IBM Unseats Microsoft As Second Most Valued Tech Company

First time accepted submitter FlatEric521 writes "The BBC is reporting that for the first time since 1996 IBM's market value has exceeded Microsoft's. The values cap a sustained period in which IBM's share price has moved steadily upward as Microsoft's has generally been in decline. Of course, Apple is still the #1 company by far."

Comments

What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that count on MS's value?

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is worth more to the U.S. government then INTEL, Apple, and Microsoft combined.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still a stinking nigger.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

They own none of Apple.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[jo_ham]

It doesn't count because they don't own any of Apple at all.

They did purchase $150 million of non-voting stock as part of a court settlement many, many years ago, but they sold it a long time ago.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Your.Master]

Even if they did, it would count and in no way contradict this.

And so Anonymous Coward learns of the concept of the "convergent series".

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that like saying your a wet water?

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[symbolset]

They did once. If they'd held it that bit would double their value now. But they lacked vision, then as now.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lacked vision? Who would have thought that people would have been so stupid to buy en-masse the mp3 player with the worse usability among all those on the market? (unless you had a missing arm, that's it) Who would have thought that later people would buy en-masse a phone that was good at everything else but making phone calls? at a premium price and locked down? Come on...

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[shutdown -p now]

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice...

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[symbolset]

Oh, yeah. They should have bought into Plays For Now, or Zune and they didn't. What fools they are! They should have grasped that brass ring when it was before them, and now they could be enjoying the rapture of Windows Phone's one percent market share. after having sold their soul to the devil to get there like Nokia is doing.

Um, no. Not just no, but Fuck no. Are you fucking kidding? I saw this movie and it doesn't end well. It's a sole survivor flick where even the survivor is tortured.

But it's different now because Microsoft has grown warm and fuzzy.

Fuck you. We've had that story a thousand times, and it's a faustian bargain every time. The devil treats only when it's his advantage to do so. Make a deal with him, and he gets your soul. That's how it works.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[symbolset]

If you want to argue with me on this point then do the math. Look at what the investment was paid in then, and what it would be worth now if Microsoft had held it to the present day. Only then, if your numbers disagree with what I said, call me a liar. Or trust me, you can't do it. I did the math and if your figures disagree, you've read them wrong somehow. That one investment, if held, would now be most of Microsoft's market cap. Microsoft has fared well on their core markets for a long time - but we knew how to do WYSIWYG document editing before they even bought the word processing package we know as Word. And long before then, word processing was a solved problem, much as spreadsheets and presentations were.

What has Microsoft got to give but a halt to progress to preserve their control? Diddly. Is that enough? Maybe, if we're not watching.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, the iphone wasn't even good at 'everything else' until years later. People love calling it a smartphone, but its still one of the 'dumbest' phones out there - even today.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[symbolset]

We're a decade in. I'd go to symbolset's house and find out what that fucker wants 'cuz he's spoiling a lot of shit. I'd find a way to make him play along.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[symbolset]

He's me, and I'd still do it. Embrace your best critics. Win.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[jedrek]

Yes, everybody is stupid but you. Give me a fucking break, AC, the reason the ipod pretty much created the modern digital music player market because of it's usability, not in spite of it.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[realityimpaired]

Actually, it's marketing, not usability. The Sandisk Sansa from the same era was much more usable than the iPod, and had features that the Apple didn't, like FM radio and MicroSD expansion ports, in addition to being mountable as USB mass storage. While it's personal opinion, I also found that the menu options on the Sandisk were more easily navigated and made more sense to me... in the end, it wasn't usability/features that caused the iPod to catch on, it was marketing. There were *much* better options available on the market, at a fraction of the cost.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[MightyYar]

I did quite well buying Apple stock. Didn't do as well with my Dell stock, but that's why you diversify.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

The features and menus made more sense to you because you are a *nerd*. 99% of the public is *not*. I bet you could figure out how to change the blinking "12:00" on your VCR within 30 seconds.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're a decade in. I'd go to symbolset's house and find out what that fucker wants 'cuz he's spoiling a lot of shit. I'd find a way to make him play along.

He's me, and I'd still do it. Embrace your best critics. Win.

Oh dear, forget to tick the "post anonymously" box on the grandparent post, when we were posting our bogus conversation, did we?

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Slashdot Assistant]

You are incredibly odd. I'm talking Star Trek/Lord of The Rings cross-over fan fiction odd.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[UnknowingFool]

Your name is rather appropriate. My recollection is the Sansa first started appearing around 2006. By my math that is 5 years after the iPod so I don't consider it part of the same era.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[realityimpaired]

Haven't owned a VCR in over a decade, and the last one I owned, I just had to tune in to the TV Guide channel and press a button on the remote for it to set the clock on its own. :)

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably too much tequila. It happens.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[Grishnakh]

I don't think your comparisons are quite right. Zune/PlaysForNow weren't around when the iPod first came out, in fact it took many years for Zune to come out after MS finally saw that people wanted MP3 players. In fact, MS was soooo slow and late to the game that they only brought out the Zune shortly before the MP3 market starting collapsing, due to the rise of smartphones that could also easily act as MP3 players (like the iPhone), and which came with enough flash built-in to make consumers not want a separate MP3 player device.

Back when the iPod first came out (1999?), MS was nowhere to be found, except maybe with some odd WinCE phones with very limited memory. However, there were other players on the market from other companies. Remember when the iPod first came out, there was a Slashdot article that famously called it "lame", in comparison to the existing competition. Unfortunately, I don't even remember who the competitors were any more. Archos maybe? Obviously, the click-wheel was such a hit that it gained popularity very quickly, despite only having a Firewire port (WTF?).

iPhone was a slightly different story as I recall it. At the time, the only other smartphones were Crackberries and some other horrible Windows phones (running WinCE I think). Both of these, IIRC, didn't even have actual touchscreens, but really stylus-screens, as the UIs were pretty similar to desktop Windows and were designed around using a stylus, and weren't very easy to learn. iPhone was a bit of a revolution, in that actually was easy for someone completely clueless to pick up and use, and didn't require you to fool around with a stupid stylus. Android and Windows Phone came along quite a bit later, copying this.

Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple?

[RobertM1968]

...and now they could be enjoying the rapture of Windows Phone's one percent market share. after having sold their soul to the devil to get there like Nokia is doing.

What the hell?!?!?! Talk about FUD and misinformation!!! It's almost 1.5% of the market share (of WM's total 3%). C'mon!!!

[/humorous-sarcasm]

if google can turn around motorola

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps they will take 3rd place.

Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going for second (most valued) post, but I missed it.

There aren't that many threads where "second post!" is almost on topic...

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I bothered? Do I look bothered?

Re:Who cares?

[Locutus]

Steve, the legs of that chair sticking through your office window say otherwise.

LoB

Re:Who cares?

[spk037]

Am I bothered? Do I look bothered?

Are you disrespecting the house of Cooper?! Art thou calling my mother a pox-ridden wench?! Art thou calling my father a goodly rotten apple?!

And yet none of them is worth a...

[Anonymous Coward]

bucket of warm piss.

Which can be used for at least some useful tasks, though I understand it's not effective against jellyfish stings.

Re:And yet none of them is worth a...

[Anonymous Coward]

Source of Ammonia if nothing else

Re:And yet none of them is worth a...

[Anonymous Coward]

How can we make leather without any piss?

Poor old Microsoft

[Billly Gates]

They boasted how they were the little guys and how they beat Apple and even IBM can not be sustained to such a powerhosue monopoly and awesome company.

Apple's market cap is now bigger and so is their rival IBM. MS needs to increase its sales to survive. Offices still using Windows XP, IE 7, and Office 2003 many years later and refusing to upgrade is hurting sales and their venue big time. MS entertainment finally made a profit after losing billions and Bing is still losing money.

MS is in trouble. They are a shadow of themselves and can't compete with themselves of MS old as their older products are good enough with so much tie in that customers can't leave.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

MS doesn't have innovative growth plan. Instead what they do is wait and watch which next computing trend is going to get big and they go after it (i.e. Bing, Xbox, smart phone and tablet with multi touch, enterprise services, zune) The problem is once they're way behind it is very hard to get enough market share and a lot of these investments are not giving enough ROI.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I always find this a little absurd. Steve Jobs said it best: "We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." The same basic sentiment goes here. The fact that Apple and IBM are doing better than Microsoft doesn't mean Microsoft is in trouble. They're making more money than ever, despite slashdot predictions of doom and gloom continuing since they made a fraction of what they do now.

That doesn't mean Microsoft isn't in trouble but there's really nothing about "not being the richest in the world" that means "dying".

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[networkzombie]

Do you really believe that dribble or are you trying to be modded up? You're saying their old products are so good no one is buying their new products? Do you know how much profitable software they sell besides OSs and Office? ERP systems are a huge market for Microsoft and still a small part of what they sell. Poor Microsoft indeed.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[KingMotley]

Microsoft isn't in trouble. And as for hurting sales... Sales haven't ever declined, not a single year -- ever. Go spread your FUD elsewhere, the actual numbers are easy to see if you look.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[Billly Gates]

Numbers I see from www.cnn.com and others show PC sales lagging. Offices have been cutting back on upgrades and using older versions of software. I have not seen a single article stating that sales are actually increasing from MS in a long time. That was true 10 years ago, but not today.

In 2000 and earlier people upgraded WIndows and Office every 2-3 years. Now the standard life cycle is well over 5-7 years with people hanging on to Windows XP for life. The cost accountants in these organizations have noticed and they like it. Windows 3.0 did not have anything near 40% of the market when XP came out, likewise 10 years later 40% still have XP etc. Those numbers say a lot and equal lost sales.

Also please do not count the sales of new pcs as proof that Windows Vista is catching on, when corporations wipe them and use their old Windows XP volume license. Even if you include those numbers desktops and notebooks are on a big decline. The Ipad is part of that reason and so are some smart phones.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[hedwards]

Part of that is that neither IBM nor Apple have been under DoJ supervision for the last decade, which tends to put them at a bit of a competitive advantage when it comes to pushing for growth. MS got slapped for going for other markets beyond Windows and Word. Granted they were going at it in an anti-competitive manner, but MS historically has only known how to grow via those sorts of sleazeball tactics.

That being said, Apple did have the good fortune of having a decade where the DoJ didn't believe in antitrust regulation where they were allowed to engage in questionable tactics to grow their business.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[ppanon]

In 2000 and earlier people upgraded WIndows and Office every 2-3 years. Now the standard life cycle is well over 5-7 years with people hanging on to Windows XP for life.

And the ironic thing is that Microsoft is the chief reason why that happened. They switched to Software Assurance after XP and Office 2003 came out and then, with a steady source of income from people buying in each year, the pressure was off and they took forever to put out Vista and Office 2007. Then of course Vista had horrible performance and there was that whole Vista Ready sticker fiasco. Thus decision makers held off on upgrades, so that by the time Windows 7 came out, companies had already been making do with no changes for half a decade, They had stayed off the upgrade treadmill and the world had not ended.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[BBCWatcher]

It's not about sales. It's about profit (and profit growth). Wal-Mart generates far more revenue than Microsoft, but Microsoft has a market capitalization that's currently about $30 billion higher. Wall Street is concerned about Microsoft's potential for future profit growth, and that's not wrong. For example, Microsoft is going to find it increasingly difficult to collect its high Windows taxes in light of devices such as $199 Amazon Kindle Fires running Android.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[KingMotley]

Here's the actual numbers, but I stand corrected, there actually was one year that revenue dipped (2009):
Date / Employees / Revenue
June 30, 2011 90,412 $69.94B
June 30, 2010 88,596 $62.48B
June 30, 2009 92,736 $58.44B
June 30, 2008 91,259 $60.42B
June 30, 2007 78,565 $51.12B
June 30, 2006 71,172 $44.28B
June 30, 2005 61,000 $39.79B
June 30, 2004 57,086 $36.84B
June 30, 2003 54,468 $32.19B
June 30, 2002 50,621 $28.37B

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

Part of that is that neither IBM nor Apple have been under DoJ supervision for the last decade, which tends to put them at a bit of a competitive advantage when it comes to pushing for growth. MS got slapped for going for other markets beyond Windows and Word. Granted they were going at it in an anti-competitive manner, but MS historically has only known how to grow via those sorts of sleazeball tactics.

That's a BS argument because MS tried to get into a lot of markets after the anti-trust agreement like Xbox, Zune, Bing; and they haven't done very well not because of the supervision but because they sucked at selling directly to consumers.

That being said, Apple did have the good fortune of having a decade where the DoJ didn't believe in antitrust regulation where they were allowed to engage in questionable tactics to grow their business.

Again BS. Apple didn't have DoJ supervision because they weren't convicted of monopoly abuse. Being a monopoly is not what got MS in trouble. Abusing that monopoly was their problem. Apple by all accounts has the highest marketshare of MP3 players. They never got in trouble with the DoU because they didn't strong-arm their partners against their competitors like MS did.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

The concern with MS for many shareholders is their stock is stagnant and they don't seem to have a plan for the future. IBM is growing and they do have a long-term strategy. Part of that strategy was getting rid of their PC business 5 years ago. Some people didn't like that but in retrospect, it was clear that while generating a lot of revenue, it wasn't going to be very profitable. With MS, they seem to be rushing in late to every buzzword that comes up and throwing lots of money at ventures that don't bring in much money.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

No what he's saying is that for most businesses, they don't need the latest Office and their current Office may work for the vast, vast majority of their workers. As for Windows, Vista really hurt their image but Win 7 is good upgrade from XP. But they lost revenue in the meantime as companies skipped one OS upgrade. As for ERP, my understanding is they are still dwarfed by SAP and Oracle and Infor. As of 2010, they lost market share in ERP but gained in CRM. However they are at 3% and 7% respectively. MS only does well in the small business market. The middle and large enterprise are owned by others.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

Also as the prices of computer hardware goes down and Windows prices go up, it's harder for someone to pay $100 retail for Windows if they build a computer for $400. OEMs also will have issues because they are being squeezed on margins as it is.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

Yes, many companies felt they got burned by SA. I don't know if any companies complained or got discounts on Win 7 but I'm sure that the SA contract had an escape clause that gave them an out when Vista wasn't ready.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

MS still makes lots of money and profit. But that's not the concern. The concern is they don't seem to have much of a long-term strategy. They have had major stumbles. Their stock is stagnant. IBM has surpassed them in cap because investors think that IBM has a plan for the future.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[Hognoxious]

Wal-Mart generates far more revenue than Microsoft, but Microsoft has a market capitalization that's currently about $30 billion higher.

Comparisons like that - between companies in entirely different sectors - aren't just invalid, they're retarded.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[Billly Gates]

Looks like I stand corrected too and retract.I am not a troll, but rather I see bad signs and a less powerful mindshare wise from 10 years ago while clients refusing to upgrade. MS has more and bigger competitors now in many areas. I am surprised actual sales growth is occurring, as Asia is mostly pirated and life cycles are much longer than a decade ago. I wonder where its new revenue is coming from? I know they sell sharepoint and a few other newer things but Id ont know how much they cost.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[hedwards]

That's a BS argument because MS tried to get into a lot of markets after the anti-trust agreement like Xbox, Zune, Bing; and they haven't done very well not because of the supervision but because they sucked at selling directly to consumers.

It's not BS, they did try, but they had to take into account the restrictions and scrutiny that came with being supervised. The Xbox, is a poor argument to make, they did well with that one in large part because it was separated enough from their monopoly that they had room to maneuver.

Again BS. Apple didn't have DoJ supervision because they weren't convicted of monopoly abuse. Being a monopoly is not what got MS in trouble. Abusing that monopoly was their problem. Apple by all accounts has the highest marketshare of MP3 players. They never got in trouble with the DoU because they didn't strong-arm their partners against their competitors like MS did.

Strong-arm their partners? You mean like how Apple refused to license Fairplay to any other hardware manufacturer so that anybody wanting to use the ITMS had to either buy an iPod or had to go through the inconvenience of burning and ripping a disc, hence getting a lesser quality of product.

But, no, it's not like Apple would ever strong arm the competition like that, no siree.

As for the lack of conviction, it's hard to get convicted when you're never put on trial. It might be that Apple engaged in perfectly legal behavior, I doubt it, but it somewhat waters down the point when the DoJ isn't enforcing the law.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[KingMotley]

Some of the numbers and reports are grossly overblown. For example, there is an estimated 409 million PCs sold in 2011 vs 20 million tablets. If each tablet sold constitutes a lost PC sale (which in the vast majority of cases it doesn't.. It's in addition to a PC, not a PC replacement), it would be hard to notice the impact. You would see PC sales increasing at a measly 10% per year rather than it's normal 14.8%.

It's a trend, and it may have an impact in 3-5 years, perhaps, but that day isn't today. It also shouldn't be ignored, and it appears that Microsoft isn't ignoring it (Window 8 being largely a tablet friendly enhancements). Time will tell.

