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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

The problem I see is that as the iPhone became big they shifted focus towards it instead of trying to focus on everything they already have. But I could be wrong, and maybe someone else might have more insight. I want Apple to succeed, same with Microsoft. They are imho necessary companies, otherwise we're stuck with whatever Google, Facebook or Amazon feed us.

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The mobile phone market was already becoming the largest electronics market in the world before Apple entered it. It made perfect sense to focus on that.

Eleven years later, there is still not a single electronic item that is larger than the smart phone market.

PC's aren't making a comeback, TV's are low margin and bulky, etc.

You still need proper machines to develop for those phones though, and since Apple requires Macs for it, they really should of never neglected their computer market. I am pretty damn sure if they hadn't we'd have seen a lot more Macs all throughout. Now we're seeing plenty of dedicated Mac users jump ship to Linux or even Windows 10.

I think you misunderstood the parent comments point. “PCs aren’t making a comeback” doesn’t mean they disappear entirely. It means that they’ve now been relegated to niche use cases, like the ones you point out.

Not only have mobile phones cannibalized the “a PC on every desk” for people at home, they’ve expanded to “a computer in every pocket”.

Dedicated iOS developers are by definition, not abandoning Macs and “Creatives” are not flocking to Linux.

Even if other developers are leaving Mac (and the numbers don’t support that) and if Apple could have grown Mac sales by (an unrealistic) 50%, it still wouldn’t have made a noticeable change in their profitability.

The vast majority of the world consumes content only — doesn’t even touch an IDE, hence the proported shift away from PCs in the first place.

Man, we really have come full circle.

Of course they focused on the iPhone. As a corporation you can't blame them, focusing on that market led to them becoming the most profitable company in the history of capitalism on the planet Earth, to say that a publicly traded company should not have done that is basically economically insane (or at best naive). It is problematic, however, because in many ways the earning of massive profits was almost too easy, and that's led to a significant degree of laziness in the industry. Worse, the combination of massive profits and consolidation means that there are lots of plenty viable markets and customers who aren't being well served at present. Because the talent and capability to do so is locked up in these megacorps who can't be bothered to pay attention because they are drowning in money from the mobile devices business. There is a similar problem at google where the vast majority of the company's revenue comes in from search ads, rendering everything else the company does (even if it's important, even if it represents the foundation of a multi-billion dollar business) basically "for funsies" in comparison.

I think perhaps the Dutch East India company was the most profitable company in history. But yeah, they have done very well.

Most "valuable", certainly, especially at the height of the speculative bubble, but in terms of actually generating net positive cash flow from ongoing revenues?

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