8 ms·

Someone here needs to explain it to me because I just don't understand. We have the largest computer company in the world, a shit load of people work there, su

• intrasight 10y ago
  I think what you're missing is that Apple pursues high-margin endeavors, and competing with a $300 NUC isn't going to be a high-margin business. Some easy money for Apple would be to sell OS licenses for Intel NUCs.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • wl 10y ago
    Apple could sell a $300 NUC for $600 and people would still buy it. The issue is that Apple doesn't sell anything decent in this form factor that runs macOS.
    • intrasight 10y ago
      I agree that they could and should - I'm just speculating as to why they don't. As they probably could make their desired margins, it must be they would consider it a "distraction" from future endeavors (VR, cars, etc.)
  • hendersoon 10y ago
    The NUC in question, the NUC7i5BNK, is $620. That is without RAM or storage, so add another $50 for 8GB RAM, $80 for a 128GB M.2 SSD, and $100 for a Windows license. Total price is $850. This guy isn't cheaping out, he just wants more hardware for his money. $700 at Apple gets you a much slower 3 generation old i5 with a 1TB hard drive. But, with MacOS. It's one thing for Apple to charge a premium for better hardware. But that is NOT what they're doing. They're charging the same amount for ancient, inferior hardware.
    • sliken 10y ago
      Never pay MSRP, the NUC7i7BNK is going for $500 ish on preorder. The NUC7i5BNK is going for $400. The i3 version for $300, and the celeron or whatever is below the i3 is going for $200 ish. However the nuc generation7 i5 is the lowest model with the iris graphics.
  • derefr 10y ago
    There are some little things a Mac Mini has that you can't get by just (essentially) Hackintoshing a NUC. For example, Apple's custom UEFI, plus a Bluetooth controller that boots in HID mode and loads configured pairings from NVRAM, allows you to "hold down [key combination] at boot" on your Mac Mini's Bluetooth keyboard. Or the fact that all the desktop Mac models have internal speakers (and not just the motherboard PC speaker kind) and internal microphones, so OSX can guarantee it always has those devices available to use to play system event notification sounds, or for Siri, or for FaceTime, or for visual-impairment accessibility tooling, etc. Or the fact that you can still plug FireWire or DisplayPort devices into a Mac Mini through its Thunderbolt port (with a passive adapter to map the pins) and the motherboard will happily accept the device; whereas no PC would have any idea what to do with those wire protocols, even if you plugged them into the port of an explicit Thunderbolt PCIe card you bought. If you could get these things from a NUC, then sure, there'd be no point in the Mac Mini.
• tacostakohashi 10y ago
  I guess they've painted themselves into a bit of a corner with the way they do their pricing, and product announcements with a lot of hype. If they were to do the kind of update you suggest, there would be a lot of bad press stating the obvious ("It's just the same as before, but faster and more RAM. No new alloys or anything!"), and it would drive down prices for inventory of the old model.
  • benologist 10y ago
    Apple has stated they think the iPad Pro is the next computer for everyone. I would bet Apple is quite far along making tools for the iPad Pro that let you create apps for the iPad Pro and iPhone. They released a first foray into this kind of tool last year with their Swift Playgrounds, a language they designed to replace old things, using all-new APIs like Metal. The computers we like all stem from what we call Apple's history and legacy!
    • figers 10y ago
      Allow a mouse to connect to it and as a developer I would agree with you...
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • benologist 10y ago
        I kind of expect they'll only enable iOS development on iPad Pros, leaving them unable to create apps for platforms with mice.
    • massysett 10y ago
      This makes a lot of sense when you wonder why they aren't putting a touch screen on the Macs. Microsoft took a desktop OS and bolted a touch screen onto it. Apple will take a tablet OS and bolt a keyboard onto it. [edit] Makes even more sense when you consider who has what apps. Microsoft had a huge lead in Windows apps, so of course you want to bolt your touchscreen onto that. Apple has the huge lead in iOS apps, so better to bolt a keyboard onto that than a touch screen onto the Mac.
• flycaliguy 10y ago
  I think they are folding their desktop and laptop stuff into the IOS stuff, planning on a singularity in the next couple years. The iPhone will be able to carry their business over the hill of user discontent in the meantime.
  • eanzenberg 10y ago
    That's exactly what they're not doing, and I dunno why everyone thinks they will.. maybe because that's what msft is doing? Apple repeatedly said their laptop/desktop/macos variants will remain for hardcore users who need that freedom, while ios is for users who want simplicity.
    • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      The same hardcore users who dislike the new Macbook Pros?
      • maolt 10y ago
        How many of those do you ? How many of those hardcore users actually do like the new MBP and do not bother talking about it ? I would honestly appreciate to see a bit more fact & figures instead of anecdotal evidence.
        • AnOscelot 10y ago
          I'd love to see that too. Sales seems to be high for the MBP so maybe there's more quiet supporters than loud detractors. However the very existence of loud detractors about a product line, which historically has had far more fervent defenders than critics, indicates the hardcore users are unhappy overall. Apple, more than any other tech company, usually attracts the "can do no wrong" type of fans. They're still around for this product lineup but much quieter than usual. That should be worrying for Apple, assuming they still care about Macs.
          • mstolpm 10y ago
• spydum 10y ago
  It's waaaay more profitable to sell the same device for three years without updates: it costs nothing in r&d. This wholy explains the mind boggling profit margins doesn't it?
  • unusximmortalis 10y ago
    Exactly. Which saying what about this company?
  • tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
    Sounds short-sighted. You assume they continue to sell the same number of devices per quarter. I argue the quarterly number declines with outdated specs. Taken to the extreme, 40% profit margin on 1k sold units is nothing compared to 30% of a million sold units. Also, how hard can it be to put new CPUs and more RAM in? You don’t need a design team for that.
