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Apple's Annual Sales Fall For First Time Since 2001 (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: Apple just posted its first annual sales decline since 2001, the year it launched the iPod and kicked off a tremendous run of groundbreaking products. The tech company revealed Tuesday that annual sales fell to $216 billion in the 2016 fiscal year ending September 30, from a record $234 billion in 2015. The sales decline is closely connected to the falling sales for the iPhone, which remains Apple's largest source of revenue. Apple sold 45.5 million iPhones in the September quarter, down from 48 million iPhones in the same quarter a year earlier. That marks the third consecutive quarter when iPhone sales and overall revenue have declined from a year prior. Many analysts have raised concerns that the global smartphone market is saturated. Customers are taking longer to replace their phones. And Apple's latest iPhone is a dead ringer for the previous two models, eliminating some of the desire to upgrade. The good news is that this sales decline may prove to be a blip and not the new norm. Apple is projecting that it will post sales of $76 billion to $78 billion in the upcoming quarter, up from $74.8 billion a year earlier.
Our design and products are the BEST.
"a tremendous run of groundbreaking products"
- removed headphone jack to previous generation phone
- upgraded battery and performance slightly on watch
- released a more performant iPad
Nothing of significance -- and that's coming from an iSheep with several Apple products.
"Because it takes courage to take a fall"
- Tim Cook, 2016
Yes, I'm joking.
Apple is DOOMED! Fandroids rejoice!
Maybe they'd sell more. Been waiting to buy a new Macbook Pro forever now - without updates to the MBP line. Took forever for them to update the Mac Pro. Yet, minor dumb improvements once a year to the iPhone like clockwork.
This doesn't seem like a surprise. You can't expect people to keep replacing $700+ devices every one or two years.
#DeleteChrome
PRO hardware needs to come back they killed so much like.
Mac mini server
Mac mini with quad core cpus
Xserve and they did not at least say it's ok to run Mac OS X Server in a vm on any base hardware you can run it that way but the licensing restrictions say no.
imacs with easy to get to disks
laptops with easy to get to disks.
a pro workstation (the new mac pro really missed the mark)
They payed lip service to gameing by making some of a deal of trying to push mac os for gameing but not really having the video cards for it to work well. Say big imac screens with weak video cards, the 2012 old mac pro only had a ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB in the base system.
I've said it before and I will say it again: Without Jobs Apple is toast. Just like the last time Jobs left. They will continue for some years due to momentum but there is no stopping their fall. Without Jobs they are rudderless.
to bad the new mac pro missed the mark and they sat on it. They may of had planes to move faster on it but likely hit to the oh shit we F* up and we need to re plan it wall.
This is what "bravery" gets you. People are holding onto their older iPhones longer and likely considering alternatives.
Buttered toast?
That couldn't climb forever...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
This doesn't seem like a surprise. You can't expect people to keep replacing $700+ devices every one or two years.
I think it has more to do with the iPhone 6 generation being a very popular upgrade, mostly due to the larger screen sizes. That was a significant differentiator between the iPhone 4 and 5 generations. The iPhone 7 generation is too similar for many people to want to accelerate their device upgrade plans.
In short its not that sales of the current generation are bad its just that the previous generation was phenomenal, a spike above the trend.
N/T
And you do not need to be a sir Newton to figure that out.
don't want to feel troubles of Walnut [mi7.edu] found 4erspective, the for the project. So on, FreeBSD went
D00d, you might want to check those links - goat.cx is now a parked domain. You'll need to find the new home for pictures of Mr. Johnson's world-famous anus.
iPod was a smashing success because it had audio output that everyone in the world could use. The year they got rid of the 3.5mm jack sales crumble, coincidence?
And for selfish reasons. I want the Apple back that used to make Macintoshes! Power Macs! Real professional computers that could be upgraded and didn't look like a lame ass speaker tube( or a trash can if you think Beats Audio makes good audio products. ).
Real Pro devices, not some over priced tablet that thinks it's a computer, just because it has more non-upgradeable-storage, a shitty-keyboard-option, and a shitty-pen accessory that is worse than the Wacom Styluses I used almost 20 years.
Real computers, not overpriced toys that took a que from the GREED-department of Apple that believe computers should not be upgrade able.
I want Apple to ease back on the iOS puke they're vomiting into OS X, which has made this OS sucky, when up until a few years ago It had so much more going for it...