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[dave87656]

Granted they were going at it in an anti-competitive manner

I think that is more of the problem. MS hasn't innovated anything -- they wield their patent portfolio and extort or steal technology and/or revenue. And the biggest selling point they offer in non-windows products is compatibility with Windows which is their monopoly anchor. Other companies, such as google, are innovating and providing better products. Compare bing results to googles, compare Picasa to Windows Live phots, compare gmail to windows live. The MS products seem simple and primitive compared to the google products. So what does MS do instead? They extort patent royalties for patents they are not even willing to disclose.

My 2 cents .. YMMV

Re:Poor old Microsoft

[UnknowingFool]

Strong-arm their partners? You mean like how Apple refused to license Fairplay to any other hardware manufacturer so that anybody wanting to use the ITMS had to either buy an iPod or had to go through the inconvenience of burning and ripping a disc, hence getting a lesser quality of product.

There is a difference in Apple not licensing a DRM they invented to anyone and MS hinting to Intel that if they developed a Java VM, MS would strongly favor AMD in the next version of Windows and telling OEMs that if they installed Netscape that their Windows prices might rise. The problem with your argument is that Apple did not have partners in their DRM; they did it on their own.

But, no, it's not like Apple would ever strong arm the competition like that, no siree.

Read carefully and process what I said. How is it strong-arm the competition by not licensing or partnering with them? Did Apple ever reach out to third parties? Did Apple ever go to any of their iPod/iPhone case manufacturers and tell them not to make cases for Samsung or HTC or Motorola or their licensing fees would rise? That would be analogous to what MS did.

As for the lack of conviction, it's hard to get convicted when you're never put on trial. It might be that Apple engaged in perfectly legal behavior, I doubt it, but it somewhat waters down the point when the DoJ isn't enforcing the law.

If you have a specific complaint other than their refusal to license their DRM which they have a right to do, I'd like to hear it. Netscape and Sun had specific examples of wrong doing by MS which they presented to the DOJ.

And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Colin Smith]

So IBM will be number 1 soon.

Really though. This isn't news for nerds.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[redneckHippe]

"This isn't news for nerds." And neither is Slashdot.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[jcr]

Apple's P/E ratio is only 15. On what exactly do you base this prediction?

-jcr

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[MakinBacon]

So IBM will be number 1 soon.

Really though. This isn't news for nerds.

No, but it is stuff that matters, which I believe is the second half of slashdot's former slogan.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Surt]

Apple sells upscale products at a premium to a market that is being eviscerated by a massive economic downturn. I would expect them to take a serious hit.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's entire business runs on iPhone and iPad and iPod, the latter being less important these days. Apple is basically Nokia of smartphones and tablets. So you just have to look at Nokia or RIMM to see what will happen to Apple. Unless Apple creates the new iPhone creation that everyone wants, it will be replaced by generic copycats or some other super-gadget of the future.

IBM's business model is not about one gadget. Even Microsoft is much more diversified than Apple.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[BBCWatcher]

Apple controls the dominant application and content ecosystems for both mobile and tablet devices. Nokia (especially) and RIM never accomplished that. People don't buy iPhones and iPads only because of the hardware, excellent though it is. They buy those devices for the Apple and non-Apple software solutions and content. Regardless, the only application ecosystems that are even remotely competitive to Apple's in these two device categories are Android's, not Microsoft's.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[rtfa-troll]

Recently economic downturn has not translated into a collapse in purchase of premium mobile devices. Nokia used to do fine. The reason seems to be that people who can't afford a new car, for example, get their premium kick by buying a new phone. I'm not saying there won't be an effect on Apple; I'm just saying don't count on it. It's more likely that the downward influence will come from Android.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Cico71]

This work for people that still have enough money left. The stupid and useless unregulated market is pushing more and more middle-class people down the poverty line. The number of people that need to carefully budget to survive end-of-month is scarily increasing. Yet, most need a phone anyway. I guess the first company that manages to really break the smartphone/dumbphone barrier will change things quite a bit. By "really break" I mean something like invading the market with a really low-cost offering. I expected Nokia to do it. Even after announcing the death of Symbian. Unfortunately I see nothing happening from their side and Apple may not be so stupid to remained seated on a huge pile of cash only nitpicking about design and suing Samsung i.e. think at the cheap iPhone rumors.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Because microsoft is the backbone of the IT industry and apple is like the nailpolish or jewelery. Tastes can change anytime and fads come and go. None of what apple makes is a "necessity". Except maybe one or two A/V software suites.

Using their usual dirty tricks they keep releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware. And now you cant even downgrade iOS so you're forced to buy a new phone when your current iphone/ipod becomes slow. People will eventually catch on.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

The downturn has been ongoing and yet Apple's profits are up. There doesn't seem to be any basis for this prediction.

I would file this with "year of the Linux desktop."

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Joe Jay Bee]

Don't ask my why, but certain people I see have no money yet insist on obtaining the latest iTrinkets no matter what.

Apple will be fine.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[obarthelemy]

Actually, the luxury market is fairly resistant to downturns. Most crises affect mainly the poor, then the middle class. The rich are and will be OK.

Also, as seen with tablets, Apple has so much scale now that they can even compete on price. They've been very quiet on the desktop front, it wouldn't take much to give a nice fillip to their share there.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[thetoadwarrior]

The recession is not new and they've only been going up and that is because they are selling premium products and don't rely on lowly Wal-mart scrubs to get by. Do the world a a favour and stick your shitty financial advice up your well used ass.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

But what's the alternative? Do you see Mac owners and Apple product fans suddenly start buying Window PCs and iPad clones? If the economy slows down, it slows down for everyone: people who would have bought Apple products may slow down their buying spree, but they won't suddenly start buying Windows-8-powered crap. And people who would have bought Windows-powered piece-o-crap will slow down their mindless-consumer buying spree too.

Also, even with a market cap halved in two, Apple would still stay the #1 in market cap.

I somehow think they're here to stay (and this comes from a Linux user so I'm neither an Apple fanboi nor a paid M$ astroturfing troll).

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[TheRaven64]

Apple's strategy for the last decade has been to ride the cusp of the wave of commoditisation. They identify a market that is about to be overrun by commodity products, enter it at the point when they can get commodity prices from their suppliers but still charge premium prices to their customers, and then move on to a new market while keeping a small share at the expensive end of the newly commoditised market. Home computers, laptops, portable media player, smartphones and tablets have all followed this trend. The problem that Apple now has - and the reason that they're resorting to lawsuits to slow down other tablet makers - is that they don't have the next market identified and they don't have a product ready for it.

This strategy is very profitable, but only as long as they keep moving forward. Apple's market cap is based on the fact that their net income has increased by a huge amount year on year. As soon as it stops increasing, or the rate of increase slows, it will collapse.

It remains to be seen whether post-Jobs Apple can keep this going. Steve Jobs was always good at identifying this kind of market (look at PDO and WebObjects, for example), but it wasn't until he returned to Apple that he was really good at exploiting them, and I suspect that this was largely due to other people on the management team. I'm not sure that Apple still has the expertise to both identify and exploit a new market.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me correct that for you

Apple sells upscale products at a premium in spite of a market that is being eviscerated by a massive economic downturn.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is news for nerds. If you are a nerd in the Microsoft camp then you better jump ship because it is sinking. Only Windows 8 can save Microsoft!

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[phillymjs]

Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.

You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.

If you want to talk about bloated OSes that force hardware upgrades, you'd better talk Microsoft.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

I joined IBM when they were nearly ten times bigger than their nearest rivals - and that was DEC. IBM is now part of my history, and this bubble that carries Apple northward will burst. Things may come, and things may go.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[realityimpaired]

Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.

You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.

I think the GP was intending to talk about forced obsolescence, but somehow doesn't know how Apple actually goes about forced obsolescence... They don't put in bloat code to slow things down on older hardware, they declare that older hardware is no longer supported and simply refuse to install the new version on it, regardless of whether it would actually run properly or not. There is no technical reason that you can't run Snow Leopard on a first generation Intel iMac, yet it won't install because the hardware is "obsolete". This is in spite of the fact that Leopard ran perfectly well on it, and as you so rightly pointed out, Snow Leopard is noticeably faster than Leopard because its main focus was on streamlining things and reducing the system's footprint on the hardware... in other words, Snow Leopard *should* run better on older hardware than Leopard.

Apple is sneaky that way. Microsoft... not so much... Win7 actually runs better on older hardware than Win Vista (and arguably Windows XP once certain minimums are met)... Microsoft doesn't hide the fact that they're designing for newer system configurations, and they don't place arbitrary limits on whether the software will actually install in the first place.... they do limit installation on older hardware (go ahead, try installing Win7 on a '486), but they do it for sanity reasons, not to try to convince you to buy a new computer, and they make it much easier to circumvent those limits (if you check youtube, you can find a video of somebody who's shoehorned Win7 into a '486).

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhh... I preferred "Stuff that splatters." :(

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Your entire thesis is summed as: if Apple keeps growing and making money, their share price will increase. If it doesn't, their share price will drop.

Also: I can't predict the future and neither can Apple, but I assume they will stumble at some point.

This is astoundingly obvious I wonder if you've just completed the Paul Krugman school of economics.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem that Apple now has - and the reason that they're resorting to lawsuits to slow down other tablet makers - is that they don't have the next market identified and they don't have a product ready for it.

How do you know this?

There was no tablet market really; perhaps a really, really small tablet PC one. The iPad was announced in January 2010, and now everyone is scrambling to compete with it. That was not even two years ago when Apple, basically all by themselves, exploded a new category of devices.

How can you possibly know what they're looking at? Given that no one really saw the tablet market (everyone was all about netbooks though), how can you assume that it won't happen again?

Similarly with smartphones: the devices were for geeks, and a few business people with their Blackberries. The iPhone arguably commoditized that categorize as well and made it mainstream. Sure there are other smartphones, but they're fractured and fighting amongst themselves IMHO.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

More than just exploiting new markets, they created entirely new markets. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad 2, he mentioned that the iPad 1 sold more units than all the tablets in history combined until that time. No one thought of the music player like an iPod. In fact, up until the moment Apple discontinues it, the iPod remains the undisputed champion of dedicated MP3 players.

On to the financial side, a P/E of 15 is usually reserved for cash cows--companies like GE or Johnson & Johnson. Those are behemoths, tremendously important but irrelevantly uncool. Apple has a unique combination of excellent growth, strong loyalty, and a cash printing machine at the same time. A P/E of 15 is way too low, but it has been for some time, so much it becomes normal.

If Apple has the same P/E as Amazon, at 100x, their market cap will be bigger than the GDP of Canada, at $2.8 trillion dollar. No public company has ever crossed the $1 trillion dollar mark.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[rtfa-troll]

There are loads and loads of really cheap Android phones coming out of Chinese manufacturers. They aren't much available in the US due to Microsoft patent threats, but they do exist and equivalents will come to the USA if they are needed by the market.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[UnknowingFool]

And yet they have had record profits and revenues since 2008 which when the downturn started. When did you predict this hit to occur? When we go into recovery?

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Surt]

Nice. Thanks for coming on by the internet. Sorry you can't stay.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[UnknowingFool]

There is no technical reason that you can't run Snow Leopard on a first generation Intel iMac, yet it won't install because the hardware is "obsolete".

No there isn't a reason but I suspect you haven't actually installed it because Snow Leopard will run on any Intel Mac even the iMac. So either you are mistaken or you are making stuff up. Now you can't run 64-bit applications but that's to be expected since the Intel Core Duo and Solo were 32-bit processors.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Surt]

I'd predict this to occur when there are less than ten million people in the country who can afford to spare $500 for something they don't really need. We're on our way there.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[UnknowingFool]

So you are singling out Apple's iPad as the sole reason you think they will collapse. Have you noticed that Apple has more than one product? I don't have any use for an iPad but I do have an iPod. I'm sure people buy their computers and iPhones as well.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Surt]

I'm concerned for their ipad, mac, ipod and iphone sales. All of those are grossly overpriced compared to their competitors.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[UnknowingFool]

Yes, the iPad is grossly expensive compared to their competitors yet very few of their competitors released a 10" tablet that was massively cheaper. Yes the mac and iPhone are more expensive than their competitors yet Apple is still having record sales. Your premise that price will hurt sales hasn't exactly been true the last 10 years. Maybe price isn't the only variable in Apple's sucess.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Surt]

Yeah, apple had a wildly successful ride during boom times. Exactly what I predicted when I bought their stock 15 years back. But I've sold now. Because while price isn't the only variable in their success, it is one.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Apple sells upscale products at a premium...

Your 'upscale products' are priced at a little above impulse purchase range. We're talking about cell phones and tablets here, not Hyundai and Lexus.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM sells upscale products at a premium to a market that is being eviscerated by a massive economic downturn. I would expect them to take a serious hit.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's customer base (e.g. millions of Manhattan residents and such) would quicker move out of Manhattan (or SF, etc.) than give up their ipods/iphones/ipads :-). They're probably not the folks impacted by this recession... (e.g. if you can afford an ipad/iphone *now*, you're not "struggling" now).

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Surt]

No, they don't, as far as I know. Name one high end consumer product IBM sells?

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Karlt1]

I'm concerned for their ipad, mac, ipod and iphone sales. All of those are grossly overpriced compared to their competitors.

So who sales a device that the equivalent of the iPod Touch (802.11n, 960x480 display, etc) cheaper than the Touch? Who sales a 160GB equivalent of the Classic?

Who is selling a 10" tablet that is equivalent to the iPad 2 and cheaper?

All of the high-end Android devices are around $200 - $300 price of the iPhone.

But all that being said, in capitalist society, nothing is "too expensive" as long as enough people are buying it to create a supply demand equilibrium.
   

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[ColdWetDog]

We're in boom times now? Good to know, makes me feel so much better whilst I watch my 401(K) tank.

Thanks!

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[ceoyoyo]

Uh huh. That's why they've gained in every metric you care to look at during the actual economic downturn and during everything the media has hyped as a downturn since.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's P/E ratio is only 15. On what exactly do you base this prediction?

-jcr

You better stay out of the stock market if you do not understand that Apple is the most valuable tech company by far. They are worth more than Microsoft and Google combined.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's strategy for the last decade has been to ride the cusp of the wave of commoditisation. They identify a market that is about to be overrun by commodity products, enter it at the point when they can get commodity prices from their suppliers but still charge premium prices to their customers, and then move on to a new market while keeping a small share at the expensive end of the newly commoditised market. Home computers, laptops, portable media player, smartphones and tablets have all followed this trend. The problem that Apple now has - and the reason that they're resorting to lawsuits to slow down other tablet makers - is that they don't have the next market identified and they don't have a product ready for it.

This strategy is very profitable, but only as long as they keep moving forward. Apple's market cap is based on the fact that their net income has increased by a huge amount year on year. As soon as it stops increasing, or the rate of increase slows, it will collapse.

It remains to be seen whether post-Jobs Apple can keep this going. Steve Jobs was always good at identifying this kind of market (look at PDO and WebObjects, for example), but it wasn't until he returned to Apple that he was really good at exploiting them, and I suspect that this was largely due to other people on the management team. I'm not sure that Apple still has the expertise to both identify and exploit a new market.

You are stating the obvious Raven. Apple's stock already accounts for this risk. No company is immune to the need to find the next big thing. It is just that Apple has been successful so many times. They created the PC industry with the Apple II, revolutionized the PC industry with Mac, turned the music industry upside down with the iPod and iTunes, blew up the mobile phone industry by introducing touch, multi-touch iOS, and the App Store. Now we are hearing about iCloud and the post PC era. So who is best positioned for this Post-PC era? Wall Street is betting on Apple. I certainly would not bet against Apple. They sell systems that integrate and simplify the way we communicate, share, and seek entertainment. With the iPad and iPhone they are opening up a new market for Apple - corporate - for which they only have 5% market share and CEOs are stating that 30-40% of their future technology purchases will include Apple products. They could easily double their sales in the next two years with this new business market.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[iinlane]

Apple's strategy for the last decade has been to ride the cusp of the wave of commoditisation. They identify a market that is about to be overrun by commodity products, enter it at the point when they can get commodity prices from their suppliers but still charge premium prices to their customers, and then move on to a new market while keeping a small share at the expensive end of the newly commoditised market.