  • mwfunk 10y ago
    No, because while those ancient computers probably do have amazing margins at this point, they don't sell in sufficient quantities to make a big impact on quarterly earnings. Those mind boggling margins and profits really do come from mostly new devices. It really is just a matter of either poor multitasking by the organization, a very depressing long-term strategy, or both. It's weird- the practice of never talking about product roadmaps started in an era when whatever customer angst and uncertainty it generated was vastly outweighed by customer and media delight when the next step in that roadmap was finally revealed, which at the time happened like clockwork at 6-month intervals. Now people want them to talk about product roadmaps not because they're excited to know when/what the next great Mac is going to be, but because they're worried that there won't BE any Macs anymore (at least not any that they would want to buy). :(
• HillaryBriss 10y ago
  roughly 12% ($5.7 billion/$46.9 billion) of Apple's revenue comes from Mac sales, so they don't emphasize Mac development, i guess. http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial-results-iphone-mac-sales-down-again-3581769/ http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial...
• mmagin 10y ago
  It's a reality of the accounting, financial reporting, and executive incentives that in any large publicly-traded company today, product lines that bring in a small percentage of revenue are going to not get the chance they deserve.
• eanzenberg 10y ago
  My guess is they're mostly working on the "next big releases", so between iphone, ipad, and previously the touchbar mac and watch.
• dba7dba 10y ago
  It's the management, not the product managers, designers or engineers. With the management led by a logistics/operations man, you end up with products that are UNinspired. It's a pity Mr. Jobs picked Mr. Cooks to be the successor.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    If the share holders didn't like it could they vote him out of that position?
    • importantbrian 10y ago
      Of course, but Apple is enormously profitable. That's what shareholders care about, so why would they?
      • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        Because it's short-sighted. If you let your products stagnate, the current profits are higher because people who are tied into your ecosystems still have to buy something, so they buy the low-cost obsolete product for the high price, and you are very profitable right now. But doing that burns goodwill with your customers.
• krzyk 10y ago
  Largest? You mean employing the most people or having the largest area? As for the employees, Apple has about 115 thousands, IBM has about 379 thousands, Samsung has 319 thousands, HP has 289 thousands (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_information_technology_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...). You probably meant the most valuable (stock number * stock price).
  • mwfunk 10y ago
    He probably just meant "having the most resources" in some very general sense. But it's true, in terms of # of employees it's nowhere near the largest. In fact the vast majority of those 115000 people are retail employees. I would estimate that in terms of engineers, it's more like 20k or less.
  • Eric_WVGG 10y ago
    If that figure includes Apple Store employees, the number of engineers and product people is even lower. Cook has said multiple times that their biggest challenge is acquisition and retention of talent.
    • mahyarm 10y ago
      Maybe they could give market rate offers (ie facebook or google rates) to sr engineers then. You have to work there for 2 to 3 years before you start matching FB or Google.
  • desireco42 10y ago
    Per product, they probably have most employees, both overall and if you count R&D
• mattnewton 10y ago
  As an apple alumnus, I believe it has to do with a culture of "laser focus" There is an internal course called "what makes apple apple" that you can take, but it's not necessary to pick up one of the key pieces of culture: the importance of saying No to most things. Apple has built their reputation on high quality. To continue to deliver takes immense effort, even for incremental programs, and often almost if the talent internally shifts to whatever is new or deemed important, at the expense of everything else. So it's not that they don't know, it's not that they don't care. It's that they believe in sacrificing opportunities elsewhere so that they can focus on what is truly important. Another shift that happens internally is executive focus. Executives at apple are extremely hands on with products. They don't micromanage, but instead constantly judge whether a product is on course and has taste. We use to prepare monthly keynotes that went all the way to the top, hitting each executive along the way, who was interested in taking the pulse of every project underneath them. This approach does not scale to more than a handful of product lines per executive. There is a lot of risk inherent in this approach, because if they line up a home run with half the company over a few years and then you whiff, you could be in a tough spot. By that's exactly what apple does. And one of the advantages is that people are rarely worried about whether apple is committed to an entirely new product, because they go all in each time they move. For example, apple is absolutely committed to making the watch dominate the smartwatch market. It isn't a hobby for them. The solution the internal apple devoutiees would see to this problem is to cut the Mac mini entirely if it stopped selling, rather than refresh it. It is believed to not be worth splitting the companies attention. Edit: as other commenters have mentioned, apple is also not the largest maker of these products, just the one with the largest valuation. They have less, more focused talent, and larger margins. Edit edit: I just remembered the giant picture of Steve jobs in Infinite loop I used to walk past to lunch all the time that said "I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next." pretty much sums this up.
  • tim333 10y ago
    I see what you are saying but you'd think you could update some of the chips in the mini without needing much company attention?
• JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  They are trying to figure out how to make them thinner. Apple is very weight-conscious.
• cbsmith 10y ago
  I think this post itself a pretty good explainer as to why. Customers aren't even aware of the lack of competitiveness.
• dgregd 10y ago
  I ask myself the same questions. It seems that Apple is lost in internal politics. It was right decision at the time to build the new OS only for mobile devices. But now laptops and desktops have also touch screens. It was easy to foresee this. So Microsoft decision to build touch OS for laptops and desktops payed off. But who at Apple will take the blame for the decision made 5 years ago to still have two separate OSes? I guess it is safer to continue Steve Jobs vision, even knowing that Steve often changed his mind. That lack of Mac Mini internals upgrade is really insane. It seems that no exec wants to be associated with that simple project. In most innovative and valuable company everyone has to work on something revolutionary, otherwise someone will be not considered as the right person for Apple. I guess that "laser focus" and "saying no" are now mostly used in internal office fights.