I want the Apple back that made enough money to design and sell some great computers and actually cared about people that thought different, not this Apple that wants all of its users to THINK EXACTLY THE SAME and line up to buy their new product + 1... I want the Apple back that had great customer service....
So here's a BIG FUCK OFF TO GREED, because it has not made Apple great, it's made them stagnant.
Apple needs to stop "courageous" pretense and start making products people want to buy.
They need to stop making design decisions in the echo chamber of their aging white male demographic. No one wants a thinner Apple product with fewer physical ports at this point; wireless will necessarily be imperfect until cybernetic human augmentation allows us to see in RF.
In software they need to focus on augmenting reliability of existing software... the "it just works" mentality has turned into "it just works... if everything has the latest updates... and you never did anything previously unsupported... and you're not trying to extend functionality beyond what Apple originally envisioned... and you're a paying customer and you call Apple support. Oh, and you're definitely not using iCloud."
g=
Phones are like computers.
From the 80s to mid-late 2000s, businesses and later people (when it reached commodity prices) often brought new computers every 3 years, despite the massive cost, because the speed bump was so subsequent that it affected productivity. Other than a McD's cashier or Bank Teller at work, almost no one used a10 year old PC if they didn't have to, even if was $5,000 when new and worked as well as the day it came out of the fatory.
Outside of gamers/artists and other niches, a good (at the time) 2010 computer would fit the masses just fine and the experience would be mostly the same. The same couldn't be said for a 1993 computer in 2000 or a 1999 computer in 2006. Notebooks are a different story due to form factor but getting there. In fact, the biggest upgrade most people will anticipate in a desktop won't be CPU but screen resolution -- soon 4k, but the vast majority of PCs are still using 1080p which probably was the same story in 2010.
Phones have reached the good enough with iPhone 6. In both screen resolution and speed/ram. I have a iPad 2 from 2011, total PITA for daily use and not suitable for anything but netflix. Browsing is molasses. But I could see using my iPhone 6 for 3 more years without major hassle. Or a modern Samsung for 7, due to super screen res.
Apple's Q4 has been the weakest or second weakest quarter since 2012. New iPhones are released only during the final month of the quarter and are supply-constrained, limiting the revenue that can be pulled from there. Cook said that Q1 2017 (Oct-Dec 2016 for reasons only known to accountants) will see a return to profitability, and Apple has consistently been spot-on with their numbers. Q1 has consistently been Apple's biggest since the iPhone eclipsed the Mac in revenue.
Now, if Apple undershoots its targets for Q1 (entirely possible), then I'd start watching for sweating Apple execs.
Under Cook's so-called "leadership" Apple did away with local sync for the iPhone,
despite protests by well over 300,000 people in the form of an online petition.
Under Cook's so-called "leadership" Apple did away with the headphone jack on the
iPhone.
Apple has forgotten the vital importance of giving the customer what the customer
wants. It's impossible to overstate the importance of this simple truth. Apparently
when Timmy Cook was in school he skipped those classes.
Seriously, Tim Cook is a clueless fool who might be good at crunching numbers but
doesn't have the knowledge which Apple will require to bring itself back from the abyss,
which is EXACTLY where it is headed. Words cannot describe the derision I have for the
likes of Cook, who is paid money to fuck up a once-great company. I will just say that I hope
Cook is soon stricken with a fatal disease and that it finishes him quickly.
The iMac G3 of 1998 was Jobs' first successful computer. Prior to that he misread the market, the customers wants/needs over and over again.
I guess it would be fair to say he misread the market during that era too at times, ex: Flower Power and Dalmatian themed iMacs.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
And of course the Lisa too.
Two in the last week and more in the last few months.
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
I was sort of wondering why only Notes were catching fire. Evidently the S7 Edges are too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
iTunes and Safari have become shit. Nobody I know wants an watch when they can just look at their phone, so an iWatch has no good marketplace. Mac Pro is nothing more than a glorified iMac with its stupid barely upgradable design. The rest of their product line has been stagnating. Whatever internal changes that happened after he died, they need to be rolled back, because the company is going to start hemorrhaging money now if it keeps going this way. I can't imagine how these shit products keep making it into production. Where is the re-invention of old products?
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Apple isn't going bankrupt. The still have PLENTY of cash. They are nearing completion of their new campus. Their stock has SPLIT several times. They have issued dividends as recently as about 2 months ago. Apple could very probably survive many years without making a profit.
