An important metric to note from there release however is that 66% of sales came from international markets.
Maybe sales were over-stated in the decade prior due to weakness in the US dollar? I don't understand the meaning of picking a favourable exchange rate to normalize the earnings.
For all we know, it's high dollar from here to eternity.
The reason for this is that, while Apple gets incrementally better, it at least does not tend to get worse. Compare with Windows 10.
Superficially, Apple tech is also a status symbol, especially among the young--but that is not to say that the cool kids do not buy Android phones, Kindles or Chromebooks. Less superficially, the target market of Apple is the luxury/privileged--and this segment of society does not consider advantages of upgrading and neither do they consider cost. It is the same segment of society (or at least significantly overlaps with the same segment) that will order avant-garde splats of "exotic modern art" food for exorbitant prices where others would consider frugality or nutritional benefit. It is the same market that all marketing targets: the clueless and impressionable.
I am not saying Apple devices are bad, I am saying they are heavily marked up far beyond the value that OS X and its exclusive applications add, and ergo the majority of its buyers are sufficiently well-off that they can afford to have the most fashionable computer. There is very little fashionable about having something from the previous season, let alone 2012 (despite the fact that a MBP from this year will probably still be sufficient for a web developer in a typical situation).
Of course, I am going to get lambasted if I do not also mention that OS X is (arguably) well-designed in terms of user interface. I say arguably because, personally, I do not see this glistening advantage--but I'm a developer, I want a command line and a modern web browser. What I do see is more effort put into the actual polish of the UI than Microsoft seems to invest in their OS.
It's no different to Chrome vs Firefox. Chrome is building up quite an impressive market share, despite the fact that its peers (excluding IE, as always, because apparently implementing the flexible box model was too difficult) can do most of the same things that Chrome can do.
In a similar vein, Chromium (FOSS Chrome) is readily available to use (yes, yes, dev builds, but they are remarkably stable and I've yet to experience an issue with a Chromium dev build) yet nobody uses it. While obviously discoverability is an issue (since Chromium does not advertise that it can be easily installed) I imagine that if you offered Apple hardware at a lower price without branding, it would sit in the branded Apple hardware's shadow. Especially given the angst already present among cool kids about phones which seem to imitate the iPhone's physical product design)
Well, this has been thoroughly anecdotal and I don't usually like to do that, but hey ho. If it's of value for someone to read and expand upon or criticise, why not post it
[0]: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apples-iOS-eats-into-Androids...
> It is the same segment of society (or at least significantly overlaps with the same segment) that will order avant-garde splats of "exotic modern art" food for exorbitant prices
Those are unaffordable luxuries.
Jeep is a good comparison. Jeep's vehicles are probably not much different than other car makers, but there is a huge and well established aftermarket parts business. Jeeps hold value well in the used market.
I would be interested in the used value of Apple vs comparable Android products.
I find a dumb phone meets my personal needs, so I have little interaction with either product.
Edit: I agree that people in general upgrade their devices more often than they need to based on their use case. It would be interesting to know if Apple owners do so more often than Android owners.
They nailed the product planning, they just missed the collapse of oil and the high dollar.
Then again i can't help but wonder if he got help by Apple computers being a de-facto standard in media production.
I seem to recall that the first time i heard about iPod was because some artist or actor was seen with some white wires dangling from his ears. And that was back when you needed a Firewire card and third party software to get it working on anything but a Mac.
And as best i recall it was not in the tech section or some such.
No one else did that. Every other computer company allowed other motivations to trump human factors.
These days it's standard practice... although, few people know how to tell a good designer from a bad one, so they hire bad ones who do crap work and the institution never really trusts them and project managers end up running the show, mostly by allowing powerful employees to put their pork barrel projects on the schedule.
Steve Jobs could tell good designers from bad ones, he provided a wall of protection and power around them, and he fought like hell to keep the company solvent until the rest of the organization started to trust them. That's why they have devices people want to re-purchase year after year.
Apple manages to provide a complete and round packet. Sure, some aspects are better or more pronounced than others, but it’s not very uneven.