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Apple Prepares For the Coming iPod Slump
Hugh Pickens writes "Companies like AOL have stagnated along with the products that made them successful as a mature market and downward pressure on prices led to a nasty death spiral, but Saul Hansell writes in the NY Times that Apple has used its amazing six-year run with the iPod to nurture other business lines. Even though the number of iPods sold this quarter grew only 1 percent from the same quarter a year ago, Apple should be able to sustain itself with three business lines that will help it withstand a collapse in the MP3-player market: a continuing revenue stream from the iPods that have already been sold because of the iTunes Store, product upgrades to the iPhone and iPod Touch that are so different that they may well appeal to a significant number of iPod users, and perhaps most significantly, sales of the Macintosh which showed an increase of 51 percent by units and 54 percent by dollars."
As economic prosperity spreads to certain parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, I'd think there should be a steady stream of new buyers. Of course, in non-Japan and Korea Asia people seem happy with the fake iPods (complete with "iPod" written large on the front to soothe your designer-look lust) and I can imagine competing there is difficult.
Or is this the one which was supposed to hit two years ago? Or the one from last year? You see, I get them confused, as it seems every year someone is predicting that Apple's iPod growth will suddenly crater as Teh Next Big Thing comes along and steals Apple's thunder.
I don't know if iPod growth will crater, or slowly slow down or whatever. But I am pretty well convinced that, whatever happens, no "expert" will predict it.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Apple is driving the market and has been doing so since introducing the iMac. Apple invests in technology years in advance while the Dells and HPs are running their businesses on a quarterly basis.
The punditry will be surprised when they finally notice Apple's growth in the enterprise, at 2-3 times the industry rate. Anyone who's paying attention will realize that the features and capabilities that will make Apple unstoppable in the enterprise in a few years are being designed into Apple products today.
Similar things can be said for Apple TV's prospects for becoming a more ubiquitous consumer appliance - but don't be surprised if even Apple TV shows up in the enterprise, as a device to stream corporate training podcasts hosted on a MacOS X Server.
Apple introduces useful new capabilities that provide compelling reasons to buy new Apple products. What compelling reason is there to upgrade Windows PCs, other than for the sake of upgrading?
Predicting it is not the point. Cray, Silicon Graphics, DEC... I'm sure they all saw the writing on the wall. We can predict social security going insolvent, we can predict China surpassing the US, we can predict global warming. The question, in every case, is "now what"?
Your argument is like renting a 5' by 10' apartment on the reasoning that you can just store everything you're not using in a storage unit, then haul it in when you need it. When you finish watching TV, just carry the whole TV and stand out and bring in your bookshelf so you can do some reading.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
I'm not sure how this got modded interesting. They already make a 12 or 13 inch MacBook Pro -- it's called the MacBook. It's one distinguishing feature is the small screen and lower spec graphics. I guess you can complain about lower spec graphics, but when was the last time you saw a high spec graphics card in that space? The mac books already get really hot, I don't want to know what would happen with a Geforks 8600 in there.
The economy isn't bombing. It is just firing on 14 trillion cylinders instead of 15 trillion cylinders.
Of course, that's still a lot of pain.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I almost went mac this year in a serious way. The prices were about right and I was tired of the hassles of the OSS world. Why didn't I go mac?
I went to a very nice mac store, 3 times. The first time I asked one of the sales people a question I knew the answer to. I could see in her face she didn't know the answer. Instead of telling me that she gave me wrong information that could have cost me money. The 3rd time I went back I spent a lot of time playing on one of their systems to get a feel for it. I liked it very much. I didn't like the idea of having to relearn everything to migrate and I thought Ubuntu is very nice. Then a young clerk with a snotty attitude asked me to get off the chair I was using to check out the computer. I guess I wasn't as important as the class they were holding in the store. I figure if I was going to deal with snotty 20 somethings I should do it with the linux community and save myself a grand.
Then I wanted an MP3 player.
I was seriously considering an iPod.
Then I found out I could not use iTunes on Ubuntu without an emulator. Then I read a few "fuck you" articles from the mac high priesthood addressed to linux people who used iPods. then I read articles about how the iPod would get changes making more work necessary to get it going with linux.