Note: Yes, I am an Apple shareholder (since 1983). No, I'm not even close to being rich.
With post-scarcity nand chips, a burgeoning taxation issue in EU and these recent courageous turns to remove functionality, I predict Apple will decline MUCH further over the next few q's.
He's a competent leader, but he's no driver of innovation like Jobs. I think they should do a small phone, a REALLY small phone, yet they follow the big phone lot instead of setting a trend themselves.
Jobs was always setting some new direction, then leading his engineers in that direction. Cook, well he seems to be driven by his engineers, who in turn are hindered by their MBA bosses. With Jobs in charge, those negative people didn't block innovation, but with Cook, he probably follows the chain of command and listens to the MBAs who in turn get their sound bites from their magazines who in turn get their articles from their competitors.
Take a look at Google, and you'll see the same thing.
Apple of 2001 made computers.
Apple of 2016 makes phones. The fact that they're now making fewer phones just means the phone market is maturing as the computer market matured. The real question can the revolutionize yet another industry? Steve Jobs? Perhaps. He was smarter than me so maybe he could've come up with something.
Not an Apple fan in general but now I feel a bit sad.
"...annual sales fell to $216 billion in the 2016 fiscal year ending September 30...." Yes, it's less than the super-heady early years but they are still tremendously profitable and could likely sustain solid margins for quite a long time. PS - I own no Apple products or stock and - quite frankly - despise their business model of sucking profits from app developers for their over-priced but well-engineered products.
yet don't mention in the same article about the shiitty douche phones from apple catching fire too
douche
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have two coworkers that worked at a startup that was bought by Apple. One quit 8 weeks after the purchase, the other lasted 7 months. They said the company is just like the old 1984 commercial. "A garden of pure ideology."
That does not bode well for a company that has to operate in a free market. And consumer electronics is about as free a market as exists in today's global economy.
I used to be an Apple fan when the Mac first came out - ease of use and functionality were put first.
Now, Apple have lost the plot that they should be trying to satisfy customers' needs:
- thinner rather than usable battery life
- thinner rather than a useful selection of ports, so we need dongles
- no escape key, so we can have a context sensitive bar
- feeble geegaws like Siri, yet a windowserver which crashes dumping you to a login screen
- data transferred to the cloud where you can't access it offline
- watches with little point
- an OS that does not support older models for no technical reason, just to force hardware purchases
- no MacPro I can readily add pci cards to
I could go on and on like this.
They really need some serious introflection at this point as to why their sales are in decline. Some is market trends to be sure, but some is wrong direction.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
And of course the Lisa too.
The Lisa was a spectacular machine. Best monochrome monitor in history. A very well designed business-oriented computer. Just too damned expensive, and too far ahead of its time.
enabling the user to do things they otherwise wouldn't know how to do or be able to do. Since Jobs left, they've steadily slid into the old game from the '90s and '00s that the tech majors (HP, Compaq, and so on) used to play—"innovation" becomes another word for "throw gadgety gimmicks at the wall and see what sticks," but without well-thought-out reasons why users might want the device, or an understanding of the ways in which UX friction impacts the device's usability.
Compared to the rest of the marketplace and competing products at the time, the original iPhone, the original iPod, the original Intel Power Macs, the original LaserWriter, the original Macbook Pro models, the original iPad, etc. were all towering improvements that enabled users far more than competing products did.
Now, the trend is the opposite.
On the consumer end, iOS phones and tablets feel arbitrarily constrained next to Android ...and so on.
Current Mac OS machines are generally limited in serious software and upgradeability again relative to Windows machines
On the pro end, Apple's application ecosystem is weak once again compared to pro-level Windows applications
It used to be that you paid a premium for Apple products but got much more or at the very least something highly differentiated for your money (esp. in the cases of early iPods vs. other MP3 players, iPhone 1 vs. other smartphones, iPad vs. other contemporary tablets, etc.).
Now you pay a premium either for less or for something that is largely undifferentiated (and often negatively so in the minor differences that do exist).
It hasn't always been the case that you're simply paying double for brushed metal and a glowing Apple logo, but it certainly feels that way now. People still want to pay for quality (hey, the aluminum case and better QA are nice), but now they have to consider the tradeoff—I can pay a lot more and get a nice metal Apple device, or I can pay a lot less and get a phone that's more configurable and flexible.
