7 ms·

This is ridiculous. Mac revenue was roughly $25 BILLION dollars in 2019. The idea that they don't care about it is simply wrong. Same with the idea that they do

by greedo 6y ago

This is ridiculous. Mac revenue was roughly $25 BILLION dollars in 2019. The idea that they don't care about it is simply wrong. Same with the idea that they don't care about marketshare. Of course they care more about iDevices than the Mac. It brings in roughly 5x as much money as the Mac. But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.

jedberg 6y ago
25 billion is still only 10% of their revenue. And they won't lose it all by making it a shitty transition. Heck, they won't lose most of it. But if they lose 20% of their revenue because of a bad transition, that's still only 2% of the total company revenue. Why would the spend money on protecting that 2%?
- rrdharan 6y ago
  If the money they need to spend is less than that 2%, why WOULDN'T they spend the money?
  - jedberg 6y ago
    The overhead of hiring people. The overhead of managing an extra team. The overhead of extra QA. The overhead of triaging extra bugs. There are a lot of costs associated with backwards compatibility with very little payoff if it doesn't mean a lot to the bottom line.
    - rrdharan 6y ago
      Sure. Note that 2% of $25B is $500M. Companies of all sizes (even FAAMNG) will act to protect that kind of existing revenue. And my point was that you can do all of the things you listed for less than $500M; probably for less than $250M. Developers are more expensive than they used to be but $100M+ still goes a pretty long way.
- renaudg 6y ago
  Because the Mac and iDevices revenue streams are not as independent as you imply. Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well. Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for creatives. There’s indirect value in that.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I mentioned this above—I feel like Apple's pro apps are highly analogous to what happened to the Mac. That doesn't portend a bright future. Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. They killed Aperture, which lots of photographers loved. They replaced Final Cut Pro 7 with a much more limited Final Cut X, and seeded lots of ground to Adobe in the process. There's also OS X Server, although there's a strong argument to be made it wouldn't have survived in the modern world anyway, and Apple just saw the writing on the wall. Logic does seem to have done consistently fine, at least, so that's something.
    - Jasper_ 6y ago
      Logic pissed off a lot of composers with the lack of 32-bit AUs in newer versions. The few producers I know who love Logic aren't upgrading to Catalina and are already considering switching to Windows.
    - pfranz 6y ago
      > Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. Sure, and this might be skewed by hindsight because they did make new releases for a handful of years, but it was an acquahire to develop Aperture and other color tools for Final Cut Pro. Small shops use After Effects on Windows, medium shops used Shake on Windows, and large shops used Shake in Linux. Because of hardware costs you'll be very hard-pressed to get medium or large shops to use macOS. I also don't see Apple investing/competing with the big transitions that happened in CG over the next 5 years; 64bit, 4k/8k, and stereo. Apple had special deals where they offered Shake's source code when it was discontinued and a few studios clung on and tried valiantly to accommodate [1] [1] https://www.studiodaily.com/2008/07/delivering-8k-vfx-shots-for-the-dark-knight/ https://www.studiodaily.com/2008/07/delivering-8k-vfx-shots-...
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
This was my argument for why Apple shouldn't have killed Aperture. Sure, it was a tiny percentage of Apple's business, but it was beloved by customers and independently profitable—more profitable than plenty of entire businesses. Apple still killed it.
- specialist 6y ago
  Yup. Apple is the best (large org) at marshaling resources, focus, priorities, pushing the envelope. It's been fantastic. But every decision has consequences. They abandon beloved products. They deprioritorize code quality. I wish they'd find a better balance, or clever new org strategies. Spinoff abandoned products. A separate cleanup crew to address technical debt, fix bugs. (I'm sure there's plenty of other devs, like me, who revel in house cleaning.)
- slantyyz 6y ago
  Man, Aperture was really good, and I loved the fact that if you bought it from the Mac App store, you got to install it on up to 5 computers, which was a bigger deal back then than it is now.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I never understood why they killed that but kept Filemaker. I guess they really did think the update to Photos was good enough.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Filemaker is different, it's not an Apple product anymore. Claris was spun off into a separate company.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I think Claris are still owned by Apple though?
      - 6y ago
pier25 6y ago
> But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time. I don't know, look how long it took for Apple to finally replace the damn keyboards.
tosers4 6y ago
>But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time. No. Look at MS and the difference in quality. They are both samey in the $$$ department, but MS much larger focus and enormous dev base makes it not such a nice thing for products. Apple reduced scope is what lets them have quality thing. They do not have much manpower (I mean, they are one of the few trillion dollar company, their human resources don't look like that), spreading focus would harm quality. Their iDevices makes 5x as much money, that's where their eyes are, that focus can't be made smaller for an "infirior product" money-wise.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Even back in 2006, there were at least 7-8 different ways to define a string on Windows depending on which API you were using.
  - Steltek 6y ago
    You may have missed GP's point. Microsoft is casts a very wide net, running on a huge array of hardware and trying to do everything from mobile to console gaming to datacenter servers. The dev experience is equally diverse: you don't even need a Windows box to develop for Windows. Apple jettisoned all of that diversity to refine a few precious use cases to earn that "quality" aura. I think this move to ARM is signaling a couple more use cases being tossed to the curb, like beefy workstations and PC gaming.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      How is that “wide net” working out? - Microsoft is a non starter in mobile - trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful - Windows is horrible as a touch first interface. - even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows. -it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows. - They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to use a competitors engine. MS is not exactly the shining example of how to successfully pivot as technology changes.
ksec 6y ago
Action speaks louder than Words.They only acted when the sales number or Data shows. And that was already too late. That is not caring by old Apple's Standard. Apple sells roughly 18-20M Mac per year. According to their own words more than 50% of these are completely new to the Mac platform. ( And most of them are form China ) You would have expected 9-10M new Active Users every year if no one was leaving the platform. Instead from 2014 to 2018, during that 5 years they managed to add 20M. ( Genuine Question, Did anyone notice there are less Mac users in US? ) There are also 20M registered developers, which adds to the bottom-line of Mac. What used to be annual Active User number reporting stopped in 2019. And even stopped mentioning satisfactory rate of Mac. Mac Pro was done not because they cared, but because a few closely connected real professional customers threaten to leave the platform before they took action. ( And many left before they notice ) It is like in a marriage when your partner keeps telling others in public how he/she loves you. But did not show any care or action during that time. For years He/She dont even talk to you or notice you. You try talking to him/her about having problems but he/she completely ignore you. One day you publicly file for divorce and He/She rushed out and tell others how much he/she cares and are working on it. That is not caring, it is called saving faces.

