Intel or AMD hardware. However, now we have G5's, there is simply no comparison. I can now have the most efficient OS and the fastest CPU available in one platform. Apple needed the G5 and that I would say is the single biggest product Apple has come out with this year.

iPhoto performance?

[Otter]

The ugly: iPhoto performance with large photo libraries

That's their gripe on the software front? I'd say _THE_ single biggest screwup for 2003 was destructive software upgrades. The number one selling point for Apple is that things just work and you don't need to worry about them. Whatever they've been doing for QA on their upgrades, it needs to be massively revamped.

Re:apple should get out of the PC business

[presearch]

Although this has been beaten to death, let me take a quick whack once again.

x86 OS X makes little sense. PC people just want cheap compatibility with other
cheap Windows compatible people and workplaces.

Apple would sell less boxes if all they could compete on was design.
They would eat up any profit by attempting compatibility with the umpteen
billion PCI cards out there. Any profit that would be left would be eaten up by
dummies asking why the Windows game they bought doesn't work.

Slashdot would be full of comments on how you should just run Windows
instead of the emulation layer.

Current users of Mac stuff would have no end of fat binary grief.
All Mac developers would have to ship fat binaries and double
the support load in addition to the size of the distribution.

Things are fine they way they are for now. Let x86 die the quiet death it deserves.
And Windows with it.

Re:Right Track

[iSwitched]

Bad for Linux?

First, do you have proof that OS X has significantly less 'substance' than Linux? Or is this just an opinion. Let's assume for a moment that I'm not just feeding a troll here.

Linux is a tool, OS X is a tool, some people prefer one, some another. If the number of people preferring OS X begins to outstrip those preferring Linux, then the Linux community has two choices:

It could pull a microsoft, wring its hands, and decry Apple as anti-choice and un-american, or...

It could stop bashing for just one second, examine what is being done that is good and innovative, evaluate why people are making the choices they are, and then compete, hopefully building a better Linux along the way.

How on earth could this be bad for Linux?