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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Believe me, believe me!
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.
So you're predicting Trump will be as successsful as Apple, or did you want it the other way around?
Cook is not incompetent, he is just not Jobs.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Please stop watching GoT. That makes you pollute the delicate /. forums.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Seriously. People are talking about it. Very important people. Experts!
If you had to compare Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our profits are YUUUUUUGE!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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
Steve Ballmer actually delivered constant, massive profits at Microsoft. To this date he has been the most successful CEO in that organization.
lucm, indeed.
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.
Our design and products are the BEST.
Designed in California
Made in China
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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
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"
Steve Balmer, despite all the hate for what he did wrong (which there is a shit load he got wrong), consistently year on year increased revenue and profit. By the end of his time he had more than tripled both revenue and profit to the point where they were actually worth the insane overvalued stock price they were at when he first took over.
What would it actually cost to produce a MacBook in the USA? My guess is that it'll be more expensive, but not by a factor 4. And in case of iPhones, which are sold at 3x the cost of manufacturing, I bet they could sell them at only a slightly higher price if they *gasp* would accept a lower markup.
Even so, I still expect people to go for the slave labour Macbook at $1699 instead of the $1899 "proudly manufactured in the USA" model, when given a choice. Especially when no one is looking.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
Why rag on Apple about this? Maybe I'm mistaken, but can you name a smartphone maker who manufactures in the US? Or PC vendor? But Apple alone is the fall guy?
What would it actually cost to produce a MacBook in the USA? My guess is that it'll be more expensive, but not by a factor 4. And in case of iPhones, which are sold at 3x the cost of manufacturing, I bet they could sell them at only a slightly higher price if they *gasp* would accept a lower markup.
Even so, I still expect people to go for the slave labour Macbook at $1699 instead of the $1899 "proudly manufactured in the USA" model, when given a choice. Especially when no one is looking.
My prediction is that as robots become more prevalent in industry there will be a gradual shift of manufacturing/assembly back to the US. It's already slowly happening in the auto industry.
I think most consumers do feel Apple has the best quality, or at least quality equal to any competitors in design and quality. (neckbeards may not, but the 99% do)
The phone market is going where the PC market did. The smartphone market is mature. The tech has exceeded for the moment our ability and the networks' ability to utilize it.
There are few reasons to upgrade your phone year to year, as there once were.
(One wonders if the thinner/lighter trend and the trend of putting slick curved edges on these dainty phones isn't intended to create more replacement buyers...)
(along with the "you can't replace your battery so you have to buy a new phone when the battery life deteriorates" trend)
In any case, compelling new features are few and far between. I used to replace every 2 years or so consistently, but I don't see any reason to replace mine soon as long as the battery holds up.
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.
I had a motorola atrix once. Easily my least favorite/least durable phone ever. I had an otter box case even, it slipped out of my hand from two feet above the ground, landed on the top corner of the phone, and entire screen turned into a spiderweb of cracks. Maybe other motorola's faired better?
Seems like the future for manufacturing in the US is the Elon Musk approach - factories employing as much automation as possible; those will provide jobs for the contractors that build them, but thereafter not so much.
Compared to his "gigafactory" which will make batteries and employ 6,500 people, the future of Tesla manufacturing will be that there are no people on the production line, at all.
Gigafactory
https://www.fastcompany.com/30...
Tesla Factory
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Everyone loves to complain how we lost our manufacturing to China, but the truth is we began losing it a LONG time ago with the "invention" of automation. Companies bringing their manufacturing back to the U.S. will earn big rounds of applause, but in all likelihood, will only be doing so because they're determining that it's cheaper to do without the humans at all.
Robots continue to be more and more prevalent in manufacturing. There's a grey area in which you have to look at the cost of a task-specific robot vs. the product lifecycle though...and calculate X # of man-hours @ $ vs custom robot that costs $millions.
The more universal the robots are, the more they can be used across production lines and the simpler to adapt them when they are.
It doesn't, however, solve the problem of employment for the displaced workers. Yes, yes, I know...all the crying and politics. There's an end-game somewhere down the road though and it's not pretty. Manufacturing used to be what the poorly or moderately educated could do to earn a livable, though certainly not extravagant, wage. Now that's shifted to things like retain sales, call centers, and other marginalized jobs...except the comparative pay and buying power is much, much worse. ...ok climbing off my soap box now.
No, people aren't going to spend 10% more on a product because 'made in USA' ... imports would need to be taxed or something similar to make them price equivalent.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
"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.
I think most consumers do feel Apple has the best quality, or at least quality equal to any competitors in design and quality
I don't know. Apple Maps is widely known to be inferior to Google Maps, even among Apple enthusiasts I know. I also know a lot of Apple fans who aren't happy about the loss of the headphone jack. Still, there is a lot of residual brand loyalty that hasn't yet been overcome by Samsung envy. Samsung's woes are helping Apple at the moment on that front.
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.
What would it actually cost to produce a MacBook in the USA? My guess is that it'll be more expensive, but not by a factor 4. And in case of iPhones, which are sold at 3x the cost of manufacturing, I bet they could sell them at only a slightly higher price if they *gasp* would accept a lower markup.
Accepting a lower markup (meaning, less profits) just for the "Made in USA" sticker is dumb. No sane businessman would do it.
I am not devoid of patriotism or empathy for domestic workers. But if I were making a product in China and decided to bring it back to USA, i would simply raise the price and pass the increased cost to the customer, keeping my profit margin the same. Of course this only works if your product is still desirable at that price and the cost difference isn't huge.
I remember an article a few years back from a business site (Bloomberg or Forbes or some such). They did an analysis of the iPhone 5 (I think) and how much more it would cost to make it in USA while keeping the same margins. It was something like $30 to $55 per phone. So the iPhone which was selling for $700 at the time would cost $730 to $755 if made in USA.
Being beaten on a single feature and being beaten across the board are two very different things. Apple was much closer to having an overall inferior problem about 5 years ago when high end Android was way ahead from a hardware perspective and Apple was competing on usability and richness of applications. With Android having moved down market now the major feature on which Apple lags is lower cost models. Used are the only lower cost Apple models and these lag in many respects.
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
Jobs gave the customer what the customer didn't know he or she wanted, and was spectacularly successful in his later years. If he had made an apparently stupid change, it would most likely have wound up being brilliant. Cook can't do that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Even so, I still expect people to go for the slave labour Macbook at $1699 instead of the $1899 "proudly manufactured in the USA" model, when given a choice. Especially when no one is looking.
That's why the US version would have a special red/white/blue color scheme.
Learn to love Alaska
I had a Motorola Timeport World Phone in 2000. Lost it in a parking lot. Found it later. Had been run over at least once. Still worked, essentially undamaged, though the batter cover was problematic to get on and off after (but once one, stayed on).
Learn to love Alaska
Labor isn't the cost (except for GM, and others with horrible management). The environmental cost is the issue. Toyota makes cars in the US for a cost difference less than shipping them from Japan.
Learn to love Alaska
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
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