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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.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously. People are talking about it. Very important people. Experts!
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.
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
Phones are like computers.
They aren't "like computers" they ARE computers. They are computers that happen to be able to make phone calls.
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?
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.