I personally think that part of Apples success comes from focus on small set of products. They don't speak about generic "target audiences" and "markets" as much as others do and they don't flood those markets with products for each niche segment. For us, consumers, it doesn't matter if Apple can keep it going - they already changed the industry. For apple shareholders there would be something to worry about when P/E ratio grows larger, but currently there's no bubble there.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Gen_Music]

You seem to forget how good Apple is a building an eco-system. You're not comparing a Dell to a Compaq here. Most people that go the Apple path once stay there, as its very costly to switch. You forget that once you go back you have to buy all your software once again, relearn to use different shortcuts, beat muscle memory, and deal with system errors/incompatibilities in a completely different way. That's cool for a power user like me, but generally thats too much hassle for someone who just want a computer for simple things aka 90% of Apples market. Then there's the business users. I don't care what anyone says about graphic design, the biggest userbase for Apple machines is Music and Video Production.Why? Arguably the industry's best tools (Logic Pro, and Final Cut Pro) are made on them and all Audio applications run a hell of a lot smoother on them (CoreAudio makes things so simple). On a more financial note, Apple will survive in this market. not because their price point is around $500 or even $5000, but because their finance options' structure makes it affordable to almost everyone. I went to a college populated by these things, but the endo f the year, there were 12 kids living on British equivalent to welfare that were rolling around with Macbook Pro's on finance, and the payments have been organised so they can all pay it off successfully. That's good business!

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Gen_Music]

I personally would score this 5 as it is in-fact the reality of Apple software. Can anyone explain to me why OSX Lion requires 4GB or RAM to work reliably when Snow Leopard needs 2GB and Leopard only needs 1GB. And lets not forget that Lion removes Rosetta and Classic environments (removing all PowerPC and OS9 emulation code). Surely they cant be doubling the about of code every single time they release a new version of OS?? The fact is Apple's profits come from selling hardware. If Apple allows end users to believe that they don't need new hardware, then its sales will decline. If I hadn't bought a 2010 mac mini and therefore been disallowed from running anything older than the current OSX at the time of my products release, I would stillb e running Leopard, because to me, there is nothing 10.5.8 cannot do that Lion can that is anything more than meaningless eye candy.

Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse

[Surt]

Troll? MetaMods, read the thread.

Apple is a tech company?

[dicobalt]

All they make are fancy consumer oriented things. They don't qualify as a tech company anymore than Nintendo does.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Billly Gates]

Macs are professional machines. The Power macs cost about $3,000 and are used as scientific workstations, and advanced video editing. Smaller businesses use Macs in Europe and run Office on them. Especially businesses that do design.

True they are leaving their roots but Macs are popular in business and where I used to work at the Anchorage School District, they have like 30,000 macs in use in both servers and classrooms.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are no less a tech company than Microsoft. They both make hardware, they both write and maintain software and an multiple operating systems. They both sell to consumers and business.

I am a pharmacist and own my own pharmacy. The entire pharmacy runs off mac (6 workstations at the moment). I can't do that with a Nintendo.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[aztracker1]

Too bad they pretty much ditched the server market.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Pence128]

That was back when Macs had PowerPCs to differentiate them. Now they're just overpriced PC clones. Schools have always had a hard on for macs that I've never understood. Do they get discounts or something? $200 off a $1300 $800 computer?

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[bky1701]

And a PC that runs rings around an Apple-branded PC costs about 2k$. Seriously, when I built this computer, I cut a lot of corners, and it was still far higher in every spec than the best Apple had on the market. You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.

"Macs are popular in business"

Graphics, music, and some small forays into movie production (although the real work still happens on Windows and the processing on Linux). Business-business, that being, engineering, finance, healthcare, point of sale, etc, still are Windows or Linux only clubs. For very, very good reason.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine school's love the one vendor handling everything, just talk to apple if you have a issue with a Mac.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, schools get quite good discounts, on the theory that every Mac in a classroom influences a whole lot of kids to be more likely to buy a Mac once they graduate and have money.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Anonymous Coward]

You built a custom all-in-one PC really bro? Do tell.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised.

(Disclaimer, I work for big blue but do not speak for them and my views are my own etc etc)

As I said in the disclaimer, I work for big blue, and I see more and more macbooks in use around the place. Now that IBM is out of the manufacture game, people have a little (not a lot) more choice of hardware to use for your main client machine. Mac's are becoming more popular. It's still under 5% and mostly in the management tiers (we engineers usually get some massive quad-core thinkpad), but they're definitely there.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[BBCWatcher]

Apple's machine runs Apple's software. Something else doesn't. The value is in the software (and the content), customers recognize that, and so does Wall Street. It's really quite simple. The number that Wall Street assigns to the value of a company is far, far removed from the number of gigahertz in that company's products. Apple has found multiple winning formulas in its products, while Microsoft is struggling to deliver compelling products right now.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[MalleusEBHC]

Graphics, music, and some small forays into movie production (although the real work still happens on Windows and the processing on Linux). Business-business, that being, engineering, finance, healthcare, point of sale, etc, still are Windows or Linux only clubs. For very, very good reason.

Funny, here in the middle of Silicon Valley, I see a whole host of MacBooks. I guess we don't do any real work like engineering. At least in the software world, they can't be beat. Since the vast majority of people developing for Linux have dedicated build/test machines, all you need is a thin client for ssh access. Add in that the Mac can run your collection of bash/perl/python/whatever scripts locally if need be, and it's the ideal dev machine. All this and you don't have to spend pointless hours forcing Linux to work correctly with your laptop. Yes, it's possible to make a functioning Linux laptop, but it doesn't "just work" like a Mac. And guess what? My company (and many others) would gladly pay the extra money for the Mac because it pales in value compared to the wasted time of engineers.

PS - Thank you. I've turned to near hatred of Apple over pretty much everything they touch with iOS. Thanks for bringing back the good ole early 2000s era Mac bashing and letting me release my decades-cultivated Mac fanboy. Who knows, maybe for old time's sake I'll install an OS X point release and come post about how snappy it feels.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Tom]

You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.

You're also paying for it being a little higher in quality than your average cheapest-component-everywhere bargain PC. If you compare the average Mac to a comparable quality brand PC, the difference is much less than your above.

I don't mind paying a premium for something that's worth it, but I hate it how the PC fanboys distort the numbers. Yes, Apple is more expensive. No, the difference isn't 30-40%, that's just ridiculous. You can't compare a product against its cheapest competitor and then claim it's that much more expensive than all its competitors. At least get your math right and use an average. And you can't compare an off-the-shelf product with building one yourself, unless you price in your time as well - what you're doing is comparing a product to the sum price of its components. I'm sure the car you're driving is also a lot more expensive than it would be if you'd bought all the parts and assembled it yourself.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[mickwd]

Part of what has made IBM and Apple so successful (and Nintendo too), is that they don't just "sell tech".

In Apple's case it's the whole experience of using a (usually portable) device to play music, surf online, communicate.....a whole range of activities that people are interested in doing. They don't just make those things possible, they concentrate on making the whole process a) simple; and b) enjoyable. Too many of their competitors have concentrated solely on selling the tech and letting the users try and work out the rest for themselves.

In IBM's case they've concentrated on selling business solutions. Yes, it's now a horrid buzz-phrase, but IBM decided early on that just selling tech wasn't enough. Most companies would rather not get involved in working out what they need for themselves, buying the appropriate tech, plugging it together and getting it to work. Getting this stuff right is hard. They would much rather have a company like IBM come in and just sort out the whole problem the company is trying to address by investing in tech. This is what IBM does, and companies pay big money for it, because the whole problem is taken off their hands - and IBM is one of the few companies left with enough reputation that companies would be prepared to trust them with something like this.

Us techies often forget that for the majority of people tech is a means to an end - not an end in itself.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[thetoadwarrior]

You're a mongoloid.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[chuckugly]

Actually buying all the parts would make it a lot more expensive for the car example. Try going to M-B and buying an E-class from the parts dept. and you will soon see.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[jo_ham]

How did you manage to get all those off the shelf parts into the screen and keep it virtually silent and cool running?

I'd imagine the GPU would stick of of the back or something, but I assume you had some sort of plan for that.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[cyber-vandal]

Silicon Valley businesses are hardly typical of day to day businesses though are they. Walk into any corporate/government office and count how many Macs you see.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. IBM sells solutions.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[scamper_22]

Of course this could all change again.

Now for another good buzz word.... cloud computing.
Microsoft is already hosting Exchange, Office, and SharePoint online. They and other product providers can directly provide the service now... reducing the need for IBMs.

It's just another possibility.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Actually, Macs are so common in Hollywood that I bought a Macbook Pro and use BootCamp to run Windows on it so I can work comfortably in either environment. I paid more for it, but I don't regret it. It's like being bi-lingual, especially at delivery time. If you ever visit any production, and I do mean *any* production, you'll find so many Macs you'll start to wonder if their marketshare is really only ten percent.

Your use of the term 'real work' is misleading. Whether you're sending emails, entering into spreadsheets, or building complex 3D models, it's all work that has to get done. Downplaying it by calling it 'real work' is the same sort of elitist bullshit that earned Apple fans their reputation.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[unixisc]

Too bad they pretty much ditched the server market.

Apple could have had some success in the server market had they made POWER based servers at the time they were selling iMacs, loading them w/ NEXTSTEP and pushing their object computing pretty aggressively. They'd have been right up there w/ Compaq, HP, Dell, Sun, et al.

That was back when Macs had PowerPCs to differentiate them. Now they're just overpriced PC clones. Schools have always had a hard on for macs that I've never understood. Do they get discounts or something? $200 off a $1300 $800 computer?

I think the simplicity of Macs from the beginning was what inspired schools to use them, particularly for junior grade kids. It wasn't just a case of the money.

Macs have always been popular w/ the DTP crowd, regardless of whether they were based on Motorola 68K, PPC or now Intel. Major reason being that Adobe's major apps - Framemaker, Illustrator, et al were always well supported there. I don't see that ever going away. If anything, I expect the popularity of the iPads to spill over into Macs, particularly if Apple makes it easy to transfer data between the two.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[ColdWetDog]

Silicon Valley businesses are hardly typical of day to day businesses though are they. Walk into any corporate/government office and count how many Macs you see.

Just went to a Forest Service meeting in Juneau, Alaska. All of the laptops with only two exceptions in a crowd of 30 government employees were various flavors of MacBooks and one iPad.

Hmmm.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Billly Gates]

I had a dilemma last fall.

Mac or PC. Like I mentioned above I worked for the Anchorage School District, so I was inclined to pick a mac. I checked them out and borrowed a ibook from work to play with for a weekend a head of time to see if I could get used to it.

I did not like using it after 10 minutes. I kept having to click the menus and it was hard to find things. Macs are so click dependent on the menus. I do not know if I am used to Windows or if the explorer shell was simply better?

Anyway I compared. An Asus PC was on sale for $700 and only 15% slower than the $1600 iMac. CHEAP!! ... right? Well, shoot need a monitor. I found a 24 inch HP brightview with 1:10,000 contrast and 2 ms delay for $379. Ouch. Now I need wireless? Found netgera powerline ethernet adapters $90. Keyboard and mouse? $125. Yes I went expensive because I wanted high end. Add them up? That is $1350

Cost savings only $150. The Mac does have wifi and probably an even better monitor. But lacks blu ray, HDMI, Windows, and Office. If I want to install Office and Windows the cost is now $2,000! Not to mention I can't install a hauge pauge card for TV later on.

So, my exwife explained it as you want one to last for 5 years, but if there is a problem you need to upgrade it. My PC is lasting pretty well except that the USB cable on the keyboard is dying and it is noisier in which I plan to replace the PSU and fans soon.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Billly Gates]

They are opening up in all but large companies.

Macs have much lower TCO than PC counterparts and are more reliable and secure. Sharepoint and other proprietary software is holding Windows in but that is rapidly changing. Newer demand for VPs to access IE 6 only intranet sites are causing many companies to update. Updated intranet sites which work with IE 8 more than likely will work with Safari too.

Many business internet sites now support Safari as well as IE for supported browsers so this is changing. Apple is still too scared to support business and that is a shame. Small business owners use Macs a lot outside and sometimes inside the US where they do not have legacy requirements.

As things move to the cloud Windows will be less relevant. Small business is where it is at

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Billly Gates]

Here is what the school gets.

You setup the macs and walk away and they will work for a very long time. TCO is important as they do not have the budget for a large and compentent I.T. department. They get special macs that cost $800 that are not available to consumers. The equilevnt is a $1200 imac. 30% discount. Educational software is mac based still so compatibility is not as important. Powerpc macs are harder to get infections which add more bonus and costs.

Macs are really good in that when they get obsolete they graceful degrade in performance. They last longer for simple tasks which means longer life cycles than PCs.
Punk teenage kids who try to bring in worms to put up goatse.cx and meatspin on the desktops find life harder on macs. Yes, they really do that and think its funny.

Also it is much easier to add a child account to a school network for non-IT users. I substitute taught, and the principal just added a new child as they enrolled and the account rolled per mac at the school. All their settings and work files went with them. Pretty cool as IT would not feel comfortable giving an administrative Windows server password to an administrator, but it is different in an Apple network.

Macs have wonderful benefits and are cheaper than wintel pcs with support staff and reliability.Anchorage school district just this year finally pulled the last 2003/2004 eMac and upgraded. That is a very long time those machines lasted

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Pence128]

So they pay about the same for hardware as a commodity PC and get OS X on it? Ok, that's a pretty good deal.

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[plover]

I think the simplicity of Macs from the beginning was what inspired schools to use them, particularly for junior grade kids. It wasn't just a case of the money.

The history of Apple getting into schools is long and nowhere near that simple. It was a case of money, time to market, competition, inertia, vendor lock-in, and possibly corruption (depending on how you define it.) And yes, simplicity was a factor.

Apple made deals with school systems to purchase Apple ][ back in the late 1970s, and got them in schools long before IBM arrived with the IBM PC. Being older, they were cheaper and less capable, but because they were the first exposure to computers for a lot of kids, those kids fell in love with them. And it happened long before Macintosh came on the scene. When the IBM PC came around, Apples were already in many schools.

I remember a discussion with my dad in 1979, where I thought that Apple was going to be the primary computers at work too, because they were already so widespread in schools. Having seen IBM's corporate marketers in action, he said "you have no idea how IBM's marketing team works. When IBM enters the market, they are going to completely dominate it. They play hardball." And he was absolutely right.

Then came the PC. IBM's market strategy for the PCs was simple: target the Big Corporations of America, because they have big budgets and lots of IBM hardware already, and IBM was interested in their higher price tags and huge volumes. IBM had done business this way for decades, and were really, really good at it. Sure, they wanted to sell to the home market, but it wasn't their primary focus. The idea was to get PCs in front of everyone at work in hopes they'd go home and buy a PC for home use. IBM PCs remained the choice for Corporate America, mostly because their IBM reps sold them the PCs as "business" machines instead of those Apple "toys". IBM had long been telling their corporate customers "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", back when IBM's primary threat were the mainframe clones by companies like Amdahl. They continued to repeat it to sell the PCs. And IBM sales forces had golden measures of persuasion. (Let's just say you really missed something if you never personally witnessed it.) And here, IBM won, hands down. PCs absolutely dominated the corporate market.

But the home market wasn't that simple. Lots of homes had kids who wanted Apples like they had in school, so there was a divide between Mom and Dad, and Junior and Sis. Not really seeing much of a difference for themselves, many parents went with Apples at the recommendation of their kids. Remember, at the time, buying home computers was completely new territory for families, and these were very big ticket items for most people. From this, the marketplace learned that education was a driver of primary importance for making computer purchase decisions at home.

When IBM realized they weren't dominating the home market, they applied their business experience and figured it was price point. They introduced the PC Jr. It bombed, because it turned out that the price wasn't the dominant factor. It was a very confusing time for them, especially as the clones entered the market about this same time. They came out with the XT, and the AT, and while businesses were buying them, home users were less interested. For one of the first times in their history, IBM was out of their element.

Later, as the first Macs arrived, the school districts who had contracts with Apple saw them primarily as an upgrade, even though they were an entirely new architecture. The concept of a graphical OS was certainly part of the sale, but I'd bet most of it was inertia - we bought from Apple last year, we'll buy from them again this year. (School board members are elected officials, and are certainly not hired based on intelligence.) Nothing wrong with it, but again, Apple was courting them as heavily as they could while IBM remained focused on the businesses who h

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[Billly Gates]

The eMacs and education edition iMacs are not sold at the store. They are more limited and have slower graphics and lesser icore5 processors than the ones you see at teh Apple store for consumers. But yes it is still $200-$300 more. If it costs someone $75 to $100 an hour to fix it pays for itself over 2 - 3 years

Re:Apple is a tech company?

[fyngyrz]

Silicon Valley businesses are hardly typical of day to day businesses though are they.

Quite true. Silicon valley businesses have more people who are smarter about computers than most businesses. And they choose Macs. Interesting, eh? Maybe it's that powerful Unix underpinning, and all the amazing dev tools that run under it. Or the desktop tools. Well, of course, both run at once, so maybe it's both, eh? Or maybe it's the lack of a need to worry about virus software. Or the insanely great multiple-monitor support. Or maybe its the fact that a Mac can simultaneously run one or more sand-boxed Windows VMs in windows (or on multiple monitors, or both), and so covers the whole Windows ecosystem as well as the Mac ecosystem. Or maybe it's because smart computer folks consider total cost of ownership instead of just the purchase price, thereby determining the actual cost of owning a computer. Or maybe it's the fact that those claiming that they can put together an "equivalent" machine for the same, or less, money are actually completely full of shit, and Macs are actually a far superior value as compared to Windows PCs, not just over time, but also as an initial purchase. :o)

Nah... on second thought, I'm sure Ma and Pa Kettle's budget purchase of a "Dude, you're stuck with a Dell!" is the better choice. After all, they've brought us "Dancing with the Stars" and "Faux News." How could they be wrong?

