Mac sales declined nine per cent over the quarter
Make a decent one, and I'll go buy one!
*Desperately wants a new Mac Mini but it's beyond the waiting and caring phase now.
Apple continues to display all the characteristics of a money-making machine, with record results for the third quarter of the year. This was the iGiant's strongest fiscal third-quarter results in its history, according to Apple, and its fourth straight quarter of double-digit revenue growth. In a conference call with analysts …
Exactly. I don’t think it’s that no one wants the Mac anymore, but with nothing up to date in the low end (Mac Mini, MacBook Air) or the expandable high end (Mac Pro), everyone who wants to buy a Mac is either holding their breath or getting a Hackintosh.
I think that, once Apple extracts its opposable digit from its fundamental orifice and delivers new hardware, sales of the Mac will recover considerably.
Agreed.
That silly tube like MacPro thing
Batteries that cannot easily be replaced
Anything else that easily cannot be replaced
shit keyboards that don't last
fixing stupid problems that dont need fixing in the vain cause of 'innovation'
To name a few
Partially disagree. Thats your personal preference but not all of that needs to be fixed to recover sales.
Fixed batteries have been a MacBook staple for years with little discernible impact on sales.
Stick in an upgradable SSD and Memory even if it makes it 1-2mm thicker.
Produce equivalent top end MacBooks without the silly and expensive Touch Bar.
Refresh MacBook (non-pro) with a few more ports so its a good Air successor - make sure there is a <$1000 model.
Any one of those would stimulate MacBook demand.
The mid 2018 refreshes did a lot to improve things. In particular the 13" is a pocket rocket now its got 4 cores - 8 virtual as the i5 and i7 both have hyper threading.
@ Gordon 10, "Fixed batteries have been a MacBook staple for years with little discernible impact on sales."
You're right but it's the degree to which things have been fixed inside that has most definitely changed.
My old Mid-2010 17" MBP can have it's battery swapped at home - unscrew the back, unplug old battery, plug in new battery and screw the back in to place again. It's not something you can do on a regular basis but it is a world away from the latest MBPs with their batteries glued in place inside and near enough impossible for someone to replace at home.
"Make a decent one, and I'll go buy one!"
Absolutely! The dual-core-only-ness of the Mac Mini line is crazy (IMO it's to stop people buying a mac mini and pairing it with the monitor(s) of their choice, rather than forking out for a large, bulky iMac whose lovely monitor will boost Apple's profits, not to mention easily outlast the computer itself).
I'd also add another requirement: Something that's a bit more sensibly priced - I mean, over £4k for an iMac Pro, and at least £3k for a stupid dusty-bin thing?! I may be one of the mugs who'll fork out extra for Apple stuff, but not that much extra!
I think the point is, if you decide two years hence, you need more storage in your precious little MacBook, you can't have it. You can't just unsolder the old SSD and solder in a bigger one. You have to sell your entire machine and buy one with more storage space. And pay Apple's inflated prices for the privilege.
Ditto the RAM.
I can think of a couple of reasons for swapping out a laptop drive, and not all of them have to do with needing more onboard storage. Drive failure for one.
Another being that the easiest way to give a creaking laptop a new lease of life is to increase the RAM and throw in an SSD in place of the original drive. I've lost count of the number of colleagues I've seen do this, but usually with an older i5/i7 laptop rather than an Argos £300 core-duo special.
Want to do either with a new Macbook Pro? Forget it.
This.
My Macbook Pro 2012 is still going strong, with a RAM upgrade to 16Gb from 4Gb, an SSD swapout, and the optical drive swapped for a second HDD. When it eventually gives up I'd buy another Macbook Pro in a heartbeat if it wasn't a soldered/glued together mess of non-user-servicable parts.
There's no reason why RAM and SSDs have to be soldered to the mainboard either, every other manufacturer gets by without having to do so.
Surely the functionality of the Shuffle, for exercise at any rate - which was its primary use-case, has been subsumed into the Watch? If you’re into exercise, and you’ve bought into the Apple ecosystem, then you probably have a Watch - regardless that it’s an order of magnitude more costly than the old shuffle - and you’ll be using that to play your exercise tunes instead.
In some more advanced countries, those some USain like Trump hate a lot, countries with little debt and even a surplus, there are provision to share some of the profits with workers too, and not shareholders only.
Yes, they are bonuses, but are not left to the grace of the CEO. They are contractual, and based on measurable parameters.
How US companies work is clear - it may not be the best way in the long run, especially not there's a trend to crush workers' rights.
Wages stagnation in the US is a problem, and it will become bigger and bigger. It also explain why US imports so much cheap stuff from China and the like, and why it burdens of debits people as soon as they enter university.
It can work for a while, then the bubble explodes (remember subprimes...) and the economy falls. A working economy require customers - if you can't create and sustain customers, it can't.
I think unequal societies are more sustainable than you think. It is after all the rich and successful who benefit. They are able to lobby and plead a special exception to every rule. "If you tax us too much we'll live elsehwhere" and the Govt will believe it. Especially in the US even to be a candidate you have to be a multi-millionaire or billionair. It is unclear to me why they would even be aware of the falling real value of wages as they are unlikely to know what "work" is in the tradional sense, they are more rentiers or pure capitalists. Whilst capitalism needs consumers to consume and therefore have wages to do so, I do not see why they have to be sold good quality products, and they can buy them on credit too. The average American is also not as well educated as a typical European in a high tax high public service society.
Actually, the I-Phone X stuff is spin: sales growth but from a low base.
My anecdotal street survey does suggest that they are selling more ear brushes™ but I've not seen many Apple Galaxy X's in the wild. YMMV.
The push into music seems to be, ahem, paying dividends and should help Apple launch its video streaming service but they may face a decision at some point as to whether the services must be tied to Apple devices.
My anecdotal street survey does suggest that they are selling more ear brushes™ but I've not seen many Apple Galaxy X's in the wild. YMMV.
Same here, other than at the locations where you'd expect the sort of wealthy customer who will always upgrade to the "best" product in Apple's range - seen quite a few X's at the few posh functions I've been to.
Can't speak for other EU nations, but I'd certainly expect US X sales to be notably stronger than the UK, since (even after the sales tax adjustment) the X starts off with a 12% price premium in the UK, and household disposable income in the UK is around 10% lower than the US.
Screens without glass means screens where scratches are a problem. No thanks, I was glad to leave behind the old days of phones with plastic screens that would magically acquire scratches from being in my pocket despite never putting anything else in the pocket with it. I guess pocket lint contains a little bit of fine silica or something else that scratches plastic.
It was annoying back when there was hardly ever any reason to look at a phone screen, now that we look at phone screens for hours a day there's no way I'd tolerate a screen that's not at least as resistant to scratching as glass.
Everyone likes the idea of folding phones or phones with rollable screens. Reality bites, though - folding phones will need to be square when folded, or be a trifold, to get a decent aspect ratio when unfolded. Phones with rollable screens will need some sort of frame that unrolls with them to keep them perfectly flat, because who wants to look at a display that's wavy or otherwise non-flat.
Between those issues, the aforementioned scratching, weight (for the backing for folding or frame for rolling) bulk since they'll probably be larger when folded/rolled, battery life (more display = more power draw) and likely durability problems with the first gen (at least) after repeated folding/rolling multiple times a day over a year or two I think when released they will get a lot of hype, but won't prove to be very popular. Especially if they cost significantly more than current flagships, which seems likely. The issues will be worked out eventually, but not for years after they first appear.