Engadget:
Between dropping sales and controversial products, what does the Mac means to Apple in 2018? Yes, it’s the company’s first flagship product, but it’s also an increasingly small portion of its business. Pretty much everything that Apple sells, from streaming music and wireless headphones to the Apple Watch and HomePod, is designed with iOS in mind. The days of the Mac serving as your “digital hub,” as Steve Jobs famously put it way back in 2001, are long gone.
If that’s the case, what does the Mac mean to Apple (besides about 10 percent of last quarter’s revenue)? The answer can be found by looking at the one product category going through explosive growth: Apple’s services segment.
Many people will say Apple is ignoring the Mac and using the 13 percent drop compared to a year ago as evidence but here is the argument that the Mac is integral to Apple’s Services numbers.
Sales were low because they released new MBP after the quarter ended. Last year they released them during the quarter. Let’s see what sales are next quarter.
This is somewhat of a “chicken little” article about the Mac. Some quarters, the Mac represents more sales than the iPad! With MUCH higher ASPs!
This is somewhat of a “chicken little” article about the Mac. Some quarters, the Mac represents more sales than the iPad! With MUCH higher ASPs!
I’m still holding my breath Apple will ship a new Mac Pro this year.
That was a really thoroughly stupid article. Macs are not just drivers for services revenue. Macs are the root of the entire Apple ecosystem. You need a Mac to write code for an Apple device. Without developers, you no longer have an ecosystem. Sure the branches are much bigger and more flashy, but without the root the entire money tree dies.
They explicitly promised that it would not be this year. Sounds like you’re already exhibiting symptoms of oxygen deprivation.
You’re underestimating how much Tim Cook’s Apple loves money. Any investment in maintaining the Mac platform has a good ROI. But that comes at an opportunity cost of investing that same effort into iPhone/iOS, which will have a much better ROI due to the massive number of units those move. Apple can’t sustain a good business like the Mac forever when it detracts from their phenomenally good business. Being the iPhone’s “dad” so to speak will not save the Mac. There are other ways to keep iOS development going without the huge obligation to produce a line of PCs!
Eventually, Apple will either formally kill the Mac at such time as they feel developers can stomach using iOS computers to develop for iOS, or they will (hopefully) sell the “macOS” itself outright and strike a deal to make sure XCode continues to run on whatever it becomes. There’s also no reason you couldn’t develop for iOS on Windows. And devs may “revolt” and go “eww” but the market will still be there, and people will still need apps. So other devs will happily take their places.
Apple clearly hates making computers as the rest of us know them. They’ve made that abundantly clear for the past few years. They want to make proprietary luxury consumer appliances of which they can sell billions of units, like iPhone.
Shit, thought that announcement was last year. 🙁