This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business.
The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.
The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.
NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple.
It's 'the same OS' from the watch, TV, Airpods to the Mac Pro.
There is no cost cutting the top end because it's ALL the same Platform. The Top end is the same as everything else with an additional parlor trick.
For the phrase "Apple is Dooomed!", including similar results, I get only 4 pages of google search results.
For "Apple is Doomed!", including similar results, I get 31 pages.
What chance can anyone else have if the Mac Pro is doomed if iPhone sales dip?
History would have taken another path without that reverse acquisition and Microsoft's money injection.
Although revenue for Mac is still increasing (most likely because they're making even more profit by using their own CPU) the sales are already softening.
More of an issue now and in the coming years is bandwidth to do work on low volume products. They may be happy to spend the money but diverting key staff who could be working on a volume product, say the next iPhone SoC, that's a tougher call.
My surprise is that Android is the "other one" and not Windows Phone.
> it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew.
Microsoft never fully committed to a phone OS because workable tablets might have demolished the desktop market.
The problem was that the "Windows XP Tablet Edition" was utter crap. A desktop OS and its mentality shoved into tablet form with modifications that fell way short of what was actually needed for that form. The iPad was the first tablet that got it right - and feel like a tablet meant for tablety things, as opposed to a PC without a keyboard and crippled in all sorts of ways.
I'm not. Microsoft, with WP, copied the weak things from iOS (like being locked down, but also with very poor walled garden; single platform, Snapdragon reference design only), but not the strong ones. Android did it the other way, so I'm not surprised at all.
This is because platforms have three advantages. The first is a user’s sunk investment. I own hundreds of pounds worth of iOS software, and even the free software I use took an investment of time and effort to learn. Plus I now have considerable assets in those file formats and storage systems. Switching to a new platform would be expensive in money and time. The second advantage is network effects, my whole family is on the same platform, so is my company and many of my friends using the same services. The third advantage is the ecosystem. There is a plethora of software and services available for iOS that a new entrant won’t have, many offered by third parties. In competing with iOS and Android you’re not just competing with Apple and Google, but also the entire ecosystems of companies that complement them. These three advantages also apply to Android and its users.
This is why even Microsoft could not break into the modern mobile smartphone platforms market, they were too late. Android and iOS had critical mass in all three areas. Google was incredibly lucky they managed to get Android up to being a viable platform before Apple had the entire mobile platform market sewn up. Fortunately the Android team at the time knew the new game they were playing when they saw the iPhone announcement, and realised they were in a race against time for survival.
This is also why the desktop is dominated today by the same platforms it was in the 90s. Mac and Windows. Arguably we could extend that to the 80s with Mac and DOS. That’s around 3 decades of stability. The mobile market in its current form was established around 12 years ago. I would not be at all surprised if the mobile market is still dominated by Android and iOS in another 20 years. There are incredibly powerful forces driving this.
If the cruise ship sinks, the yacht might be a great help - or it might get pulled down with it.
Luckily, the cruise ship doesn't show any signs of sinking at the moment.
Increasingly though it feels like those of us who prefer a laptop (or desktop machine!) over a phone are like HAMs ... or perhaps guys that like manual transmissions.
It seems more likely that it will be the Macs that go down, and not the iPhones a decade or so from now.
As for the "edge of bankruptcy" was due to a series of bad business decisions, not the Mac line itself. If anything, the Mac line and Mac customers was the only thing they still had going for them. It was the OS that was old and tired in an era of good enough Windows, Apple wasting resources in Copland, Newton and other endeavors without results, the blunder of allowing clones that ate into their Mac lunch, and so on.
edit: 2023!
> It's just choice.
For CAx in general it's difficult to say, because there's such a huge variety of software and every little niche has its own highly specialized (and usually very expensive) tools. I've never seen any of these support anything other than Windows and/or Linux. Some of them have Win32 GUIs and Linux is headless only (for running simulations), some are fully cross platform, some are Linux-only.
Most CAE engineers around here work on Linux, mainly because they prefer how easy it is to script and automate things and because the headless HPC/batch environment is of course also Linux. Meanwhile CAD and design only happens on Windows because CATIA is Windows only, like the various Autodesk tools used for CAID. From the late 80s to the early 2000s this place had a ton of UNIX workstations (SGI, HP, Sun) and even UNIX clusters (IRIX and SUPER-UX among others, the latter having virtually no representation on the internet today). There's also still IBM AIX systems around, as well as IBM mainframes. Not my department though.
Suppose something like CATIA was available on Mac and offered lets say a performance benefit. Would you consider Mac? Or would you for example still need a whole other set of tools to be available as well for it to be even possible?
Are you saying some people still use IBM mainframes for CAD/CAE/etc applications? If yes, that's unexpected yet intriguing information, and I'd love to know more.
Although maybe you were just stating the obvious that IBM mainframes survive in general even if no longer in this particular domain.
I haven't had the time or the desire to take it for a spin yet, but I'd love to be able to compile FPGA designs on a nicely configured and quiet M2 system.
Apparently, one of the reasons for its lack of adoption, was lack of a native macOS GUI – instead it ran under X11. https://community.sw.siemens.com/s/question/0D54O000061xMQgS...
If Apple really cared about it, I'm sure they could have worked out some deal with Siemens to keep the macOS edition viable, even improve its UI to be native and more usable. It would require them to move away from viewing themselves just as a customer, into more seeing it as an investment into their own platform (making it viable for more use cases.) Sad to say, Apple doesn't seem to think like that much (or maybe some people there do, but not the people whose opinions really count)