“Hewlett-Packard is still on top, and gaining. Dell is slipping. Apple is still a darling, with a pair of asterisks,” Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes for The Motley Fool.
“The first of Apple’s asterisks is that HP actually posted stronger year-over-year growth than Apple. This bodes well for HP heading into its upcoming quarterly report. Naturally, this doesn’t look good for Apple ahead of its report later this month, but just remember that Macs are no longer a material driver for the Cupertino titan. IPad and iPhone sales made up 72% of its holiday quarter revenue, with Macs accounting for a thin 14% slice of the revenue mix,” Munarriz writes. “The second asterisk is one that you won’t see from this table. We have to dig up Gartner’s data from January to show market share data for the fourth calendar quarter. Apple had a chunky 11.6% of the U.S. market during the period. It’s now down to 10.6%.”
Munarriz asks, “Apple’s present — and undeniably its near-term future — is more about iOS than Mac OS. Isn’t it better if Apple simply focuses on those platforms and nixes its Macs and MacBooks? …Should Tim Cook kill that Mac?”
“Are you insane?” Munarriz writes. “I was only testing you. Apple has better things to do than pry MacBooks from a fanboy’s cold, dead fingers. Letting the long tail for PCs play out makes far more sense than putting all of its eggs in the iOS basket.”
Read more about why Apple is not “wasting its time on Macs” in the full article here.
No.
Apple should bring the mobile sensors of iOS to the Mac. (touch, gyro, accelerometer, light sensors, cameras, proximity)
Apple should bring Mac input devices to iOS ( mice, gamepads, stylus, mouspads)
Make a large (ten finger) desktop horizontal Touch interaction surface that incorporates a hardware keyboard and multitouch so you don’t get gorilla arm touching the vertical screen.
Sync not just files and save states, synch application states over all form factors.
Add more standard flash storage to all devices and stop using it as the sole means to pad their profit margin.
The product catagories are merging. Only those who really need the processing power, the RAM and the memory (although that is moving into the cloud or external drives) will purchase Macs.
Redraw your mental map.;
Just another Motley Fool article designed to get you to buy their products.
Haters will be haters. Apple will not kill off products that grow and get better year after year.
Nope
Maybe what Apple ought to do is finally license OS X for desktop/notebook computing.
If you follow me on this, most Apple users will continue to get their gorgeous hardware from the best source — Apple. Meanwhile, the average cheapskate PC user might opt to buy OS X from, gulp, Dell (assuming apple only allows these vendors to put it on pre-certfieid hardware).
It won’t lose Apple much, might make some modest gains in revenue, and then it’ll bludgeon Microsoft (which is the point) while also making iOS even better as it fits into the realm of computing.
Fanboys? What about the millions of Mac fangirls?
No one mentions that of those 250,000 or so IOS apps, every single one of them was written with a Mac. There may not be that many out there, but they are responsible for the growth. Maybe not directly, but certainly indirectly.
Exactly!
Nope – Mac specifically the iMac is the true Apple iMacTV.
TIme shall prove this soon to be true – the iMac will integrate more televisionary functionality by which shall bring more Macs into family living rooms rather then the den or study. The real entertainment unit will come – and the Mac is that unit. Think 30 and 40 and possibly 50 inch slim iMacs with cable television slammed all together with the iMac-ness.
Perhaps eventually. IMO we won’t see such an integration until those big screen sets have at least 2160p resolution. OS X, much less any OS, starts getting clunky with the relative large pixels of 32″ screens and greater. Remember that 2560×1600 was/is considered an ideal resolution for 32″ monitors. By these ratios 1920×1080 is actually not a very “HD” by monitor standards on a similarly scaled TV. Give me 2160p on a big screen and the utility of the OS on the wall becomes much more viable, whether it’s built in or running off my Mac’s thunderbolt port. I doubt we’ll see a full-fledged OS X running on these Apple TVs, however. That’s more than likely staked out for iOS. Assuming it’s IOS we’ll see the respective 10′ interfaces geared around living room use as opposed to the full OS, particularly at 1080p.
Sounds like another divide-and-conquor question to me.