[OT] mobile rising

Tony tonytdominguez at aol.com
Fri Nov 10 12:55:24 UTC 2017


On Friday, 10 November 2017 at 11:28:41 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>> It would either be you and Jobs, or just you, letting them 
>>>> rebel. I would keep the line.
>>>
>>> That's funny, as I was responding to your statement above, 
>>> "So, let them rebel." :D
>>
>> "Let them rebel" was with regard to your point of view. As 
>> demonstrated by the sentence I put after it: "You said that 
>> they would like to see it go away, and/or they want to milk 
>> it." You said that Apple would be happy to see it go away. 
>> Then you added that they were "milking" the line while they 
>> could. Satisfying rebelling users doesn't jive with either 
>> position. They rebel and you want to get rid of it - and you 
>> get rid of it. They rebel wanting changes, and you only want 
>> to keep milk it while you can - then you get rid of it, 
>> because you can't milk what you have.
>
> Your logic is extremely confused.  Let me spell it out for you: 
> the Mac is all but dead, particularly when compared to the 
> mobile computing tidal wave, since they sell 10 iPhones + iPads 
> for every Mac, according to the sales link I gave you before.  
> They have cut investment in that legacy Mac product, but they 
> would like to keep selling a lower-quality product at high 
> prices to the few chumps that still maintain the old Mac aura 
> in their heads.

You have little company in thinking the Mac line is a 
"low-quality product". The computer magazine writers gush about 
the Macbooks.

As far as "all but dead", in the most recent quarter, that line 
did have declining sales from the previous year, but it was "5.6 
billion in revenue in Q3 — over 12% of Apple’s total for the 
quarter".


> So that is what they do, milk the suckers still paying high 
> prices for a rarely refreshed product with a lot more bugs.  I 
> don't know what's hard to understand about this for you.  When 
> the Mac userbase rebels, they try to calm them down and say 
> they're coming out with a new Mac Pro _next year_, five years 
> since the last one!

Your logic seems extremely confused. If they aren't changing the 
product it won't have a "lot more bugs". With no changes you get 
less bugs over time.

>
> Apple is a business.  As long as the Mac faithful are still 
> willing to pay a lot of money for lower-quality products, they 
> will gladly take their money, even though it's now just a 
> sideline for their real business, the iPhone.  Of course, 
> they'd rather just focus on the iPhone, but if they can take a 
> lot of devs off macOS and still milk those suckers, why 
> wouldn't they?

What does "take a lot of devs off macOS" refer to?

>
> Apple is all about making money, which is why they're the 
> largest company in the world, with some forecasting that they 
> will soon be the first company to have a market cap of... one 
> trillion dollars!!! insertDoctorEvilPinkie();
>

Very few companies are not "all about making money". That is why 
Americans were laid off by the millions and replaced by workers 
in countries with much cheaper labor rates. Bad for the workers, 
good for "making money". Apple isn't unique in making all it's 
products outside the USA.

I don't see where it makes sense to call people who buy Mac 
products suckers (they seem especially popular with software 
developers) who pay extra for what you call "low-quality 
equipment" without saying the same thing about the people who buy 
iPhones. Your mantra is "people need so much less than they are 
buying". Well, that applies as much to iPhone users as it does 
Mac users. People don't need $1,000 phones and they don't need to 
upgrade a phone every two years.

>>>> The large Apple profit comes from offering quality products 
>>>> and then pricing them at the highest gross profit margin in 
>>>> the industry. In order to get people to pay a premium for 
>>>> their products it helps to have a mystique or following, and 
>>>> the macOS line helps to maintain their mystique and it is 
>>>> small potatoes next to their phone business.
>>>
>>> I've already said repeatedly that they're not going to drop 
>>> the Mac line anytime soon, so I don't know why you want to 
>>> write a paragraph justifying keeping it.
>>
>> My post was in response to this statement of yours "Simple, 
>> they see the writing on the wall, ie much smaller sales than 
>> mobile, SO THEY WANT THE LEGACY PRODUCT TO GO AWAY, which 
>> means they can focus on the much bigger mobile market." That 
>> seems to be a contradiction to "they're not going to drop the 
>> Mac line anytime soon".
>
> No contradiction: they want the Mac to go away, but are happy 
> to keep supplementing their bottom line while pulling engineers 
> off of it, just like the iPod Touch.

If somebody wants something to go away and they can make it go 
away, they make it go away. It is most certainly a contradiction 
to say "they want it to go away" and they "want it to not go away 
so they can milk it".
>
> You seem to be confused by the fact that a business sometimes 
> has contradictory goals- should we focus exclusively on the 
> iPhone and make more money there or keep the Mac limping along 
> too?- and tries to balance the two as long as it makes sense.
>

That doesn't look like contradictory goals. It looks like two 
choices. Only iPhone or iPhone + macOS. They chose the latter. 
What exactly would Apple do, if it didn't make Macs, with regard 
to iPhone development, that would allow it to make more money 
from the iPhone? Their revenue from iPhones is 10's of billions 
of dollars a quarter. I doubt that there is any focus that the 
iPhone is missing.


>
>> If people ever get so cost-conscious that they decide to buy a 
>> $150 companion for their phone, instead of a $400 laptop, it's 
>> unlikely they will be using iPhones. You can get a nice 
>> Android phone with plenty of RAM/ROM for half the price of an  
>> iPhone.
>
> Sure, the hypothetical iPhone with multiwindow/dock and the 
> iPad Pro replace the expensive Macbook or Surface Pro, while 
> the Android phone you already have along with something like 
> Dex/Sentio replaces cheaper Windows PCs.  I already made this 
> point earlier.

So Apple users need a tablet and a phone but Android users just 
need a phone? There are Android phones just as expensive as 
iPhones, in addition to the ones that are 1/10th to 1/2 the price.

Why are you talking about iPads? Why would a $649 and up iPad Pro 
be something people need when you say they can use their phone 
instead of a $400 Windows laptop? That is something I would 
expect Tim Cook to claim.


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