I went on the ubuntuforums got some recommendations for linux friendly mp3 players. Then I bought a used one for $50 that does everything the iPod would have done for me and more.
Right on. I didn't want to pay for a new 8GB iPod, so I bought an 8GB "refurbished" which looks brand new but cost about the same as a 4GB new one. It would sure suck for an MP3 player to be confined to one app, but fortunately the iPod is not that player because I found at least 2 pretty decent (non-iTunes) iPod apps (among several mediocre ones), and chose the better one.
I notice you don't say what kind of player you got, but simply that "the interface is fine". I haven't seen any MP3 player with a half-decent interface that isn't an iPod, so if there was another one, I'd love to hear about it, but I doubt it exists. Good work, though: you're playing off the classic "Apple is expensive!" meme, while not giving slashdot readers an alternative to pick apart. That's the sort of vague memethink that gets you to +5!
Apple has a good schtick going on. I don't know why anybody would buy a new Mac or iPod when you can save a ton of money buying one a couple months old (but which looks brand new). But apparently most people want that new-Mac-smell because their refurb and clearance pages are almost always full.
You know, sometimes the "unit growth" metric ticks me off. Markets saturate, get over it.
Apple's laughing all the way to the bank because they still sold over 10 million players AND managed to make even more money on those sales than they have previously. Every other tech company in existence would see their revenue shrink (but not their profits, if they're good) due to price cuts and whatnot.
Last I checked, Apple's still selling more iPods in a quarter than MS has sold Zunes, ever, and by a healthy margin. I'd hardly call it a "slump".
Trigun, duh.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
And other than to say that you carry around all your music on your iPod is there an actual practical point of this? Do you routinely spend 2+ months away from your computer listening to music 24/7?
No, but I routinely listen to music when I am not at home and often feel like changing what I'm listening to. So why wouldn't I want to have my entire music collection readily available so that I can have music that suits my mood?
I don't know about you, but I am unable to predict with 100% accuracy what I will feel like listening to throughout my day when I leave home in the morning.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I use a new MacBook Pro because I wanted the snazziest laptop I could get (bought in early 2007)
My G5 iMac is still running fine and is my media server (bought in late 2004)
My G4 PowerBook is still running fine and is my print server. (bought in early 2002)
My G3 Blueberry iMac is still working but its getting replaced because my friend has no more use for it because it sucks too much power. (bought in 1996)
Though I will admit that my old Mac (a 7200 I seem to remember dimly) died in 2002.
On the other hand both my wife's Windows eMacine and my own Linux eMachines went down and needed replacement of some parts after a year or so.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Actually, not as much as one might think, according to this chart showing the OS userbase trend from May 2007 to March 2008.
According to the chart, Vista's share increased from 3.75% a year ago to 14% today. The chart also shows that XP's share decreased from 82% to 73.6%. Vista has been cannibalizing XP's share, but Vista+XP today has a 1.6 percentage points greater share today than a year ago (86% in March 2007 to 87.6% in March 2008).
The chart shows that Mac share went from 6.5% a year ago to 7.5% today, which is a significant increase. But note that the chart separates PPC Macs ("Mac OS") from Intel Macs ("MacIntel"), and here you can see that MacIntel's share has increased from 2.5% to 4.5% while PPC Mac OS decreased from 4% down to 3%. That is, most Mac sales are due to people upgrading from Mac PPC to Mac Intel in the same way that most Vista sales are at the expense of XP's share.
So XP+Vista increased by 1.6 percentage points from a year ago, while PPC Mac + Intel Mac increased by 2% from a year ago. Not much difference, and with Vista well ahead of the combined Mac total (14% vs 7%) it's difficult to argue that Vista caused mass defections to the Mac.
However it CAN be argued when you look at the Windows 2000 stats. Windows 2000 went from 4.3% to 2.3% during that same time period. It appears that of that loss of 2 percentage points, 1.7 went to Vista and the other 0.3 went to MacIntel. I think that Mac also gained from the decrease in "Other", which decreased from 2.5% to 1.9%.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000