Apple is #1?

[Pence128]

Why doesn't anyone else take their laptops and add an aluminum case and 50% markup?

Re:Apple is #1?

[jo_ham]

Because for some reason everyone else thinks that they way to be successful is to make their laptops as cheap as possible in a race to the bottom. There are some other nice laptops out there, but almost no (none?) other all-metal case laptops - it's seen as too expensive.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

That's a very good question, and it should lead you to consider that maybe "aluminum case and a 50% markup" isn't all there is to Apple's success. But it probably won't.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because it is too expensive. At least, for the 90% of people out there that are not using Apple laptops. They'd rather get the $300 laptop that they hand down in two years when they go out and buy their next $300 laptop.

Yeah, I know, "resale value" blah blah...90% of people don't care. They'd rather save the money up front and not have to gamble on a future return selling it on Ebay...especially when the rest of that 10% of users all have the same idea. There was just an article today about making sure you hurry up and list your iPhone before the new one comes out because the market's about to get flooded.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Pence128]

You're right, they'd also have to make an operating system that wasn't created by trying to use floppy disks as toilet paper.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no resale value when the battery needed to be replaced at the end of 2-3 years. That's going to cost $100+ and by then the machine is "slow" etc...

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in the PowerPC days, but now a Mac laptop (to use the OPs example) is nothing more than a PC laptop with an aluminum case and a markup (I won't claim 50%, as it varies depending on the model and the PC maker. Let's look at what a modern Mac has

x86 CPU? check
A complement of ports? check, though usually the Mac is missing those commonly found on PCs like SD cards, CF, Dock expanders, expresscard etc.
ATI or nvidia graphics card? check
LCD? check
Trackpad and keyboard? check
LiIon battery? check
Optical drive? check, though Macs still don't have Blu Ray.
Runs Windows and Linux? Check

In fact, no matter how it's spun, there is *no* difference between a Mac and a PC laptop of equivalent specs (talking logic and features, not design), except the Mac will be several hundred dollars more expensive. What's the difference?

An aluminum case. Nothing more, and even that differentiation is disappearing as PC manufacturers make laptops with the same case and no markup, meaning you pay for a glowing plastic logo.

Re:Apple is #1?

[bky1701]

Of course it isn't what is responsible for Apple's success. The one and only cause of that is marketing. Marketing like no marketing has ever been accomplished before. What other business has the same level of blind following from their users as Apple? None I can think of. Factual and ideological arguments alike seem to have no effect on them, because the reason to buy an Apple device is cultural. iAnything is a status symbol, and therefore, actually becomes more valuable as the price goes up.

Of course, it helps that "Macs are good for graphics|music|grandma|etc" and that they are supposedly easier to use, but it is being a status symbol that makes Apple the most valuable company in technology, not better technology.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are differences including build quality and EFI. Some PC laptops use UEFI but it's not the same. In fact it's a headache that apple uses a nonstandard EFI setup that boots off of hfs partitions instead of fat (for boot loader).

Not to mention you buy a Mac for several reasons including the OS, the quality of the hardware and maybe some vanity.

Also, not all Macs have optical drives anymore. Apple is getting rid of them and they didn't want to license a blu-ray video player so they didn't bother to ship a blu-ray drive. You clearly haven't used a Mac if you think they're identical to a PC.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

where is the PC equivalent of a macbook air for hundred of dollars less?

Re:Apple is #1?

[hedwards]

I thought about getting a Mac last time I needed a new laptop. Their cheapest model was nearly 3x as expensive as an inexpensive Thinkpad and the one I ended up with was fully upgraded for much less than the Mac. I ended up spending a bit over $600 for the Thinkpad and I would have had to pay $999 for the MacBook air and I would have had only 2GB of RAM rather than the 4GB I ended up with.

They do include some nice touches, but I couldn't personally justify spending an additional $400 for what was basically just style.

Re:Apple is #1?

[jjohnson]

What does this even mean?

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

For casual browsing, nothing. For gaming, the m11x. Smaller, equal/better CPU, dedicated GPU, bad panel, worse build quality.

Re:Apple is #1?

[tonywestonuk]

I use a computer that has a unix command line, comes pre-installed with Apache/PHP, runs office and photoshop natively.... And just works.

Really..... I dont mind paying over the odds for a computer that does this.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

The m11x is not hundreds dollars less, yet weighs more. If you make it more comparable with a solid state drive, it's more expensive than the top-of-the line macbook air.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Cinder6]

Marketing explains initial buy-in, but not repeat customers. If Apple's success were only marketing, they would have to attract ridiculous amounts of new customers to replace the ones fleeing the platform. That's not the case. Last I read, the iPhone has something like an 80% retention rate. The iPhone 5 is the most-anticipated phone out there, and Apple has said nothing about it. Clearly, people must buy their products for more reasons than Apple's heavy marketing push.

For myself, I tend to buy Apple products because I know the build quality will be there, and I like OS X. Can I spend less for a faster machine? Yup (this is especially the case when you're coming up to a hardware refresh). Will it run OS X? Not without a lot of hassle and research to make sure that everything will be compatible. When I was in high school, that kind of thing was fun, but now I just want to get to work and do other, more enjoyable things. Will another PC have the same top-notch build quality? Not in that price range.

(That's ignoring the form factor. I know many people are attracted to the iMac for the simplicity of needing only one cord for a fully functional system. I don't know of any PC manufacturers that are currently offering this.)

Status? The only Apple device anyone ever sees me with is an iPhone, and that's hardly a status symbol--almost everyone I know has one. The iPhone was a status symbol when it first came out, but not now. Apple may be a status thing for some people, but if so, that's ridiculous.

Other companies don't understand Apple, and so they think they can charge as much as Apple without doing all the other things that make Apple products such a joy to use for the average person. They are slowly learning that this isn't the case.

Many posters on Slashdot don't understand Apple, and so they post ignorant messages about Apple only being successful because of marketing. Their marketing is good. It's what gets lots of people to try their products for the first time. But marketing isn't what makes people repeat customers.

Re:Apple is #1?

[smash]

To some people, OS X is important. I'd pay several hundred dollars if i could run OS X on my home PC. The fact that I needed to upgrade, so just bought a macbook pro and got nice aesthetically pleasing hardware is a bonus.

I have blu-ray (burner) in my desktop PC at home. I've used it about 3 times in the past 2 years. No blu-ray is no great loss.

Re:Apple is #1?

[smash]

To me, multitouch, OS X and the all metal case is easily worth a few hundred bucks.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because for some reason everyone else thinks that they way to be successful is to make their laptops as cheap as possible in a race to the bottom. There are some other nice laptops out there, but almost no (none?) other all-metal case laptops - it's seen as too expensive.

Nah, not too expensive, too heavy.

(See Sony vaio TZ2)

Re:Apple is #1?

[shutdown -p now]

Why doesn't anyone else take their laptops and add an aluminum case and 50% markup?

Uh, pretty much every single major laptop manufacturer has either announced or already shipped a model that's exactly that in the last few months.

Re:Apple is #1?

[das_io]

It seems to be not that easy.

Re:Apple is #1?

[dkf]

Why doesn't anyone else take their laptops and add an aluminum case and 50% markup?

Because it's not one thing, it's lots of small things. For me, the big benefits are a full Unix environment, really good suspend support (really important for a notebook) and convenient backup software. Oh, and I haven't broken the case yet, unlike with the PCs I had before of the same age. :-) YMMV.

Re:Apple is #1?

[TheLink]

Not for everyone though. My boss got a Macbook Air then gave it away because he just couldn't get used to OSX, the keyboard etc ( e.g. lack of a delete key). My colleague in front of me has a Mac that mainly runs Windows 7 :).

I don't like OSX nor Macs myself (takes too much effort to use if I want to keep 30+ windows open[1]), but I know lots of people do and OSX+Macs work well for their workflow. Different strokes for different folks etc.

At work I've got a Macbook with OSX in front of me. I use it mostly via ssh, and mainly use a Dell with Windows 7.

However I'm not sure what will happen in a few years - Microsoft seems to be losing the plot. Might be as stupid as McDonalds switching focus to doughnuts just because they notice Krispy Kreme suddenly doing better than them.

[1] I don't see the point of wasting time closing and relaunching applications and windows if the machine has enough RAM to keep them open, and I can still mentally keep track of them. Any crappy GUI can manage 3 windows with elegance, to me what's important is how the OS helps you when you have 30 or more windows.

Re:Apple is #1?

[vux984]

No blu-ray is no great loss.

Unless you've got a 100+ bluray discs and your scratching your head as to why a thousands dollar+ laptop has no option to play them.

I've got a Macbook pro, and the lack of blu ray is pretty annoying.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you been smokin' Foo? It seems you and your kind have been slinging the same old hash so long, that you believe your own hope. If you are honest about the facts, you would admit that Apple has been producing new and exciting products for years. And these are not useless trinkets we're talking about. Most of these products are ground breaking, first of it's kind like the iPod, and the iPhone and the App Store with quality controls for the first time, and the iPad and the 9 hour battery that actuaaly lasts 9 hours as advertised and the entire ecosystem that offers solid value for the money.

Who in their right mind would spend money for an iPad clone with only a hand full of apps with questionable integrity (it reminds me of the early days of personal computing, where you often bought software based on the authors claims only to get it home and have it crash your system. There was no app cop to monitor QA.)

No my friend, Apple does not have hordes of cool-aid drinking suckers buying their products for fun or fad. like I said, if you are honest about it, Apple is being rewarded for delivering truly exciting and life altering products that is leaving the competition shaking in their boots.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its also computationally faster than the top of the line Macbook Pro. Different usage areas really.

Re:Apple is #1?

[thetoadwarrior]

I'd rather pay more for something that will last more than 1 or 2 years than pay $300 every 1 or 2 years. That's why some people are poor they only look at the number they're paying at that very second and don't realise they're paying much more they they should be in the end.

Re:Apple is #1?

[thetoadwarrior]

Marketing gets people in and good money spend on hardware and and software designers keeps people in. The PC world's race to the bottom isn't self sustaining and that's why Apple will probably out live every PC manufacturer out there. HP is done for. Dell will probably be next.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Cico71]

Marketing explains initial buy-in, but not repeat customers.

Care to back up this with some facts?

If Apple's success were only marketing, they would have to attract ridiculous amounts of new customers to replace the ones fleeing the platform. That's not the case.

Care to explain why you assume that a ridiculous amount of old customers would flee from a mediocre product with good marketing? Or you simply think this is how it works?

Last I read, the iPhone has something like an 80% retention rate.

So, by the same reasoning, Internet Explorer 6 was a great product (mind that there were already plenty of good, free, alternatives). Some times initial marketing (which may include borderline monopolistic tactics) gets the bulk of the people. After, people don't leave for more simple reasons. Resistance to changes, complete disinterest in technical specifications, etc. etc. The vast majority of people are not geeks, they invest time in learning the tool, they build repositories of personal information around it, it takes something they consider a big thing to convince them moving to something else and it's not necessarily something technical.

The iPhone 5 is the most-anticipated phone out there, and Apple has said nothing about it.

This kind of indirect marketing is so old you can smell dust from miles away.

Clearly, people must buy their products for more reasons than Apple's heavy marketing push.

So you make up some premises and then you, clearly, draw your own conclusions? Fair enough, you may as well pat on your back yourself because I'm not going to do it.

Status? The only Apple device anyone ever sees me with is an iPhone, and that's hardly a status symbol--almost everyone I know has one. The iPhone was a status symbol when it first came out, but not now. Apple may be a status thing for some people, but if so, that's ridiculous.

You know, this seems to make some sense at first sight. What is considered as a status symbol is completely in the eye of the beholder which in turn depends on his social class (ok, I know it's not fashionable to talk about social classes anymore, get over it). People from the middle class used to consider the iphone as a status symbol at the beginning. Now everyone has it, still lower class people that can only afford less-than 100$ phone are considering it a status symbol. Rich people and public personalities buy stupid phones with diamonds for thousands of dollars to be sure to be different.

Other companies don't understand Apple, and so they think they can charge as much as Apple without doing all the other things that make Apple products such a joy to use for the average person. They are slowly learning that this isn't the case.

They understand Apple very well. Windows Phone 7 is much more a joy to use for the average person, just try it for a week or so. Yet, it's too late and MS never had someone that was able to generate fanatism among their customers (thanks God)

Many posters on Slashdot don't understand Apple, and so they post ignorant messages about Apple only being successful because of marketing.

But we are lucky because we can read you profund and enlighted thoughts and explanations, strictly facts-based. Not.

Their marketing is good. It's what gets lots of people to try their products for the first time. But marketing isn't what makes people repeat customers.

You're simply ignoring that brand loyalty is made up of a lot of things and, in many cases, quality and consumer advantages are down at the bottom of the list. In general, people are like sheep, they don't think a lot and are are generally under-educated. It just takes repeating messages, showing shiny bells and whistels and "group thinking" (or should I say un-thinking?). This is well-known since decades. Go, figure, try to find some dusty books, err sorry an App, with Noam Chomsky writings.

Re:Apple is #1?

[jo_ham]

It doesn't have the ability to play Blu-Ray because Apple said "no way" to all the DRM nonsense they'd have to build in to make a "trusted video path".

I thought slashdot was all about trying to eliminate these anti-consumer practices?

They still have DRM on the iTunes store for movies and TV, but it's not as bad as blu-ray for what it requires of the underlying hardware and software being "trusted".

Re:Apple is #1?

[jo_ham]

Amusing, especially this:

You're simply ignoring that brand loyalty is made up of a lot of things and, in many cases, quality and consumer advantages are down at the bottom of the list. In general, people are like sheep, they don't think a lot and are are generally under-educated. It just takes repeating messages, showing shiny bells and whistels and "group thinking" (or should I say un-thinking?). This is well-known since decades. Go, figure, try to find some dusty books, err sorry an App, with Noam Chomsky writings.

So, I'll reply to that with your own quote:

But we are lucky because we can read you profund and enlighted thoughts and explanations, strictly facts-based. Not.

We are going in circles!

Re:Apple is #1?

[TheRaven64]

Lots of people add an aluminium case. They just don't add the rest. For example, my last 3 Mac laptops have all had a backlit keyboard - if I use it in low light, I can still see the keys. The last two came with MagSafe power connectors. I managed to kick the power cable on my ThinkPad and drop it from the top of a chest of drawers (to its credit, it survived). I kick the power cable of my MacBook Pro regularly, and it doesn't have a problem. The screen on this machine is the best I've seen on any laptop. It's bright enough to use in direct sunlight and isn't one of the horrible glossy screens that seem so popular elsewhere. FireWire 800 means that I can daisy-chain a couple of external hard drives and still get good performance from them - when I was doing video editing I had one for the source material and one for scratch renders, and even my G4 PowerBook was pretty fast in that configuration. ThunderBolt means that I don't have to worry so much about expandability - I can plug in PCIe devices externally, and I can even drive two external displays if I'm going to be in the same place for a while. The trackpad can simultaneously track 4 fingers, so multitouch gestures work nicely.

My last MacBook Pro had four years of daily use before being retired to less strenuous uses and I expect the new one to last as long. My ageing PowerBook still works, although it doesn't get much use anymore.

As to the 50% markup, let's see what a similar spec machine costs from Lenovo. The ThinkPad W520 seems to be about the same spec as the one I bought. I need to bump the CPU up to 2.2GHz from the stock 2GHz to make that the same. The display is only 1600x900, while mine is 1680x1050, but it has an option of 1920x1080 for £144 more. We'll go with the cheaper one since it has an nVidia GPU with 2GB of RAM while the Mac has an ATI GPU with 1GB of RAM. I'll leave it with the stock 4GB of RAM, since I upgraded mine to 8GB with third-party RAM (buying RAM from laptop makers seems expensive from anyone, but Apple is probably the worst in this regard). The ThinkPad doesn't have the option of a 256GB SSD, so I'll go with the 128GB SSD for now. The price is now £100 more than I paid for my MacBook Pro, yet:

1. Lacks Thunderbolt.
2. Has no backlit keyboard.
3. Has no FireWire 800
4. Has no multitouch trackpad.
5. 128GB SSD instead of 256GB
6. Has a lower-res screen
7. Is 50% thicker and 10% heavier.
8. Can only drive two external displays if one has a VGA connector (how quaint).
9. Has a flimsy drive-pops-out optical drive, not a slot-loading drive.
10. Has a combined headphone / microphone port, while the MBP has a separate analogue/digital line in/out ports.
11. Doesn't have that aluminium case you thought was so important.

