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Much of the shrinking market is due to the fact that laptops used to need to be replaced every three or four years, and now only need to be replaced every six y
by Alex3917 10y ago
Much of the shrinking market is due to the fact that laptops used to need to be replaced every three or four years, and now only need to be replaced every six years or so. That's about how long it takes for the hardware to wear out, and for the next generation of hardware to be significantly better.
In 2022 Intel plans to have 7nm CPUs available. Those laptops will be considerably more powerful, and laptop's purchased today will be starting to fall apart. So it's unlikely that folks are going to go ten years between new laptops any time soon, meaning the size of the market should level off somewhat.
There is plenty of room for Apple to continue to make improvements within this general form factor, and to reduce the price. And if tablets or phones really do somehow make laptops obsolete, then Apple will just license or open source OS X. That way it wouldn't have to deal with making laptops, but developers would still have a good platform for making iOS apps.
The idea that OS X or MBPs are going anyway makes no sense, at least for the next decade or so.
- partiallypro 10y agoI agree with the first portion of your post, but I'm not entirely convinced on the second. I do think it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Apple will kill off their desktop and laptop lines. I think it's a ways off, but Apple's refusal to evolve in any meaningful way in the space might make their efforts a legacy line at best.
- grzm 10y agoI think it's a ways off Want to weigh in on a time line? To misquote Fight Club, “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for every product drops to zero.” Apple's refusal to evolve in any meaningful way in the space Given the complaints about the changes Apple made in the most recent MBP update, what evolution are you looking for? Touchbar, larger trackpad, and USB-C aren't meaningful? Continuing to reduce the size of the machine? Those all seem evolutionary (rather than revolutionary), and quite typical of the iterative updates Apple is known for. Are only increased memory and CPU speeds meaningful? Or the lack of a touch screen? Maybe no equivalent to the MS Surface Book? What would constitute a meaningful change for you? Feeling my oats a little bit, so feel free to push back. I can understand people not being happy with the new Macbook Pros for a variety of reasons. However, refusal to evolve in any meaningful way sounds unjustified.
- gwern 10y agoOr do something radical to kill the need for desktops and laptops. A dock with a monitor and a keyboard you slot your iPhone into? I would say it sounds absurd but given how many people claim, even on HN, to find it satisfactory to program and SSH and everything else on their iPads...
- mrep 10y ago> I do think it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Apple will kill off their desktop and laptop lines. How would anyone develop apps for their IOS devices than?
- nestlequ1k 10y agoProbably using Visual Studio on a Windows machine.
- bergie 10y agoI don't think XCode for iPad is that far