That's my own feeling, anyway. I'd love to have the nice finish of an iOS device, but even if there was price parity I couldn't give up the flexibility of Android. I don't want to be tied down to Apple's visuals, Apple's icon positioning, Apple's version of KHTML, Apple's take on the (non-)filesystem and so on. I love Mac OS as well, or at least I have done since OS X, but the new Macbook Pros are limiting and I'm seriously considering getting a Windows laptop for my next purchase, just so that I can access hard drive, memory, and so on.
Apple has begun to fetishize itself, rather than fetishize overall UX.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
That's because they aren't.
One asshole on youtube hitting his iphone with a hammer to purposely make it explode, is nothing at all similar to thousands and thousands of Samsung devices exploding for no reason under normal use cases or simply sitting on a desk or in someones pocket.
I've seen that MacOS Sierra 10.12.1 leak and I suspect that Apple Inc. is going to kill a lot of people if that is the new MacBook Pro.
The original Mac under Jobs' tenure was an utter failure. Lots of press, disappointing sales. Many years after the Mac's introduction the Apple II was still paying the bills at Apple, carrying the Mac project. Jobs' Apple III (note 3 not 2) was a failure. Job's NeXTcube was a failure.
And of course the Lisa too.
The Lisa was a spectacular machine. Best monochrome monitor in history. A very well designed business-oriented computer. Just too damned expensive, and too far ahead of its time.
I used one a little. When my friend upgraded his Profile to 10M I bought the 5M and put it on my Apple //e. No more swapping out assembler and source code floppies.
Beside the $10K price tag (1980s dollars) it also suffered from Jobs mentioning something better and incompatible was under development (the Mac).
I used a NeXTcube a little at school too, also nice. But like the Lisa also limited due to Jobs' "vision" and design decisions. They were what he wanted, not what the market wanted/needed. Ahead of its time in terms of tech maybe but not in design, design wise they were failures, Jobs' vision failed. As did the Mac G4 Cube, cute but impractical.
doesn't it suck when you wake up, and find the market that your saturating with crap products, is beginning to erode, and can no longer support that greed. thanks
A contributing reason.
...is exponentially bigger than Apple's.
Every 6 months Apple sells more phones than there are people in Germany.
They can cut that figure to a tenth and be exactly the same Apple they are today.
Or create think tanks and campuses globally to attract really smart staff and design globally with the very best.
Its not a consumer issue, really great staff would have predicted an emerging downturn and been ready to make a profit in any market conditions.
A great company needs skilled staff to design the future not provide happy work to average staff today.
A company top heavy with a policy of been inclusive and hire average staff cant be great with ever fewer really skilled staff.
Fix software and hardware issues. Make sure they never happen again. If a project leader or team cant get results, find staff who can based on merit.
If the US cant educate great workers, design the packaging in the USA and the marketing on each box is still usable.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Phones are like computers.
They aren't "like computers" they ARE computers. They are computers that happen to be able to make phone calls.
It had to happen eventually. The phone market is maturing, the economies of the developed world are not in the best shape, so people are holding onto phones longer. The developing worklds is not a magic cash cow either. The market for these techologiesis very competitive; there are lots of choices. Apple's revennue groweth has not been a bubble, but it couldn't go on incresing for ever without constraint. It's no wonder that companies like Apple and Google are investigating where the next big change is coming from becasue the market is saturating.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
"Best monochrome"... that's almost an oxymoron itself. The real nail in Lisa's coffin was the fact that it, like the Mac garbage that Apple pooped out later, had no custom chips for rendering graphics, so the overtaxed 68000 had to do all the work. Idiotic and stupid, even by the standards of the day. But that's what happens when a hardware company relies entirely on "off the shelf" components.
Umm, before you jump to any conclusion it's important to realize that we are heading into a major recession. According to the Buffet Indicator the value of the Market is over 2 standard deviations above the mean. This means we are in a bubble, and according to the Federal Reserve the bubble is presently in the process of popping...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...
Jobs had little or nothing to do with the Lisa. In fact, the Mac was considered a rival project within Apple, even though it built upon significant amounts of the Lisa's R&D.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Finally, we will have 'Linux on the Desktop'
Compared to what? The C64 had a bit of graphics hardware acceleration, the Amiga had quite a lot, maybe the Atari ST too.
But on the PC side, it was the same as on Apple's side. Hercules, CGA, EGA and the first VGA cards had no acceleration either AFAIK.