If Apple is adding a 50% markup, then Lenovo must be adding at least 75%. On the plus side for the ThinkPad, it does have ExpressCard (my last MBP did as well - I never used it) and eSATA (less useful to me than FW800, because I can't daisy chain external disks with it, I can only plug one in at a time). It also has USB3, which may become useful at some point in the future, .

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketing explains initial buy-in, but not repeat customers.

You aren't much of a marketer if you believe this. Successful marketing involves a hell lot of more than just cheating people.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketing explains initial buy-in, but not repeat customers. If Apple's success were only marketing, they would have to attract ridiculous amounts of new customers to replace the ones fleeing the platform. That's not the case. Last I read, the iPhone has something like an 80% retention rate. The iPhone 5 is the most-anticipated phone out there, and Apple has said nothing about it. Clearly, people must buy their products for more reasons than Apple's heavy marketing push.

your iPhone 5 example would, to me, point out that the fanbase is what some people claim they are. completely illogical.
the iPhone 5 will probably be bought mostly by the same people that have an iPhone 4, which will still be working very damn well. however it will be behind one number. the information released on the iPhone 5 is pretty much nothing, which means that there is no way to know if its really gonna be worth it, with the exception of speculating a fair bit.

the marketing of iPhone just makes it so that you always get the feeling that the next version is an improvement, no matter what they would do. there is only 1 iPhone being made, if the new version is released, its almost bound to be better then the current version. you do not have to check stats or anything to find that out. it is the only next version, so it should be better. this makes people care way less about actual stats. on android, the next version of your current manufacturer could be worse then the next version of another manufacturer, you check which one suits you best, you shop around a bit. thats where stats matter.
and that seems to be the main reason why its very hard discussing real stats with somebody that is a fan of the iPhone. they just never had to search any real stats since the first model they bought. there is but one next version, well, the next version will be an improvement over your current one, you do not have to read up on it to know if its worth it. you could, but thats most likely because you are low on cash.

Re:Apple is #1?

[DJRumpy]

Apple is the industry highest in customer satisfaction for the 8th year in a row. This isn't due to 'marketing' although I know /. loves to write off Apple as such. Apple makes solid products with good design and durability. For day to day wear and tear, the OS is excellent, and doesn't require 3 hours to update, the ports don't break after 12 months, and the power cord doesn't crack the motherboard. The hinges don't fall off, the screen doesn't crack, the bottom doesn't turn brown from excessive heat, it doesn't toast my nuts, and it's generally just pleasant to use. I know these things are hard for a geek to accept. It doesn't have the latest/highest GHz CPU, although it's certainly not at the bottom either. Same for the video card. Apple machines are just well built and it's customers know this. Marketing might get an initial customer, but why would they rank a 'mediocre' product in the top of it's class 8 years in a row?

The anti-Apple crowd on Slashdot will never understand Apple. They will dismiss it as overpriced (in reality it's prices are comparable to any other major vendor like HP), a 'fashion statement', 'gay', etc. These emotional rants don't hold up well to what the market has to say. Apple is now the largest in market cap, the highest in customer satisfaction, and produces products that have the highest customer retention, and the highest customer anticipation for new products. The Slashdot crowd was full of jeers when the iPad came out with claims that it would be gone in a month, wouldn't sell, was overpriced, pointless, etc. It has found a huge market following which no other company has failed to match yet they have been trying for a few years now. All of the bad predictions have fallen flat on their face.

Apple doesn't build a spec system. They never have. This is something that drives a tech geek crazy. Their drive to strap a quad core into a tiny compact space gives you abominations like a 12 pound laptop. Might be great for bragging rights, but it's not very useable to a typical end user. The benefit is questionable to the non-techie. They found out that although the average end user might ask a geek for tech advice, the resulting advice doesn't mean anything to them. They found they can just buy it and it works. They don't need to know how many cores, how much memory, what graphics GPU it has, etc. The 'consulting' role that the typical geek had for computing products is entirely useless for an Apple product. I have to wonder if some of the ill will for Apple comes from that. I was one myself until I bought my first Macbook after experiencing Vista. I haven't looked back since. That original Macbook Pro is still trucking along just fine too. Something my 5 other household laptops from various other vendors have failed to do, due to various failures.

Dismissing Apple as 'fashion' is probably a primary reason why Microsoft is no longer top dog and falling in market capital. Foolish.

Care to explain why you assume that a ridiculous amount of old customers would flee from a mediocre product with good marketing? Or you simply think this is how it works?

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell used to sell the M11x R1 at $600, and (later) the R2 at $700. Currently both laptops are priced equally.

Re:Apple is #1?

[realityimpaired]

They're out there. The laptop I'm typing this reply on has a magnesium case, that's both light, and inexpensive. And it's in a laptop that cost me $400 at regular price... you can get inexpensive laptops with metal cases, you just need to know where to get them from.

Incidentally, an Aluminum case would not be too expensive... with the price of petroleum these days, it's probably cheaper than a plastic case, actually. Al is one of the most abundant minerals found on this planet (behind only Oxygen and Silicon for its abundance), and is dirt cheap. Literally... some kinds of potting soil are more expensive than aluminum.

Re:Apple is #1?

[realityimpaired]

Actually, for casual browsing, try a Dell Vostro v130. I have the linux version of that laptop, and yes, it weighs about 100g more than the 13" Mac Air, it's still very light, very portable, and very usable for about everything (non-gaming) that I've thrown at it. It also handles the few games I have bothered to play (nothing taxing, just stuff like TuxKart and Frozen Bubble) with ease.

Though I suppose it wouldn't really fit the question posed, as it wasn't $100 less than a Macbook Air, it was $800 less than a 13" Macbook Air.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Voyager529]

Lacks Thunderbolt.
Has no backlit keyboard.
Conceded, though PCs are starting to get them.

Has no FireWire 800
But many are starting to ship with USB 3.0. My laptop does have a FW800 port, but for those that don't, it's trivial to get a FW800 Expresscard, a slot that the MBP doesn't have.

Has no multitouch trackpad.
Synaptics has been doing multitouch trackpads for over a year now; all of the HP Envys have them, and again I'm certain that many others in the price range do. Personally I can't stand multitouch and disable it all, but I can def do that by choice.

128GB SSD instead of 256GB
Out of the box, you're looking at the fact that that's what Lenovo offers. You value SSD drives, but I'm perfectly happy with spinning rust, and getting them aftermarket is invariably cheaper. I'll half concede this one, because Apple is about the only vendor who's got an economy of scale for SSD purchases.

Has a lower-res screen
Again, this is Lenovo specific. 1920x1080 screens are incredibly common amongst laptops in the price range.

Is 50% thicker and 10% heavier.
Admittedly I'm probably biased since my Origin EON17 is nearly 2 inches thick, so EVERYTHING is thinner than it, but this is only a selling point to people who value thin laptops, serving no other function. 10% heavier isn't a huge deal unless you're hiking.

Can only drive two external displays if one has a VGA connector (how quaint).
Knock VGA all you want, you'll find PLENTY more monitors that talk VGA than DisplayPort. Heck, if you walk into a board room with a DisplayPort, you're gonna need a VGA adapter anyway because you'll be hard pressed to find a projector that talks DisplayPort. Give me VGA any day.

Has a flimsy drive-pops-out optical drive, not a slot-loading drive.
This is also a good thing. The pop-out drives have no problem with odd-sized discs, and replacements can be had for $50 on eBay and pop out with two screws; the procedure takes less than five minutes even if you're not the least bit technical. Slot loading drives...not so much.

Has a combined headphone / microphone port, while the MBP has a separate analogue/digital line in/out ports.
Handy, and conceded, but again USB/Expresscard slots can fill the gap for under $20 if it's really necessary...and to be honest, if you're going to need both external headphones and an external mic, you're probably better off using a separate audio interface anyway.

Doesn't have that aluminium case you thought was so important.
Not the GP, but Thinkpads (by your own admission) do manage to use some pretty impressive plastic, since I've never seen a broken Thinkpad case.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Hadlock]

a 'fashion statement', 'gay', etc. These emotional rants

This isn't really what I would use to describe the average poster's comments about apple on slashdot. Slashdot nerds are pretty stoic for the most part. That's great that you like Apple products, but your arguments were redundant five years ago. This is coming from a previous Powerbook/Apple owner.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Nemyst]

MagSafe is patented and other manufacturers can't license either the connector or the technology. So much for stupid manufacturers, eh?

As for the rest, you're comparing 16:9 to 16:10. I wouldn't be surprised that Apple converts to 16:9 at some point, the trend seems almost inevitable. I don't like it, but we're all stuck with it. You're also comparing the MacBook Pro 15" with the optional 1680x1050 screen; default is 1440x900.

For the rest of your comparison, much of it is disingenuous. Thunderbolt? Intel's been working with Apple to get it in their machine. Backlit keyboard? I'll give you that. Firewire? Meh, it has USB3 and eSATA, which are far more common standards; daisy chaining is of such a limited interest I don't think 99.99% of Apple users know what you're talking about. Multitouch? Nah, it's only got a TrackPoint, one of the best input devices on the market. SSD? I wouldn't buy an SSD from either of them; you'll get OEM crap. Lower res? Not if you pick the optional screen, which you did for the MacBook. Thickness and heaviness are expected, this laptop is a tank and built like one. If you want sleek and thin, you don't shop ThinkPad. The optical drive is probably far sturdier than you'd think and I'm pretty sure they're still user-replaceable, unlike Apple's. Headphone and microphone are there just because you need one, but again this is a ThinkPad, you don't tend to do entertainment on them. Aluminium case, no, but ThinkPads are probably sturdier than MacBooks.

And then what you're not saying: this laptop has a fingerprint reader (useful to some, especially businesses), the 2.2GHz CPU is a *quad core*, which Apple does not have, and it's got freaking *Quadro* graphics, which are in a whole other class. Just look for Quadro desktop GPUs versus GeForce desktop GPUs of the same category, you'll see. Whether you need Quadro is irrelevant, the cards themselves cost a boatload more. Also, it has a VGA port, which for many is essential. DisplayPort is just a pain most of the time.

Apple does have rather heavy markup on their stuff. They make excellent products, but they're comparatively expensive.

Re:Apple is #1?

[walterbyrd]

1) It wouldn't work. People pay huge money for the name brand. It is similar to the world of high-fashion.

2) I'm not sure that Apple is making big money on it's PCs anymore. These days, I think Apple is making the big money on music and iDevices like iPhones, IPads, and iPods.

Re:Apple is #1?

[jo_ham]

Yes, it's very abundant as an element but it is very expensive to extract - 1% of the UK's entire electricity capacity is used by a single plant that extracts aluminium by electrolysis. It's cheaper when it's recycled, since you already have the metal, but it all has to come from somewhere.

Elemental abundance is no guarantee of being cheap.

Re:Apple is #1?

[TheRaven64]

MagSafe is patented and other manufacturers can't license either the connector or the technology. So much for stupid manufacturers, eh?

The exact implementation of MagSafe is patented, but any other manufacturer could come up with a magnetic power supply connector - they just don't.

You're also comparing the MacBook Pro 15" with the optional 1680x1050 screen; default is 1440x900

I'm also comparing prices. Even with the optional screen, the Mac worked out cheaper.

Thunderbolt? Intel's been working with Apple to get it in their machine.

And Intel is shipping the controller chips to anyone who wants them. Apple is the only company to be shipping them now, although other manufacturers have said that they will.

Firewire? Meh, it has USB3 and eSATA, which are far more common standards;

Really? I've not yet seen a single USB3 peripheral, and the only eSATA drives I've seen also have other connectors, so it can't be that common - and it's only for drives. Meanwhile, I have two LaCie drives that have USB2, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 interfaces, so eSATA would be no use and USB3 would run at USB2 speeds which are slower than FireWire 400.

daisy chaining is of such a limited interest I don't think 99.99% of Apple users know what you're talking about.

Not sure about other manufacturers, but LaCie disks come with two FireWire 800 ports so you can plug them into each other. It's only of limited interest if plugging in more than one external drive is of limited interest, but I'd suggest that the set of people who want to connect exactly one external drive is probably quite small...

Multitouch? Nah, it's only got a TrackPoint, one of the best input devices on the market.

Bullshit. I have a ThinkPad, and the TrackPoint is horrible to use. It needs acceleration to move around the screen at a sensible speed and then you lose accuracy. The button placement is horrible, so you really need two hands to do basic pointing operations. Meanwhile, on the Mac I can point, select, scroll in two dimensions and zoom with one hand.

SSD? I wouldn't buy an SSD from either of them; you'll get OEM crap.

Performance seems fine with mine. I rarely find the disk speed a bottleneck anymore. For typical use, it's fairly common for it to hit 20-30MB/s random read and write speeds, and it peaks at about 200MB/s if I really tax it.

Lower res? Not if you pick the optional screen, which you did for the MacBook.

The ThinkPad was already £100 more expensive. If I pick the optional screen, it's £250 more expensive.

Thickness and heaviness are expected, this laptop is a tank and built like one. If you want sleek and thin, you don't shop ThinkPad.

The optical drive is probably far sturdier than you'd think and I'm pretty sure they're still user-replaceable, unlike Apple's.

I guess I imagined the part in the instructions telling me how to replace the optical drive in my MBP...

And then what you're not saying: this laptop has a fingerprint reader (useful to some, especially businesses),

No it doesn't. That's an optional extra, for another £10. And it is insanely easy to fake (I occasionally do some work for defence contractors and they find those hilarious).

2.2GHz CPU is a *quad core*, which Apple does not have

Yes it does. I compared identical CPU models. The MBP that I am typing this on has 4 real cores, 8 with hyperthreading.

it's got freaking *Quadro* graphics, which are in a whole other class. Just look for Quadro desktop GPUs versus GeForce desktop GPUs of the same category, you'll see. Whether you need Quadro is irrelevant, the car

Re:Apple is #1?

[jedidiah]

When you can't lock people into your proprietary OS, you have no way to force them to buy your products.

I can buy an Asrock one day, a Giada the next, and then go buy a Zotac.

Apple customers are much more trapped than that.

Plus a good part of the market would rather have a better keyboard, or more RAM, or a bigger disk, or a GPU that's not a joke.

The superficial elements just aren't that appealing, especially when severe technical compromises are a part of the whole package.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Toughbook has a Magnesium alloy case dose that count?

Re:Apple is #1?

[jo_ham]

You're just trolling now, but thanks for playing.

More RAM? Bigger HD? Are you serious? Apart from the MBA, which is a very specialised ultra-light both of those things are configurable on Macs.

Keyboard is a matter of personal preference, but I can't say I've had any issues with it (I use the Bluetooth keyboard, but it's the same physical mechanism as the one used on the laptops). Some people are going to want things like a delete key (not just backspace), but you can remap your keys as you like, and some people are not going to like the action but it's a long way from a "bad" keyboard. Do you have a cite for "most of the market wants a better keyboard" - even a series of separate articles about how bad the Apple laptop keyboard is will do.

As far as GPUs go, the 15" and 17" MBP are pretty well specced for laptops I think. If you want much more grunt, buy an alienware concrete slab "luggable" laptop. It's well known why the 13" only has a HD3000, and it's not Apple's choice (unless they want to keep using Core 2 Duo CPUs, but then you'd complain about them being "using old technology")

"Severe technical compromises" is just baseless trolling, especially given the high consumer ratings that Apple products receive - there just isn't the groundswell of opinion that they're as bad as you are making them out to be.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Pence128]

Windows is shit. I thought that would be pretty obvious.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll accept your challenge

I have a Mac Airbook.
It is my first Apple product that I've purchased, although I'm familiar with Apple products since something called the Apple ][.
My first impression is that it is equivalent to a 10 year old laptop running XP, or maybe not even that advanced.
One of the big differences between this device and the PC/Windows world is I have more control over what my computer has and can do.
Let me take your bullets one by one.

Lacks Thunderbolt - I have to use the Thunderbolt port to drive a DVI display. This Apple adapter that allows me to do this also prevents me from using the Thunderbolt port for any other concurrent purpose.

Has no backlit keyboard - maybe the particular PC that you're comparing with doesn't, but they are readily available as addons, (I am using one such Logitech keyboard, or as built in, (check out Dell's laptop offerings).

Has no Firewire 800 - that may be true, and yet I can get an addon for my desktop that will give me Firewire if I really wanted it.

Has no multitouch trackpad - based on personal experience, and I know this will very from person to person, but I'll rather use a two button mouse with a built in scroll wheel any day

128 GB SSD instead of 256GB - for the models that you're talking about. For my PC/Windows desktop, I can add a 2 TB hard drive for less than $100, (on sale). How much does it cost to add 2 TB storage to your Mac?