by greedo 6y ago

jedberg 6y ago

25 billion is still only 10% of their revenue. And they won't lose it all by making it a shitty transition. Heck, they won't lose most of it. But if they lose 20% of their revenue because of a bad transition, that's still only 2% of the total company revenue. Why would the spend money on protecting that 2%?

rrdharan 6y ago
If the money they need to spend is less than that 2%, why WOULDN'T they spend the money?
- jedberg 6y ago
  The overhead of hiring people. The overhead of managing an extra team. The overhead of extra QA. The overhead of triaging extra bugs. There are a lot of costs associated with backwards compatibility with very little payoff if it doesn't mean a lot to the bottom line.
  - rrdharan 6y ago
    Sure. Note that 2% of $25B is $500M. Companies of all sizes (even FAAMNG) will act to protect that kind of existing revenue. And my point was that you can do all of the things you listed for less than $500M; probably for less than $250M. Developers are more expensive than they used to be but $100M+ still goes a pretty long way.
renaudg 6y ago
Because the Mac and iDevices revenue streams are not as independent as you imply. Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well. Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for creatives. There’s indirect value in that.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I mentioned this above—I feel like Apple's pro apps are highly analogous to what happened to the Mac. That doesn't portend a bright future. Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. They killed Aperture, which lots of photographers loved. They replaced Final Cut Pro 7 with a much more limited Final Cut X, and seeded lots of ground to Adobe in the process. There's also OS X Server, although there's a strong argument to be made it wouldn't have survived in the modern world anyway, and Apple just saw the writing on the wall. Logic does seem to have done consistently fine, at least, so that's something.
  - Jasper_ 6y ago
    Logic pissed off a lot of composers with the lack of 32-bit AUs in newer versions. The few producers I know who love Logic aren't upgrading to Catalina and are already considering switching to Windows.
  - pfranz 6y ago
    > Apple killed Shake, which was an industry standard at one point. Sure, and this might be skewed by hindsight because they did make new releases for a handful of years, but it was an acquahire to develop Aperture and other color tools for Final Cut Pro. Small shops use After Effects on Windows, medium shops used Shake on Windows, and large shops used Shake in Linux. Because of hardware costs you'll be very hard-pressed to get medium or large shops to use macOS. I also don't see Apple investing/competing with the big transitions that happened in CG over the next 5 years; 64bit, 4k/8k, and stereo. Apple had special deals where they offered Shake's source code when it was discontinued and a few studios clung on and tried valiantly to accommodate [1] [1] https://www.studiodaily.com/2008/07/delivering-8k-vfx-shots-for-the-dark-knight/ https://www.studiodaily.com/2008/07/delivering-8k-vfx-shots-...

