Too soon to tell if it’s the beginning of the end for the Mac

Speaking from a shop which is heavy Mac, we were at our wit's end with Apple last quarter. For the first time that I can remember, and certainly the first time in my company's history, we could not by a new iMac if we wanted to. And we dearly wanted to. We snapped up any refurbs we could, and that channel quickly dried up as well. So for us, at least, we were forced to push sales of new machines into the next quarter.

Seriously, what company does this? Cancel one product line, months before the replacement is available. It staggers the mind. Release after release we could always get the current model until the new one was ready.

In our local market at least, the demand for the new iMacs was so huge that it is only just now recovering from the supply shortage. Custom builds are still 2-3 weeks out - which we need if we want a machine with 16GB. So I am forced to purchase 8Gb models to meet our demand, knowing full well that they cannot be upgraded without voiding the warranty, and without a great deal of labor and the risk of shattering the front panel glass.

That is a terrible, terrible headline. Prediction without commitment. They might as well write "We have absolutely no idea where the Mac is going."

Crap article. The reason Mac has lower sale volume last quarter is Apple ended the iMac sales for more than a month while waiting for the current iMac model to launch. It blew my mind that only Apple can afford to terminate one hot selling product line for so many weeks.

I'll tell you this: It's not too soon to tell if it’s the beginning of the end for the Washington Post. Their main reason reason for existence to cover Washington is being taken over by the likes of Politico. They have a good brand, but that's not enough if they want to survive.

I don't know about the US but around here (eastern Canada), in December and early January, there were no Macs available in stores anywhere except for some models of laptop, they were still expecting the new ones.

Macs have always had pretty good longevity, and that's been even more true for the ones produced in recent years. I usually get 5-6 years out of Mac, and even then can usually sell it for not too bad a price to someone who will surely get several more years out of it.

I would say that the likelihood that most of the growth in the Mac line in recent years has been "switchers"; now they're all enjoying a computer that can actually last you 10 years potentially, so sales of course will stagnate.

Might this be partly because there are huge numbers of Mac using professionals who are holding off until the Mac Pro refresh later this year?

If the ipad is cannibalising consumer sales and new products such as the iMac with non-upgradable RAM are not appealing to the top end.

Washington Post tech coverage is about as sensationalist as Forbes, and that's saying something.

Apple seems to forget people still have to develop all those iOS apps. Their mac lineup has been horrendously badly suited for devs. I feel like the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro 17 are regrettable casualties to their disinterest in the market.

However, it's quite obvious by now that the KaplanCo birdcage-liner is well past its sell-by date.

Walking around campus I still see an endless sea of Apple products, though it's more of a fashion accessory now.

I am a pariah with my IBM Thinkpad running openbsd. When I spot the other heathens using Thinkpads we nod at each other like it's some underground secret club.

As for tablets the new google nexus tablets will be in the $99-150 range and you can manipulate the source to custom build whatever you want.