"Best monochrome"... that's almost an oxymoron itself. The real nail in Lisa's coffin was the fact that it, like the Mac garbage that Apple pooped out later, had no custom chips for rendering graphics, so the overtaxed 68000 had to do all the work. Idiotic and stupid, even by the standards of the day. But that's what happens when a hardware company relies entirely on "off the shelf" components.
No. "Best Monochrome" monitor was absolutely a viable option in 1983 (and even more so in 1978 when the Lisa was first designed).
BTW, those "custom graphics chips" in the Jay Miner designs (not taking anything away from the genius of Jay Miner, who I respect and admire greatly!) ended up not exactly doing their jobs at zero "cost", throughput-wise. In fact, they tended to "cycle steal" from the 68k CPUs, by manipulating the DTAK signal to essentially do "clock stretching", in order to get time on the common memory bus. This actually made the CPUs slower than their clock-speeds would indicate. So an 8 MHz 68k in a system with a Copper or Blitter chip, operated more like a 6 MHz one. And that wasn't just during "drawing", it was ALL the time.
And in the days of the Lisa, and the tasks for which it was designed (which was basically running the integrated 7/7 LisaOffice suite), the fact that each and every pixel was lovingly manipulated by the CPU was not a big deal, and in fact, was likely the only way at the time the Lisa was designed to achieve the Bit/Blt operations necessary for overlapping windows.
The Amiga had the advantage of coming several years after the Lisa, and also had Jay Miner's very much custom-chips for help.
Oh, and as far as the Mac goes, it, too, was designed in 1981, before there was commonly-available graphics acceleration hardware that could do Bit/Blt; so again, absent the "outlier" that was Jay Miner, anyone who was doing a GUI at that time (which, outside of PARC, was, um, APPLE and..., and...?), was doing it with the CPU. The term "GPU" really hadn't even been coined yet.
Compared to what? The C64 had a bit of graphics hardware acceleration, the Amiga had quite a lot, maybe the Atari ST too.
But on the PC side, it was the same as on Apple's side. Hercules, CGA, EGA and the first VGA cards had no acceleration either AFAIK.
All 3 of your mentioned computers had Jay Miner chipsets in them, to which Apple had no access. But as I said above, the dirty little secret with those designs is that they clock-stretched the CPU to allow the graphics chips time on the data and address busses. This means they achieved "graphics ACcleration" at the expense of constant "computational DEceleration". Kinda makes it a "meh" tradeoff.
And I believe you are correct when you say that the typical Hercules and Trident CGA, EGA and early VGA graphics cards had no graphics acceleration, and more importantly if we're talking about GUIs, no "hardware" Bit/Blt capabilities whatsoever.
You're looking at the stagnating iOS years on, rather than at what Apple did during Jobs' tenure.
I was a Palm user when the iPhone was released, and I thought I was totally satisfied with my Palm devices (which I'd been using for years) and that the premium for an iPhone was pointless. I poo-pooed the iPhone until the 3GS was released and I finally tried one. I was blown away. Full web browser, lots of useful apps that installed *over the network*, fast and complete WiFi support to enable this, large capacity to hold lots of songs and images, a camera capable of producing large images, the list went on and on. It was a HUGE step up from other things in the market at that point. Apple had taken half-measures scattered throughout the phone ecosystem and brought them all together as full "best of breed" measures in a single device. This is what the Jobs Apple excelled at.
NOW iOS is stale in comparison to Android (see my post above), and that's the problem with Apple and why they are rudderless without Jobs, but early on this was simply not the case—the iPhone was remarkable when it was introduced.
I'm a technology early adopter (not necessarily an Apple one) and this happened several times with Apple products under Jobs:
- MP3 players. I'd had several MP3 players prior to the introduction of the iPod, but the classic iPod blew them all out of the water. Far faster, large screen enabling actual navigation of your music library, capacity to hold thousands of songs (rather than just a couple dozen), played just about any MP3 file you could throw at it rather than requiring you to use their own encoder (or, in the case of Linux users like myself at the time, carefully curate and tweak command line for Lame to create files that the device's bandwidth could handle). The iPod was simply far more functional that other MP3 players at the time.