Lower res screen - again, for the models you are using. With other models of PCs, the results might be different.

Is 50% thicker and 10% heavier - maybe, but still very acceptable.

Can only drive two external displays if one has a VGA connector - my Air book can only drive one VGA, or one DVI display at a time also. And if the PC I was using has a displayport, (a fairly common port these days in PCs), I could drive multiple displays concurrently from the one port.

Has a flimsy drive-pops-out optical drive, not a slot-loading drive - again from experience, the drive-pops-out type of device has shown to be more trouble free.

Has a combined headphone / microphone port, while MBP has a separate analog/digitial line in/out ports - my Airbook doesn't, but I could buy an addon that would give me this capability for my PC if i wanted it.

Aluminum case - I usually don't buy my computers based on their looks. I buy them based on function and value, so this is not important to me.

Now, let's discuss some of the things that an Airbook lacks - like an RJ45 connector. In order to hook up an ethernet cable, I have to buy an adapter from Apple that will allow me to connect an ethernet cable to a USB port. This does two things, 1) its ties up one of the two USB ports on the machine. 2) Because it's USB based, the line only runs at 100 Mb. The rest of the computers in my house are all connected at 1 Gb.

The keyboard - I ended up buying an official Apple external keyboard to use with this Airbook. The built in keyboard is what is know has a "chicklet" style keyboard. It's the same kind Radio Shack used on their Color Computer back in the early 80's. It's the same kind IBM used on their ill fated PCjr. Most people do not like this style of keyboard for serious typing. The official Apple external keyboard is just a larger aluminum and "chicklet" keyboard, and it connects via the second, and last, remaining USB port.

The only other ports this computer has, is a place to plugin a set of headphone, and an external power supply, (which has a magnetic clamp to hold it in place - which I do like).

The fact that this Apple computer has so many short comings when compared to other laptops or desktops, (lack of function, high cost), should not be surprising. Apple is not in the computer business. They are in the entertainment business. They sell entertainment devices, (iPod, iPad, iPhone). Even their computers are heavily geared towards providing an entertainment experience, and not as a computing platform.
Because of this direction, (entertainment vs data processing), "With Apple, it's form over function." And that carries through in everything they do.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Pence128]

Here are my comparison picks.
The odd screen resolution was the hardest to match, if you can sacrifice a few pixels, you can save even more.
(Future Shop was the first place that came to mind)

Re:Apple is #1?

[jjohnson]

Referring to floppy disks threw me off. I was all "what does my coffee cup coaster have to do with it?"

Re:Apple is #1?

[jedidiah]

> You're just trolling now, but thanks for playing.

That's Apple Newspeak for possessing an opinion contrary to Apple dogma.

Macs are configurable to a limited degree. Whereas I can choose from hundreds of vendors. Some of them will even build a box for me based on a wide array of choices they offer me. I can use any GPU, any CPU, and as much of whatever I want. It can be as small as I want or as large as I want.

All of that derives from the fact that I am not stuck with a single hardware vendor.

> "Severe technical compromises" is just baseless trolling

No. That's just a clued in perspective on the new Mini or the MBA.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

that magsafe connector is patented by Apple. Despite magsafe connectors having been implemented in other consumer electronics for decades.

attach it to a computer -> apple gets a patent -> apple's innovative technology is the reason for their dominance

Re:Apple is #1?

[jo_ham]

See, this is the problem:

That's Apple Newspeak for possessing an opinion contrary to Apple dogma.

Then you go on to say, after O point out that Macs are configurable and specifically address the fact that the Macbook Air is an ultra portable with extremely limited upgrade and config (like other ultra portables from other manufacturers), you then say:

>

"Severe technical compromises" is just baseless trolling

No. That's just a clued in perspective on the new Mini or the MBA.

You're simply trolling. The MBA and the Mini are not representative of the bulk of Apple's machines - they have "normal" laptops that are just as configurable as PC laptops, they have desktop machines that are similarly as configurable as PC desktops (and with multiple expansion options), as well as an all-in-one that is reasonably configurable for what is essentially a static laptop with a desktop screen.

Instead you seem to think your argument will stand as a "clued in perspective" if you use the MBA and the Mini as "proof" that the Mac line as a whole has "severe technical compromises". It's just laughably disingenuous.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. They are putting crap in a plastic shell and selling the for the same price as Apple's. Try finding a major brand-name laptop with the same specs as a Mac Book Pro and you'll see that they are around the same price

Re:Apple is #1?

[antifoidulus]

All your comment proves is that you are an idiot, not a whole lot more. You are probably the type of person who walks into a nice italian restaurant and screams that they suck because they don't have curry...well if you wanted curry then why did you go to an Italian place? Likewise, if you wanted a computer with an ethernet port, THEN FUCKING BUY A COMPUTER THAT HAS AN ETHERNET PORT! The macbook pro has a gig port, as do tons of pc notebooks. The fact that you are too stupid to check the specs of an expensive piece of equipment before you buy it says a lot more about you than it does the equipment.

Re:Apple is #1?

[TheRaven64]

Not to mention that the other complaints are all about how underpowered the MacBook Air is in comparison to other laptops. No shit - it's an ultraportable, or whatever Intel's new buzzword is. The complaint makes about as much sense as complaining that a Mac Pro doesn't fit in his bag and work on the train.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one seems to realize that you can also with Apple's blessing and the right micro tools pop open your Mac Book Pro and upgraded the memory to 8GB for under $50 from Amazon saving a $150 plus you can upgrade the HD to 750 GB or better at 7200 RPM for about $100 from Amazon saving another bunch of money.

You can add SSD. The Thunderbird is a killer feature when used properly instead of buying a cumbersome dock used by pre 2011 PC laptops. Buying or even recommending just about any other laptop today pretty much labels you as a moron without a clue. It is either that or your are a relative of Steve Balmer.

Why even those who run Microsoft Windows in the Far East buy Apple Mac Book Pros as a Mac Book Pro is the best Windows laptop the Chinese can buy.

Re:Apple is #1?

[TheRaven64]

No one seems to realize that you can also with Apple's blessing and the right micro tools pop open your Mac Book Pro and upgraded the memory to 8GB for under $50 from Amazon saving a $150 plus you can upgrade the HD to 750 GB or better at 7200 RPM for about $100 from Amazon saving another bunch of money.

I bought 8GB of RAM for less than the cost of getting Apple to upgrade the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, but the cheapest 256GB SSD I could find at the time was more than Apple was charging, so I let them install that. That said, RAM upgrades have got a lot harder with the unibody machines. My old PowerBook and MacBook Pro just had a cover over the RAM and you could unscrew it and add more. The new machine required removing 10 screws and taking off the bottom of the case. Not for the faint of heart...

Re:Apple is #1?

[Gen_Music]

£400 for an 8GB RAM Upgrade in 2011. Yeah, that's Applespeak for 'Configurable'. :S Let's make a comparison of maybe the simplest facts about life in Appleville. If you want a particular part for a PC, you wait till it comes out. Then you buy it. Everyone on the market is completing to give you the lowest price, so once the R&D has been paid for by the early adopters, the parts become fairly cheap. For example, the i7 2600k 3.4Ghz is $300 on buy.com because it hasn't yet covered its R&D. (I'm aware that most of slashdot is US based so I will talk in dollars despite being british) In Appleville, where I have my holiday home, parts come out when Apple wants them to and upgrade parts never change price. For example, in the UK it still cost £400 ($600 with the debased currency from the depression) to upgrade a Mac mini 2011 to 8GB (from 2GB). On Apple US that cost is $300, still massively more expensive than doing it yourself. Apple consistently takes advantage of the dumb masses in ways that I find morally dubious. I was in the Apple store last week and I asked the 'genius' how I could get a Mac if it was too expensive, expecting him to offer me finance options, instead he tried to sell me a 2010 Mac Mini refurb off the website. I asked him if a 2.4Ghz core two duo was fast, his eyes bulge and he goes 'Are you kidding! And it comes with 2!!! Gighertz of RAM' Totally expecting me not to understand a word of what he said. It's pitiful really.

Re:Apple is #1?

[jo_ham]

So your argument that the guy was "dubious" was that you wanted a Mac but it was "too expensive" and you thought he was *wrong* for avoiding finance?

I'm not sure you understand how finance works. Put it this way, if you bought that Mac on finance, and let's say it cost a nice round £1000, how much do you think you will end up paying overall?

Hint: more than £1000.

As far as RAM config goes, it's always more expensive to get it done by Apple - that's nothing new, but it's not really the point of the argument - the point was that you *can* change configurations if you want (either at the time of purchase, or afterwards). I was addressing the original troll's assertion that Macs were not configurable and then giving the example of the Macbook Air as representative of all the models on offer as far as config options go.

If you want to put 8GB of RAM into a Mac Mini then knock yourself out - it takes about 5 minutes and costs about £50 or something on Crucial (I think 4GB sticks are about £20 each?). It's not like Apple made it difficult to do - you don't even need a screwdriver if I remember correctly, the bottom panel just twists off.

Re:Apple is #1?

[Anonymous Coward]

So to properly summarize, the heavily and expensively modified ThinkPad has:

1. MIL-SPEC ruggedness (Apple has nothing on this)
2. Vastly superior graphics
3. Doesn't support a proprietary and generally useless connector (Thunderbolt)
4. Has no backlit keyboard (of course if your screen isn't bright enough to light the keyboard, I'd argue the user isn't bright enough to type)
5. Doesn't have a largely proprietary horribly expensive connector (Firewire)
6. No multitouch trackpad
7. The SSD commentary is worthless the varying types and quality of the SSD is more important
8. functionally the same screen resolution
9. is heavier by 0.35 pounds (no clue where you pulled your 10% out of but it smells bad)
10. is thicker by 0.29 inches (no clue where you pulled your 50% out of but it smells bad)
11. has a removable optical drive instead of a proprietary horribly expensive to replace one
12. has the quickly becoming standard unified headphone/mic combination plug
13. offers vastly superior cpu availability
14. supports up to 32GB of RAM instead of a pathetic 8
15. two microphones for noise cancelling (the MBP has 1 omnidirectional just to make sure it captures as much noise as possible)
16. has builtin cellular/mobile connectivity
17. up to 10.8 hours of battery life (MBP offers only 7)
18. a warranty that goes as much as 3 times the length of the Apple warranty
19. does indeed lack the patented, proprietary, generally worthless for people intelligent enough not to kick cords, MagSafe power cord

Now I don't know where you pulled your thought that these are similar specced, but you are clearly wrong. You are attempting to compare two devices at roughly the same price. One of them from a design brand and the other from a commodity brand. You may freely argue that the design is worth it, but comparing specs between a design brand and a commodity brand, the commodity brand will always have better specs for the price.

Re:Apple is #1?

[TheRaven64]

MIL-SPEC ruggedness (Apple has nothing on this)

I don't see this anywhere in the ThinkPad, and having worked in military R&D I've never seen ThinkPads recommended for battlefield deployment either - things like the Toshiba ToughBook go there.

Vastly superior graphics

I checked the benchmarks, and the GPU in the MBP did slightly better than the one in the ThinkPad.

Doesn't support a proprietary and generally useless connector (Thunderbolt)

I guess you won't be buying any laptops after this year then, since most of the major manufacturers have said that they're going to start shipping ThunderBolt.

Has no backlit keyboard (of course if your screen isn't bright enough to light the keyboard, I'd argue the user isn't bright enough to type)

When the ambient light is low, you want to reduce screen brightness to reduce eyestrain (and improve battery life)

Doesn't have a largely proprietary horribly expensive connector (Firewire)

IEEE 1394 is proprietary now?

has a removable optical drive instead of a proprietary horribly expensive to replace one

Just replaced the optical drive in my old MBP. The replacement cost £30 and I installed it myself using directions from the Apple service manual.

has the quickly becoming standard unified headphone/mic combination plug

How is this a good thing? It doesn't support digital audio I/O, and it only lets you connect headphones or microphones, not both - no hands-free headset for you...

offers vastly superior cpu availability

Okay, now I know you're talking shit. Both machines had exactly the same CPU model

has builtin cellular/mobile connectivity

I'll give you that one, although I've never seen the advantage of having it built in since it means you have to get a separate data plan, rather than just using your phone.

up to 10.8 hours of battery life (MBP offers only 7)

Having owned a ThinkPad, I'd be surprised if a machine with a quoted 10.8 hours actually gets more than 5.

a warranty that goes as much as 3 times the length of the Apple warranty

It comes with a 9 year warranty? Nice!

Now I don't know where you pulled your thought that these are similar specced, but you are clearly wrong.

Uh, by comparing the specs that both list. Your contradiction seems to be by stating that all of the places where the MBP has better specs than the TP are somehow disadvantages. Which smells strongly of fanboyism. I won both ThinkPad and Mac laptops, and in terms of build quality there's little difference. The ThinkPad is more modular, largely to save costs when shipping customised models, but that also comes at the cost of reliability - I'm glad my ThinkPad is so modular because I've had to replace most of the modular components...

Re:Apple is #1?

[vux984]

It doesn't have the ability to play Blu-Ray because Apple said "no way" to all the DRM nonsense they'd have to build in to make a "trusted video path".

And then pretty much built it anyway to support iTunes HD.

BalmerMicrosoft Loozes

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Microsoft but Balmer's Microsft has lost the race.

Very soon [B]Microsoft will be 50th in the world as the rate of decline accelerates.

Bye bye M$. Bye bye Seattle Campus. Hello India. Dear Lord its so hot there ... come on ... give us a break. We'll melt.

#$%%%^^^^&DFDF^^^%%^^##EE$%%%^^^5%%%

Stock market fluctuations

[bjourne]

Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[jo_ham]

In other words "now that Apple is on top, the metric is meaningless". In the years when Apple was still a modest size (in terms of market cap) it was always touted as how much they "didn't matter" on the world stage.

Funny how the perceived value of a yardstick changes depending on which measurement comes out on top, isn't it?

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[BBCWatcher]

If you believe in rational markets -- I do, if the time horizon is long enough -- the market is simply valuing the respective companies according to the net present value of their expected after-tax profit streams. (That's an oversimplification but only slightly.) Looking at profit growth, IBM has outpaced Microsoft for several years running now. If the market simply extrapolates that trend forward, at some point IBM's and Microsoft's valuations had to cross.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

What to make of this?

IBM now faces bankruptcy over big calculator - By Danny Rubenstein
http://www.campustimes.org/2011/02/17/ibm-now-faces-bankruptcy-over-big-calculator/

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Apple and its billions of dollars in cash and ever increasing profit and incredible branding are completely unrelated to the real world.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[MacTO]

Yeap, because there is a great anti-Apple conspiracy out there.

Or maybe Slashdot is a pretty diverse place, and it always has a group of people who thinks that particular metric is meaningless and another group who thinks that metric is valuable. (Plus plenty of people who don't care either way.)

And maybe you just think that the attitude has changed because you feel violated at any perceived attack upon Apple.

Or maybe not. Maybe there is a vast anti-Apple conspiracy and I just don't know about it because I haven't been let in on it yet. If so, where do I apply. A high ranking conspirator position would be appreciated. ;)

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[hedwards]

I don't recall people using that metric previously. MS was the largest company as much by market cap as by install base. The latter being of great concern to most folks that cared about it at all. Market cap is just how much you can convince people you're company is worth and unless you're buying or selling your own shares it's a meaningless metric.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[houghi]

If the market simply extrapolates that trend forward, ...

That is one big if. Especially when you talk about long term.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[BBCWatcher]

Yes, it is one big if, but it's an if for both companies. Nobody has a perfect crystal ball, but it's simply inevitable that valuations flip when one company (IBM) consistently delivers superior profit growth compared to the other (Microsoft). That's particularly true when what forward-looking information we have suggests that Microsoft's twin franchises (Windows and Office), representing the majority of Microsoft's revenues and profits, are continuing to become progressively less relevant as predominantly non-Microsoft mobile and tablet devices supported by predominantly non-Microsoft cloud services and sold at non-Microsoft prices gain marketshare.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[rolfwind]

Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.

Bullshit. Then that would mean Joe Blow could open a company on Monday and have it be worth $300B by Friday's IPO.

Sorry, things don't work that way. A company's value is based on the information that is out there, how well people analyze, how well that corresponds to reality, plus hype or lack of.

So yeah, there can be a HUGE fudge factor in any stock price not to mention fraud. Hell, the future is also unpredictable which causes one guy to value stock differently than another, as well as their understanding of the industry/markets. But to say there is 0 correlation is the type of head-in-the-sand cynicism as well, demanding nothing less than utter perfection in order for a metric to prove it's worth.

It's the same type of absolutism that will say spedometers are worthless because the tires can sometimes spin, giving a wrong value, and that it won't tell you anything at all about your vertical velocity if the car were to drop into a 100ft sinkhole all of a sudden. Therefore it should be tossed out.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[rolfwind]

While I agree with you in general, there are some type of stocks I would never invest in, like, say, airlines. They always seem to be going out of business, and yet the brand lives on and on (most of the time).

