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The Mac does make money though, about 13% of revenue in Q4 2015: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/27/q4-2015-earnings/ http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/27/q4-20
by stupidcar 10y ago
The Mac does make money though, about 13% of revenue in Q4 2015: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/27/q4-2015-earnings/ http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/27/q4-2015-earnings/
Yes, the iPhone delivers the lion's share of revenue, but the Mac is still an important product category.
To me, the problem seems to be one of focus. The extreme centralisation that Apple inherited from the Jobs era means that, when the leadership is focussed on a particular product or product category, be it the iPhone, the Apple Watch, or a new service like Apple Music, then progress in all other areas grinds to a halt.
I can understand that Apple wants to avoid the Microsoft problem of having multiple, independent business units that end up distrusting and working against one another, but the complete opposite situation isn't healthy either. A company of Apple's size and means should be able to do more than one thing at once.
A few years ago, Apple had a perfect opportunity to finally break the Mac out of its 5-10% niche of the PC market. Windows 8 was a dud, while Apple's brand and reputation were at their zenith, and their hardware had a huge edge in terms of quality and aesthetics over anything other PC vendors were putting out. The time was right for a huge push of the Mac. But they didn't do it.
Perhaps it was absent mindedness. Perhaps it was a lingering fear of taking on Microsoft in their own territory. Perhaps they genuinely believed the PC/laptop market was going to be disappear and be replaced by tablet computers. But for whatever reason, they blew their chance. And if I was an Apple shareholder, I'd be pissed about it.
- pmontra 10y agoPerhaps they already have most of the customers that want to spend the money a Mac costs AND want to buy from Apple. There is no way for Apple to swap market share with Windows unless they sell a Mac for $300 and I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't want to sell at such a low margin.
- stupidcar 10y agoThat might be true if the only segment of the PC market left was the low-end, but that's just not the case. There's still masses of high-end PCs sold to software developers, video and graphics creatives, and gamers. And there's still masses of mid-range PCs sold to businesses, government, and schools. It's not that Apple doesn't play in these markets. The Mac mini is their offering for the mid-range, for example, and the iMac and Mac Pro are for the high-end desktop market. But as the article points out, they have left these products without updates for years, at precisely the moment they should have been capitalising on their brand momentum and the rest of the industry's problems.
- qw 10y agoOne area that deserves more attention is the office. Not every company wants to buy both an iMac AND a MacBook for each employee, so they end up with a mess of cables that has to be connected to a MacBook every morning. Why haven't Apple made a decent docking solution yet?
- pmontra 10y agoIt happens that companies buy from Apple but Apple's primary market is consumers. I think Apple really doesn't have interest in that kind of specialized enterprise products. Maybe a third party could work on it as they do on connectors.