- iPad. I'd used other tablets for years: Vadem Clio, Hitachi eSlate, Fujitsu Stylistic, etc. They had compromised battery life, a resistive touchscreen, an OS that was difficult to work with, had dog-slow processors and little memory, could not run a full web browser (in the case of the CE devices), required desktop sync or a desktop environment, were heavy and difficult to hold for long periods of time and/or to carry around, etc. iPad was hand-holdable, had massive battery life, did not require desktop sync or that you run a desktop environment that suffered as a tablet, and was generally the device I'd been hoping for for all those years as I struggled to make previous tablets work. Again, the iPad was a tablet done *right*, rather than making me buy the "promise" but suffer through the compromises.
- OS X. I switched from Linux. Why? Because OS X gave me a *nix command line environment and infrastructure, robust stability, support for high-end hardware, *and* off-the-shelf retail purchases of software and devices without having to recompile code or worry about compatibility. It's still the only OS that does this.
Jobs had a talent for spotting technologies that were essentially at the "proof of concept" stage but were making headway in a few tiny niches, and were already being sold to (dissatisfied) consumers and riddled with compromises, and getting his team and company to engineer their way around and through those compromises to realize the technology in consumer-ready, appliance form. Other companies released Ford Model T cars (hand-crank start, too many levers to micromanage mechanical functionality, counterintuitive and dangerous gearbox, rotten ride for grandma) and Jobs could look at what was there, spot the potential, and then put his team to work on a car that could be started from the passenger compartment, manage the obvious parts of its own mechanical operation, that had a safer gearbox that matched the way that people think and expect machines to work, and that let grandma work on her knitting in the back seat without poking herself.
He was masterful at (1) identifying potential in new tech that was either failing in
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
What Apple needs to do is own the IoT market. Make a secure hub that is easy to setup, all the usual bells and whistle IoT devices, and easy setup and management.
LED bulb speakers that change colors? What if they had a microphone that allowed both Siri integration as well as change the lighting based on the music playing? Lots of fun things. May not interest us, but my 14 year old daughter would love mood lighting in her room when her friends come over and play music on surround speakers.
A Nest-type thermostat hooked into the network which could figure out if anyone was home or on their way home (based on sound picked up on a microphone built into a lightbulb or GPS coordinates of the iPhones associated with the network) and adjust the temperature accordingly.
Lots of options available.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
'They may of had planes to move faster on it'
sorry, what?
Jobs had little or nothing to do with the Lisa. In fact, the Mac was considered a rival project within Apple, even though it built upon significant amounts of the Lisa's R&D.
Jobs was involved with the Lisa project from '78 to '82 when he was forced off the project. His design decisions while involved in the project helped doom it.
That's because the new Apple is now a typical bottom-line run company with current management who are either idiots, scum, or both.
Slogan?
"The New Apple! Crap designed by idiots in California, built by slaves wherever cheapest, and sold to morons world-wide!"
Epsom actually did come out with a GUI computer being run by a Z80A instead of a 68000, shortly after the Lisa (I think it was called the QX-10). And now you know why you never heard of it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Eventually, Apple sold off what it had left as Macintosh XLs, at a massive discount. The people who bought them seem to have liked them a lot.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The good news is that this sales decline may prove to be a blip and not the new norm.
That is wrong. The evil and extremely anti-competive company Apple deserves to die as soon as possible.
Epsom actually did come out with a GUI computer being run by a Z80A instead of a 68000, shortly after the Lisa (I think it was called the QX-10). And now you know why you never heard of it.
Hardly a technical peer to the Lisa. Basically a bog-standard C/PM text-based machine with a few "GUI"-ish Applications.
Another courageous move on the part of Apple.
They just unveiled their new laptop which looked not only UX-challenged, but cheap.
You gotta start to wonder if Cook is gunna turn out to be Apple's Balmer.
Certainly not a technical peer to the Lisa, but that's not what the guy at the store wanted me to think.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You're a lying sack of shit. Jay Miner's chips ONLY went into the Amiga and Atari 2600. The C64's VIC-II chip was designed by Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble. Jay wasn't even involved with Commodore at that point. Atari refused Jay's suggetion to create a new chip set, which is exactly why he left Atari in the first place. You also don't realize that all sorts arcade hardware and home computers were using their own custom chips while Apple still didn't even have sprites yet. Apple never had the foresight to actually get someone who could actually design custom silicon on their team and still haven't to this day.
As for your bogus claim about "clock-streching" (I don't think you actually know what that term means), the only real issue was the fact that the Amiga's 68000 and chipset had to share access to the first 512k, hence why it was called "Chip Ram." Additional memory is mapped to "Fast Ram" and is ONLY accessible by the CPU. However, even with only 512k, a stock Amiga far outperformed a Mac even on non-graphical computations.