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[randomsearch]

I don't believe in rational markets. The problem with such idealistic economics is that they ignore the fact that participants may act motivated by emotions, by short-term interests, and by trying to 'play outside the rules' of the markets. Some people might describe this failing as simply not taking human nature into account, but I think it is unfair to tar the whole human race with criticism of the behaviour of a small proportion of the population dealing in finance.

In many cases, hedge fund employees value companies by estimating how long the bubble will last, i.e. if I buy into Apple, will I be able to sell those shares for a profit in the future? Is there another speculator coming along after me who will be prepared to pay even more in the hope that the shares will keep rising? This kind of speculation is nothing more than gambling, and relies on emotions of hope and fear. And it just isn't that unusual.

RS

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[SvnLyrBrto]

I wouldn't go so far as to call it a conspiracy, but you people have been irrationally attacking Apple, and anyone who owns, uses, or likes their products, for just about as long as I can remember.

In elementary school, before I even know what "gay" was, I was called a faggot for having an Apple ][+ at home instead of a more acceptable C64 or IBM PC. Then came the Macintosh and "Only an idiot would use a mouse and graphics instead of the keyboard.". Then the Performa line was crap and going to be the end of the company. And what about that shitty Newton ("Eat up Martha.)? Then Apple was "beleaguered" and about to be finally wiped out entirely by IBM/Microsoft/Sun/Dell/Be/etc. and anybody who still owned one was just a zealot. ("Shut the company down. Liquidate. And refund the money to the shareholders.") Then, back to homophobia, as computers in colors other than beige were obviously only for fags. And what kind of moron buys a computer without a floppy drive, anyway. OS X? No vendor will ever port their software. And only a fascist would consider a Unix-like OS that's not GPL. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.". And so on and so on and so on.

And every time an Apple story shows up here or on Ars, it's just more of the same. You people are nothing if not predictable. Now, while Apple is the most valuable company trading; stock market metrics are worthless as a real measure of a company's success. But as soon as some other company edges Apple out for the #1 spot, you'll be harping on about how so-and-so's market cap just demolished Apple's and obviously they're doomed and anyone who still owns a Mac is a zealot/moron/whatever.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[thetoadwarrior]

I think he's right. Take a big diverse site like Reddit and try searching for Mac users taking digs at Windows and Windows users taking a dig at Mac users. I think you'll find the windows users are far more insecure. To help balance it out I'm going to explain why they do this.

Windows fanboys get upset over all the time waiting for their shit ugly machine to boot up or the time spent cleaning up after all the security problems so they feel the need to take their hate out on Apple or even Linux users. Also Window users are more likely to know nothing about their computer and find it scary and they don't want the world to change so they have to spread hate about Apple or Linux so minimise the odds of them having to learn another OS.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[jo_ham]

It's not a conspiracy as such, but but there are an awful lot of people on here and other sites - including some who register specifically on Mac-centric sites - in order to base their self worth on telling Mac users what "sheep" they are and how we're all "fanbois" and that our intelligence and sexuality is defined by our choice of operating system.

Back in the early days, as I said, before Apple was the behemoth it is today, it was often called "dying" due to its share price and stock performance.

Now that it's become big, you have a flurry of posts calling the entire stock market a "poor indicator of a company's performance" because they don't like the company with the big market cap.

In the Samsung lawsuit threads I have people telling me that "well, Samsung could just buy Apple a few times over! Apple are messing with the wrong guys!" and linking to stock market sites and market cap lists etc, so it seems like an ok metric to use to gauge Samsung's size and performance, but not Apple?

Oh, you'll also get the "Apple's share price is massively overvalued and they don;t pay dividends!" line too, despite people pointing out their their P/E ratio is actually pretty reasonable compared to other technology companies.

Like I say, I'm not "feeling violated" for any perceived or actual attacks on Apple - I don;t base my well being on whether people on the internet think my choice of operating system sucks and it is entirely too tiring to have to change sexuality and intelligence level when I switch between my OS X and Ubuntu machines. I'm not sure how anyone manages that!

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[jo_ham]

You're being disingenuous if you are claiming that the long term history of a company's share price and its overall market cap are "meaningless" in determining how it performs.

It is certainly not the be all and end all, but calling it meaningless is laughable.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm not the superstitious (read: religious schizo) type. So I don't "believe".

Also, have you lived on the moon for the last century? How many times do there have to be studies and experiments proving humans, and hence markets, do not act rationally, before you "believe" it?

I know that most people's perception has nothing to do with reality for that exact reason: Ignorance and wishful thinking.

So anyone who thinks that that delusional valuing has anything to do with real worth (the worth of the work they do in terms of energy it costs and energy it required to acquire the skills to do it), is also seriously delusional.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[cyber-vandal]

Stop saying that the overpriced limited functionality iPad is a laptop replacement and I'll stop calling you fanboys a bunch of idiots.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

If you believe in rational markets -- I do, if the time horizon is long enough -- the market is simply valuing the respective companies according to the net present value of their expected after-tax profit streams. (That's an oversimplification but only slightly.)

It is an oversimplification, but not a slight one. Pick up an Econ 101 textbook, and read the chapter headings to find some factors that can throw it off:

* Imperfect information.
* Externalities.
* Transaction costs. (This one is small in your example)
* Winner's curse (the tendency of auctions to set a price at the highest value any participant will accept)

You could make a case that the stock price converges to the best guess, given current information available at low cost, to the highest bidder on the stock, of the net present value of their expected after-tax profit streams. You could also argue that we don't have a better way to value things. But these are very different statements.

Medical analogy: These two statements are not the same:

1) Amputation is the best way to treat a broken leg.
2) Amputation is the best way we know to treat a broken leg, given our limited knowledge of medicine.

#1 is sort of true, but it closes the mind to the fact that we should look for something better.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company.

If you had a better idea of the company's worth (i.e. how much you'd make if you bought all the stocks and waited until the world's end), you'd have better things to do with your time and money than complaining about the uselessness of the metric. Examples of those better things would be buying or shorting the stock.

So why aren't you doing that? Oh right.. there's that if.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple recent success just means that now we have more fags out there than before.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

And every time an Apple story shows up here or on Ars, it's just more of the same. You people are nothing if not predictable.

And that's what Apple's critics don't get: why they're so immediately and reflexively dismissed by the Apple crowd. To the long-time Mac people, it IS "just more of the same". No matter that, in the here and now, Apple is no longer the scrappy little underdog fighting the good fight and has grown into a company that's closing in on the power and evil levels of Microsoft.

The anti-Apple crowd have been anti-Apple for stupid and illegitimate reasons for so long that they've long since shot their credibility. And now that there ARE very good reasons to be anti-Apple, their cries fall on deaf ears. It's like story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Too bad they didn't learn anything from that fable.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yeap, because there is a great anti-Apple conspiracy out there... maybe you just think that the attitude has changed because you feel violated at any perceived attack upon Apple.

Or maybe this site spends too much time fanning the flames with sensationalist stories and there are too many opinionated thickies to notice that.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[bjourne]

No I don't believe in rational markets, because the argument is based upon circular reasoning; The item is worth whatever the market price is because the market price is what determines what the right price is. The market price just doubled for the item. Was there any discernable cause for the price hike? Nope, but since the item costs twice as much now it must be worth twice as much! Here's the rub, the quarterly profit is also worthless as a measurement of how well a company is doing because it is a variable that can be tampered with in hundreds of ways and does not tell you much about the long-term future prospects of the company.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Karlt1]

Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.

Okay, Apple also has higher revenue and profit and predicted to have higher growth rates.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Pence128]

If you bought an Apple II+ before the C64 was released there's no point in replacing it, but the C64 was a much better machine. Like the commercial said, a third more memory at half the cost. It also had superior graphics and sound.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Pence128]

There are also 10 times more Windows users than Mac users. All else being equal, there should be 10 times more Windows fanboys than Mac fanboys.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Pence128]

A flurry of posts? I count one. As to intelligence and sexuality remarks, trolls be trolln'.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[jo_ham]

On this article, yes just one. But it's been a frequent staple of Apple articles to mention that the stock is "massively overvalued" and that "market cap means nothing". You only have to go back and look through - they pop up all the time, from about the time that Apple's market cap exceeded Microsoft's.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

If you believe in rational markets -- I do, if the time horizon is long enough --

So... every time the markets do something stupid (like, for instance, bringing down the economies of the West)... fuckos like you just say "We just have to wait long enough to see rational behaviour."

Face it. Your precious markets behaved like dogs left with 10 dishes of food when their owners went away for 10 days holiday. They didn't eat one per day - they scoffed the lot at once and fuck the consequences. Rational my fat arse.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[HereIAmJH]

It is certainly not the be all and end all, but calling it meaningless is laughable.

Tell that to the investors of Enron and Worldcom. Currently it's not fashionable to consider book value, and that is fortunate for many companies because their stocks are over valued. Currently AAPL trading at 5 times it's book value. An over valued stock only retains it's value as long as people continue to drink the koolaid.

Taking the top 3; AAPL 5 times book value, IBM 9 times book value, and MSFT 3.5 times book value. Even Google has a better share to book value ratio, and they don't manufacture anything.

The housing market is an excellent example of what happens when an investment is overvalued and the market loses confidence.

Re:Stock market fluctuations

[Anonymous Coward]

You believe in "rational markets"? You must be living in a universe where we didn't have a financial meltdown in 2008 and in which the European Union isn't about to completely fail to stabilize its debt crisis. I'm assuming by "rational" you mean that markets are systems which — like any system — produce predictable results given proper understanding. Two of my friends with econ majors (from very good schools) watched in shock as their parents' retirements evaporated and the value of their homes took a dive.

Markets are unpredictable. The sooner people understand that, the better off the world will be. Capitalism is fundamentally based on growth. It takes all of two seconds to realize why that makes it a problematic economic system.

For the first time since MAY

[md65536]

What happened to the last time this happened?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/22/0232216/ibm-now-officially-worth-more-than-microsoft

Re:For the first time since MAY

[Farmer Tim]

This is the last time it happened. It just took that long to filter through the Firehose.

Re:For the first time since MAY

[Tr3vin]

Hey, it is the firehose not the neutrinohose.

Prospering After Its Founder

[BBCWatcher]

It's extremely difficult for a major company to sustain its business leadership after its founder leaves. IBM was fortunate they had a son at the helm who was every bit as smart as his father. After the son the company lost its way but then found a new, better path after huge, painful adjustments. That's the exception, though. Apple had a near-death experience losing Steve Jobs, but the founder returned and put Apple back on track. It'll be interesting to see what happens now that Tim Cook is in charge, but we won't know the impact for several years. Likewise, Microsoft has yet to prove it can prosper in its post-founder era, and that experiment has been running a lot longer now. True, Ballmer has been with Microsoft a long time, but he's no Bill Gates, Thomas Watson (Jr. or Sr.), Steve Jobs, or even Lou Gerstner/Sam Palmisano.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates could easily come back if he desired. He's what, 56? I recently read some memo he made back in 94 regarding the web and in it he had a lot of what's happening today, including tablets, cloud services, web browser as OS metaphor, etc. Really MSFT is arguably responsible (thru the PC) for the web as we know it today, despite IE being so hard to make look good with the same web pages that also work on Firefox. They made the market. Apple is getting some of it but they are a consumer products company. Anyway, my point is that Gates could come back if need be. Microsoft is a money machine that was purposely hobbled to avoid getting broken up in anti trust. They can turn the money back on, I guarantee it.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[antifoidulus]

In my opinion it's actually the opposite problem at Microsoft. Judging by the way the company acts I wouldn't be surprised to see that the desk calendar on the top execs desk is still the one from 1997. Microsoft has yet to seem to come to the realization that it's biggest competition no longer comes from within the company but from outside. The past decade at Microsoft has pretty much been the top execs trying to empire build within the company and completely ignoring outside threats. As such Windows Servers market share has eroded significantly(mostly as users switch to Unix), their mobile strategy was until recently a hodgepodge of incompatible platforms, and their last OSs claim to fame was that it wasn't nearly as terrible as it's predecessor, as it continues to lose market share to OS X and Linux, both of which Ballmer has dismissed as being essentially irrelevant despite their continued success.

Things are finally starting to change at Redmond(for instance the Windows and Office UI is going to be much more consistent in Windows 8, theoretically), but it might not be enough to pull MSFT out of it's slow decline.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[qmaqdk]

So you're saying Windows ME and Vista was on purpose?

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[houghi]

What about all the other big companies that have no founding father at the helm? That would mean a lot more companies like chemical companies, energy, banks, ...

I would say it is harder for a small company to do so, yet there are many that do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[BBCWatcher]

No, a consistent user interface is not going to be enough. WebOS has a consistent user interface. Microsoft has a business model problem, and that's tough to fix. Application services are becoming more Web-based (cloud-based if you prefer), and Microsoft's Internet Explorer is no longer particularly popular. It's no problem running Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, mobile or tablet, to access the Web. (In many respects it's a better experience than IE on Windows.) Microsoft doesn't control much content distribution, doesn't control the dominant application ecosystems for mobile and tablets, and hasn't extended its Office franchise much less dominated in those dominant mobile and tablet ecosystems. (And those mobile and tablet ecosystems are doing just fine without Office, thanks.) On the back end, Linux dominates in the delivery of cloud-based services, not Microsoft. There are lots of business model problems here, and they only seem to be getting worse.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[rtfa-troll]

Mod parent up. This has class. ROTFLOL. It's far beyond our normal Microsoft shilling. I'm still not 100% sure this isn't just too far out for humour. It may be a guy who invested all his life savings (and more? a bank loan???) in Microsoft and just desperately, desperately has to believe. Anyway get yourself an account and if you can write shill posts this funny we guarantee to mod you up.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[shutdown -p now]

Anyway, my point is that Gates could come back if need be.

This question comes up again and again in the interviews, and every time he plainly says that he has different interests now, and quite enough money for himself to fund them (duh).

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Anonymous Coward]

On the back end, Linux dominates in the delivery of cloud-based services, not Microsoft. There are lots of business model problems here, and they only seem to be getting worse.

So, Azure, which is used also by Apple, simply don't exists. I bet you still think that Microsoft is running Bing on Linux because you've seen it with your eyes on Netcraft... beside the akamai word, that's it...

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[maxume]

Market cap isn't terribly instructive to how much a company is prospering.

For instance, the market is putting Microsoft at about the same value as IBM, but Microsoft has about 70% of the revenues of IBM, and about 150% of the income of IBM.

If Microsoft were not growing, that comparison wouldn't mean very much, but the problem investors have with Microsoft is that it isn't growing fast enough, not that it isn't growing.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Anonymous Coward]

the founder returned?

I thought he resurrected. He was spotted wearing the same outfit...

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Rich0]

Nobody said that it didn't exist. However, if you are writing a new web-based application, who targets MS as the server platform? Sure, it probably makes sense if you have a Windows-based app that you've been upgrading since the 90s, but if you're making something new you'd be an idiot not to base it on linux. It isn't about which platform scores marginally better on the latest benchmarks - it is about license costs and freedom from supplier control.

Why would you pay all those license costs for Windows, and be stuck with a limited number of suppliers? If you go the linux route it is cheaper to run yourself, and there will always be 40 bazillion companies that can host you since none of them have to secure agreements with anybody to do it. Plus it is less start-up cost for a start-up.

Can you run servers on Windows - sure! Does anybody do it unless they're somehow getting a deal that has nothing to do with the servers?

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Rich0]

As apps become more web-based with relatively thin clients if not outright browser based, we'll see a lot more OS diversity on the desktop/etc. Right now there are still enough apps in the typical user's library to keep them on Windows. Ten years from now I'm not sure how that will end up. When you do everything on the web then you don't really care if every desktop in your house runs a different OS. You just need to know how to launch a browser.

Games will probably still be more OS-specific, unless somebody comes up with something that works for browsers on the higher end.

I think cheap apps will also be an issue. Companies want too much money to run their online versions compared to buying a CD for $50 once every five years and maybe sharing it with 3 friends. If they charged $10/yr people would be more likely to buy into the online model than with the current model where many of these companies want $10/month or whatever.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Anonymous Coward]

Definition of a desktop: a place to put my smartphone.

This is what MS needs to learn.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Larryish]

Carly Fiorina would be an improvement over Steve Ballmer.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Pence128]

Ten years from now you won't even have to launch the browser. The OS will be the browser. Or the browser will be the OS, I'm not sure. This would reduce the PC to pretty much a thin client. Think Raspberry Pi hardware. Unless Internet connections get a lot faster (ping and bps) you won't be playing many games on it. They'll be left to consoles.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[bryan1945]

But can she dance like a monkey on stage?

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[Larryish]

No, but she sucks like a Hoover.