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

This was my argument for why Apple shouldn't have killed Aperture. Sure, it was a tiny percentage of Apple's business, but it was beloved by customers and independently profitable—more profitable than plenty of entire businesses. Apple still killed it.

specialist 6y ago
Yup. Apple is the best (large org) at marshaling resources, focus, priorities, pushing the envelope. It's been fantastic. But every decision has consequences. They abandon beloved products. They deprioritorize code quality. I wish they'd find a better balance, or clever new org strategies. Spinoff abandoned products. A separate cleanup crew to address technical debt, fix bugs. (I'm sure there's plenty of other devs, like me, who revel in house cleaning.)
slantyyz 6y ago
Man, Aperture was really good, and I loved the fact that if you bought it from the Mac App store, you got to install it on up to 5 computers, which was a bigger deal back then than it is now.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I never understood why they killed that but kept Filemaker. I guess they really did think the update to Photos was good enough.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Filemaker is different, it's not an Apple product anymore. Claris was spun off into a separate company.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I think Claris are still owned by Apple though?
    - 6y ago

pier25 6y ago

> But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time. I don't know, look how long it took for Apple to finally replace the damn keyboards.

tosers4 6y ago

>But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time. No. Look at MS and the difference in quality. They are both samey in the $$$ department, but MS much larger focus and enormous dev base makes it not such a nice thing for products. Apple reduced scope is what lets them have quality thing. They do not have much manpower (I mean, they are one of the few trillion dollar company, their human resources don't look like that), spreading focus would harm quality. Their iDevices makes 5x as much money, that's where their eyes are, that focus can't be made smaller for an "infirior product" money-wise.

scarface74 6y ago
Even back in 2006, there were at least 7-8 different ways to define a string on Windows depending on which API you were using.
- Steltek 6y ago
  You may have missed GP's point. Microsoft is casts a very wide net, running on a huge array of hardware and trying to do everything from mobile to console gaming to datacenter servers. The dev experience is equally diverse: you don't even need a Windows box to develop for Windows. Apple jettisoned all of that diversity to refine a few precious use cases to earn that "quality" aura. I think this move to ARM is signaling a couple more use cases being tossed to the curb, like beefy workstations and PC gaming.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    How is that “wide net” working out? - Microsoft is a non starter in mobile - trying to run Windows on low end Surfaces is painful - Windows is horrible as a touch first interface. - even with Azure there are more Linux VMs than Windows. -it takes literally years and multiple failures every time that MS tries to release a new version of Windows. - They finally through in the towel when it came to IE and was forced to use a competitors engine. MS is not exactly the shining example of how to successfully pivot as technology changes.

ksec 6y ago

Action speaks louder than Words.They only acted when the sales number or Data shows. And that was already too late. That is not caring by old Apple's Standard. Apple sells roughly 18-20M Mac per year. According to their own words more than 50% of these are completely new to the Mac platform. ( And most of them are form China ) You would have expected 9-10M new Active Users every year if no one was leaving the platform. Instead from 2014 to 2018, during that 5 years they managed to add 20M. ( Genuine Question, Did anyone notice there are less Mac users in US? ) There are also 20M registered developers, which adds to the bottom-line of Mac. What used to be annual Active User number reporting stopped in 2019. And even stopped mentioning satisfactory rate of Mac. Mac Pro was done not because they cared, but because a few closely connected real professional customers threaten to leave the platform before they took action. ( And many left before they notice ) It is like in a marriage when your partner keeps telling others in public how he/she loves you. But did not show any care or action during that time. For years He/She dont even talk to you or notice you. You try talking to him/her about having problems but he/she completely ignore you. One day you publicly file for divorce and He/She rushed out and tell others how much he/she cares and are working on it. That is not caring, it is called saving faces.