Certainly not a technical peer to the Lisa, but that's not what the guy at the store wanted me to think.
It could almost have been a technical peer to the Lisa, if the Lisa had ended up being based on the MC6809 CPU instead of the M68000.
Oh, and if you look at the CPU board in the first Lisas, they actually had a space for a Character Generator ROM on the layout; so the Lisa was THIS CLOSE to having a "Text" mode, too...
You're a lying sack of shit. Jay Miner's chips ONLY went into the Amiga and Atari 2600. The C64's VIC-II chip was designed by Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble. Jay wasn't even involved with Commodore at that point. Atari refused Jay's suggetion to create a new chip set, which is exactly why he left Atari in the first place. You also don't realize that all sorts arcade hardware and home computers were using their own custom chips while Apple still didn't even have sprites yet. Apple never had the foresight to actually get someone who could actually design custom silicon on their team and still haven't to this day.
As for your bogus claim about "clock-streching" (I don't think you actually know what that term means), the only real issue was the fact that the Amiga's 68000 and chipset had to share access to the first 512k, hence why it was called "Chip Ram." Additional memory is mapped to "Fast Ram" and is ONLY accessible by the CPU. However, even with only 512k, a stock Amiga far outperformed a Mac even on non-graphical computations.
I am probably mis-remembering; but that doesn't warrant calling me a "lying sack of shit" now does it?
I was under the impression that Jay Miner designed custom graphics (and other) chips for the Atari 2600, as well as the 400 and 800, at least the first Amiga, the Atari ST, and the C64 (and possibly VIC-20). Perhaps I am giving him too much credit, for which I apologize to you and to his peers.
When I called Commodore to discuss embedding an Amiga 500 motherboard into a Stage Lighting console I was designing at the time, one of the things the guy I spoke with told me was that, at that point (around 1989/90), that about 1 in 4 Arcade games was actually based on an embedded Amiga 500, which I thought was pretty impressive.
As an embedded developer with around 4 decades of work experience, I most certainly do understand what "clock-stretching" means, and I thought I had read that one of the Jay Miner chips in the Amiga actually held the 68000's -DTAK (Data Transfer AcKnowledge) signal in the non-asserted state ("Hi", in this case), so that the graphics chip could access the memory bus (that's why there was a homebrew 68000 tweaker's newletter at the time, called "DTAK Grounded"). However, I must admit that my study and knowledge of the intimate details of the Amiga and Atari ST was only "in passing", and was purely based on reading some articles at the time. I have never actually laid hands on an Amiga of any version except in a store display, and only briefly messed with an ST. I did, however, own (technically still do) and wrote some software for a C64.
I do challenge your blanket claim that an Amiga is computationally faster than a Mac; because we have to start talking about "Which Amiga vs. Which Mac?"
But I can tell you which had a more stable operating system, and although the Amiga OS was quite the marvel of preemptive multitasking (any OS that can format a floppy while playing a game is to be respected and admired!), it was also pretty unstable overall (Frequent Guru Meditation Errors and all, ya know?). Yes, the infamous MacOS "bomb" Alert was also present more than it should have been, but that was more Application-specific than the Amiga Workbench crashes, at least from what I remember.
Thanks. That's interesting. Having programmed both the Z80 and 6809 when I was a lot younger, I'd rather have the 6809.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Thanks. That's interesting. Having programmed both the Z80 and 6809 when I was a lot younger, I'd rather have the 6809.
[Posting as AC because I have been Punished Modded to "Terrible" Karma by the Apple Haters (I didn't even know "Terrible" existed!) - macs4all ]
Me too. And me too. I always lamented that Motorola based all it's 8-bit microcontrollers on this of that variant of the 6801 core, rather than the 6809 core. The 6809 was closer to a mini 68k than a overinflated 6800. TWO Hardware stacks? How perfect for compiled languages and FORTH. 16 big indexing. Pseudo 16 bit accumulator. Nearly orthogonal instruction set. Software Interrupt (which the 6502 has, too), etc...
It was like an alien appeared in the Motorola labs, threw down the plans for the 6809, and left. So all Mot. Could do was make the damn things. Why did it never make the jump to CMOS? I'd live to have had an MC68HC11 based on THAT core!
Good times, good times...