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[bryan1945]

Touche!

Re:Prospering After Its Founder

[lewiscr]

The OS will be the browser. Or the browser will be the OS, I'm not sure.

So MicroSoft was ahead of the curve when they tied IE to Win95?

right. now they just own everyone else

[decora]

"say, i couldnt help but notice you are trying to sell a mobile phone. all sorts of people might want to sue you over that, you know, what with patents and all. why dont you pay us, say, 10% of your income, and we can arrange it sos nobody patent sues you?"

shhh goldman is listening

[decora]

there are 'people in washington' who might not approve of your 'tone'.

Re:shhh goldman is listening

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah... using 'Goldman' and 'people in Washington' together... nice.

AAPL is barely above XOM as of the end of Friday's trading; it could be off the top of the list by Monday. Same for IBM and MSFT. The market right now is so ridiculously volatile that relative valuations mean dick.

This being Slashdot, I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned MSFT's downfall in the server category... Windows is being supplanted by Linux in the datacenter, and that has to have some impact on the bottom line.

Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Of course, Apple is still the #1 company by far."

Would'nt have expected that in 1999...

Re:Apple?

[ChrisMaple]

IBM has greater sales than Apple; Apple has higher profits. Exxon-Mobile dwarfs them both in sales and profits.

Take into account

[PopeRatzo]

Say what you want about IBM, Microsoft and Apple, but only one of those three companies had a strategic alliance with the Nazis.

All companies do bad things, but building automated systems for the Holocaust is taking it to a whole 'nother level.

Re:Take into account

[Anonymous Coward]

Only one of the 3 was around at the time... :/

Re:Take into account

[ADRA]

I love how you personify companies as people, much like countries do. I ask you to name a single IBM employee that was in the company at the time. I'd actually be somewhat skeptical if there are any active employees that were alive for said event.

Re:Take into account

[hedwards]

Just out of curiosity, what precisely does that have to do with anything? Are individuals that were involved with the company back then still running it? Is there even a single employee working there that was employed by IBM at the time?

It's about as relevant to IBMs continuing operations as Henry Ford's known support of the Nazis.

Re:Take into account

[Belial6]

Microsoft and Apple simply didn't exist at the time, so that is an unfair comparison. Knowing that you want to be a fair person, I ask you this... What countries have Microsoft and Apple refused to do business with because of human rights violations?

Re:Take into account

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's interesting how companies want to be considered persons, with all the rights thereof (but none of the responsibilities, of course). It cuts both ways.

Re:Take into account

[sourcerror]

I guess IBM's slogan should be - as variation of Google's "Don't do evil" - "Automating evil".

Re:Take into account

[PopeRatzo]

Just out of curiosity, what precisely does that have to do with anything?

Corporations want to be treated as persons, with all the rights of individuals. Well, with rights come responsibility.

If an individual person had done for the Nazis what IBM did, he would have gotten the death penalty at Nuremberg and hung.

Why is IBM still doing business?

Re:Take into account

[PopeRatzo]

Microsoft and Apple simply didn't exist at the time, so that is an unfair comparison.

Yours is the only correct response. Yes, we have to evaluate corporations based on what they do and with whom they do business. They cannot be given a pass just because they are profit-driven.

Who knows what MS and Apple would have done in regard to the Nazis. But it is worth remembering that not all corporations decided or sought to do business with them.

Predict "activist shareholder" knee-jerk reaction

[ibsteve2u]

In the form of "Microsoft either needs to move everything else to India, or O/S, Office, and development tools should be split apart and individually sold off to enhance shareholder value. We can call what is left DEC."

Stock prices reflect future, not today

[perpenso]

Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.

Stock prices are not meaningless, they are simply misunderstood and misused. They are not a measurement of how a company is currently doing, they are an estimate of how a company will be doing in the future. The current state is just one of several variables that goes into that estimate. Regrettably when an estimate reflects a relatively large change in either direction, good or bad, speculators pile on and inflate or deflate that price. Apple is far more vulnerable to such speculation than IBM. As suggested by their respective beta's, 0.7 for IBM and 1.3 for Apple.

While far from perfect stock prices are meaningful in a normalized form like the P/E ratio. Apple at a P/E of 15, IBM at 14, Microsoft at 9, HP at 5, ... You don't see anything meaningful or reflective of the real world in these numbers?

Perhaps I'm old fashioned but for current health I like metrics based upon cash flows. A little more difficult to engineer than EBITDA.

Re:Stock prices reflect future, not today

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.

Stock prices are not meaningless, they are simply misunderstood and misused. They are not a measurement of how a company is currently doing, they are an estimate of how a company will be doing in the future. The current state is just one of several variables that goes into that estimate. Regrettably when an estimate reflects a relatively large change in either direction, good or bad, speculators pile on and inflate or deflate that price. Apple is far more vulnerable to such speculation than IBM. As suggested by their respective beta's, 0.7 for IBM and 1.3 for Apple.

While far from perfect stock prices are meaningful in a normalized form like the P/E ratio. Apple at a P/E of 15, IBM at 14, Microsoft at 9, HP at 5, ... You don't see anything meaningful or reflective of the real world in these numbers?

Perhaps I'm old fashioned but for current health I like metrics based upon cash flows. A little more difficult to engineer than EBITDA.

The measures you use assume that changes in price and cash flow have a gaussian distribution. In general, they do not. Here is a good book that explains the problems with your methodology:

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515

Re:Predict "activist shareholder" knee-jerk reacti

[Anonymous Coward]

"We can call what is left DEC?" Last I heard, Compaq got what was left of DEC. Then HP bought out Compaq.

Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

There's got to be an internet porn company bigger than IBM? CISCO would have gone under 10 years ago if it wasn't for internet porn.

How transient dominance is

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that long ago, Cisco had the highest market cap in the world. Fame is transient in the high-tech world. Screw up one generation of products, and you're history.

Re:How transient dominance is

[Attila Dimedici]

Fame is transient in the high-tech world. Screw up one generation of products, and you're history.

Unless you are IBM. IBM has been a major player in the high tech world since before WWII. There are only a handful of companies worldwide that have been major players in any industry for as long or longer than IBM has been a major player in high tech (there are a couple who have been around much longer than IBM)..

One simple way to show this

[SmallFurryCreature]

Calculate the effect of the iPhone 5 being banned from europe vs the next Galaxy phone from Samsung. This battle is raging right now. For Apple, this is a major part of their business, it brings in a lion share of their profit.

For Samsung? They got plenty of other ventures, a block will hurt their bottom line but not in any significant way. Samsung is larger then Apple in many ways BUT not that much larger, it is just far more diversified.

It isn't fair to say Apple if a bubble stock because Apple isn't to blame for how much outsiders are willing to pay for its shares but during the bubble companies with promise were valued over companies with results. Had an ordinary factory turning out a steady profit for several centuries and wanted an investment during the internet bubble? NOT INTERESTED, burning through investor capitol like it was bonfire night, that was the ticket to get the investors piling their cash on the fires.

Apple if of course not doing that at all but what is its value based upon? A very narrow product line that depends on an economic climate in which people are willing to splurge.

Now whether this is a successful strategy depends on what you think the economic crisis is having and going to have. SOME seem to think that ALL people will feel the pain but this hasn't been the case. The crisis has hit hard but Apple is doing very well indeed. The real result of the crisis seems to be that the divide between have's and have not's is increasing. The iPhone buying bankiers got their social wellfare benefits and the factory workers have to sell of their house to pay for it. The rich not only kept their money, they got more of it. More to spend on more gadgets while the poor got less but they already didn't have enough to buy them anyway. So, some will steal them, getting the rich to buy even more...

Meanwhile poor Samsung has to actually pay its employees decent wages and run factory after factory with middle class (No republicans, middle class does NOT include people making 250.000 or more per year) workers...

Valuing Apple high makes more and more sense, since the valuing is done by the rich who got their wellfare check over the working man's back.

Apples stock will only crumble once the poor of America realize that the American Dream is the opiate of the masses and rise up. And that won't happen. Apple got EXACTLY the right business model for the USA. Poor Americans.

Valued is far from the right term

[mevets]

Monied might be more appropriate. I doubt that either MicroSoft or IBM are "valued" by anybody. They are simply players.

Rational action vs knowledgeable

[Anonymous Coward]

Markets are comprised of people. To speak of rational markets as if the market or the whole body of people itself is rational makes no sense. I'll assume you know this(a reasonable assumption, I think) and you mean the actors involved. However, this has some problems.

Suppose everyone was given the 'choice' to either have x% of their income stolen from them or they could put it in the stock market. Now suppose also that CEOs are taxed more based on salary than if they take stock options, bonuses, and all that. Suppose that the stock market grew 20 times in trade volume in just 30 years, where before it was almost perfectly level vs several other economic and population measures. Further suppose that the additional money coming from people avoiding theft are not investors, but speculators who know nothing of the companies they invest in. Additionally, suppose that inflation drives these speculators even more to the stock market to preserve their savings. Lastly, stop supposing because this has happened starting around the 80s.

So, while the actions of the individual to keep their money and avoid theft and devaluation is entirely rational, the market is driven by ignorant and scared people who were herded there by coercion. Knowledgeable investors are drown out by the investment banks who manage the huge tidal waves of money sloshing around from people with 401Ks and the like. They in turn have a deep understanding of the political system that keeps them sustained through their ruinous mistakes.

So while reality ruins systems that are unsustainable in the long run and permits only valid behavior to survive, the long run to avoid the manipulations of intervention would have to be quite far. Markets fail in these current economic conditions precisely because people are choosing the best path open to them.

Apples, Oranges and Grapes

[tgd]

Apple is a media company, first and foremost.
Microsoft is a software company, first and foremost.
IBM is a services company, first and foremost.

Re:Apples, Oranges and Grapes

[BBCWatcher]

A lot of people get that wrong about IBM. For example, IBM's software business generates more profit than its services business. IBM is simply the most successful technology solutions company for business (and government) with the most extensive vertical integration of hardware, software, and services. If you think of IBM as primarily one of those businesses, you're entirely missing their business model. Their business model is not altogether unlike Apple's -- IBM and Apple have very similar philosophies in how to succeed -- but they don't compete.

Re:Apples, Oranges and Grapes

[Nemyst]

Actually, from looking at IBM's history, IBM is a clever company, first and foremost. They adapt to the markets and do whatever is profitable for them at the time, and do it well.

Re:Apples, Oranges and Grapes

[Karlt1]

Apple is a media company, first and foremost.

http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/29/comparing-revenues-apple-and-microsoft/

Now look at the sliver of Apple's revenue that comes from iTunes.

Now they are the master!

[cparisi]

The former master previously dethroned by their apprentice is now the master!

Not 'monied' either...

[Junta]

This is market cap based. 'Value' is the closest word for that. It doesn't directly indicate cash on hand or how much debt they hold. It doesn't indicate directly how highly viewed among potential clients they are. It indicates the perceived value of IBM by stock market participants. This translates well to their ability to borrow and *usually* indicates a healthy company with positive cash flow/good standing with their customers.

While IBM is doing well enough at creating and selling goods and services, but they get a bit *extra* credit with stockholders by using a large chunk of their income to buy back stock rather than do other things with it.

A massive economic downturn is perfect for Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, downturn markets are great for companies like Apple, as their success in the last couple years should demonstrate. You see, in times like this, people cannot afford or feel they cannot afford real luxury items: vacations, expensive cars, bigger houses, pools, early retirement, so on. But people still like to treat themselves to a luxury. Apple is right in the sweetspot for this: pretty much everybody with a job can afford an Apple product or two, and they will sacrifice other things to get one just to feel like they have luxuries.

It is called the lipstick principle. You can read about it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/fashion/01SKIN.html?pagewanted=all

Apple v. Sanho

[tepples]

The last two came with MagSafe power connectors.

Which are a female dog and a half to find replacements for should they break, or to find external batteries for. For a very long time, Apple flat-out refused to license its patented MagSafe connector to a maker of external batteries. In fact, one company bought authentic Apple power supplies just for the authentic MagSafe connectors and soldered them onto its external batteries, and Apple still sued.

Re:Apple v. Sanho

[ColdWetDog]

You've broken how many mag safe connectors? You do realize they are power connectors, not belaying mounts?

Sure, the extra battery business and the lack of third party mag safe connectors is a bit of a pain, no system is perfect. I'll take the limitations so far. It's really nice to have 3 Mac Laptops in the house all using the same power brick. No fumbling in the dark to get the one that's 'close' but not quite the correct one. No screaming in agony when brainless Labrador Retriever figures out his ball is on the other side of the laptop and he charges through the power cord to get it.

Apple's current parts strategy

[alispguru]

is getting away from pure commodity parts. They've been using some of their enormous pile of cash to fund manufacturing processes they like (unibody aluminum) and to fund fab lines in return for first dibs on their output (flash RAM - Apple has a significant fraction of world capacity contracted).

Other manufacturers have had trouble competing on price with Apple lately (which is a switch) because Apple has the best price on parts and processes.

Apple will have its hands full exploiting its current markets for the next year or two, by just making the obvious updates (iPhone with 4G and iPad with retina display, both likely next year), which should buy them enough time to create the next shiny object for our enjoyment.

Re:Apple's current parts strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

@alispguru -
"Other manufacturers have had trouble competing on price with Apple lately (which is a switch) because Apple has the best price on parts and processes."

Manufacturers are having trouble competing at an equal price. My friends used to by netbooks or cheap towers because they cost $100s less than the lowest price for a Mac. This is not working in the iOS device product line. Who would pay anything close to $500 for a tablet unless it was an iPad? Who would pay anything close to $650 for a phone unless it was an iPhone? Other manufacturers cannot price their products $100s less than Apple in the mobile device market - they must price close to Apple. Apple has stated this strategy for several years in their quarterly statements - how do we beat the other manufactures in the Post-PC world - once they price themselves as a commodity and gain massive economies of scale to beat us on price we will lose a massive amount of market share. Apple's strategy was to use its existing power as the largest buyer of RAM to get the type of pricing deals these other manufacturers relied on to beat Apple.

Microsoft = DEC

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is following the arc of DEC. Both companies believed in building the entire technology stack themselves, preferably at one location (or nearby group of sites in DEC's case). They dispatched competitors with brutal intensity, using a combination of engineering and sales/marketing leverage. For awhile that worked well for both of them, until their existing markets matured and they were stuck with bloated organizations that couldn't move fast. Meanwhile, newer markets sprang up with nimble competitors leaving them in the dust, and customers unwilling to trust their business to the old monopolists.

Re:Microsoft = DEC

[Pence128]

I think what they do is run ahead to first place, declare victory and stop. By the time they notice people passing them, it's too late to get going again. You don't design v2 when someone else releases something, you start designing it the moment v1 is finished. Especially in this market.

MSFT bashing on the decline?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised I hadn't seen a comment similar to "Don't worry, Microsoft, you still smell like #2 to us!"

Re:MSFT bashing on the decline?

[dottslash3]

Testing new troll link

Re:Predict "activist shareholder" knee-jerk reacti

[dingen]

You're exactly right. Market cap changes rapidly over the years and says mostly something about how "hot" or fashionable a company is a certain time, not about how profitable or anything else really. Ars Technica had a nice article about this a while back and mainly says you can't measure a company by its market cap at all.

But still... think a few years back. If someone would have said to me "In about 10 years IBM will be worth more than Microsoft, but Apple will be worth more than both of them" in 2001, I would have laughed at that person.

Re:Predict "activist shareholder" knee-jerk reacti

[dingen]

I'm sorry, this reply wasn't supposed to be attached to this post. It was actually meant as a reply to this.

Lion on PCs?

[unixisc]

Maybe in the PowerPC days, but now a Mac laptop (to use the OPs example) is nothing more than a PC laptop with an aluminum case and a markup (I won't claim 50%, as it varies depending on the model and the PC maker. Let's look at what a modern Mac has

x86 CPU? check A complement of ports? check, though usually the Mac is missing those commonly found on PCs like SD cards, CF, Dock expanders, expresscard etc. ATI or nvidia graphics card? check LCD? check Trackpad and keyboard? check LiIon battery? check Optical drive? check, though Macs still don't have Blu Ray. Runs Windows and Linux? Check

In fact, no matter how it's spun, there is *no* difference between a Mac and a PC laptop of equivalent specs (talking logic and features, not design), except the Mac will be several hundred dollars more expensive. What's the difference?

An aluminum case. Nothing more, and even that differentiation is disappearing as PC manufacturers make laptops with the same case and no markup, meaning you pay for a glowing plastic logo.

In that case, why can't one buy a normal PC, and simply install OS-X Lion on it? Why does Apple support people installing Windows on their 'Macs', but not people installing Lion on PCs they don't make?

Apple number 1

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that humorous. They are a largely irrelevant company. Who cares if they disappear. If IBM or MS goes down the world is in a lot of hurt. Apple doesnt matter