“Apple is the master of radical pivots. It killed the floppy drive, the CD drive, and the headphone jack in iPhones, while Macintosh systems went from the Motorola 68000 to the PowerPC chip to the Intel X86 line of chips,” John C. Dvorak writes for PC Magazine. “A very memorable pivot came when the company dropped the Apple II line of machines with an event called Apple II Forever. While it extolled the venerable machine with a fancy new model, it marked the end of the system.”
“What I’m sensing is that like the old Apple II (forever), the Mac will be phased out and the whole line will be replaced by iPads,” Dvorak writes. “My thinking is based on the latest Apple commercial for the iPad Pro… Here, a little girl is floating around town with her iPad Pro doing all sorts of fiddling around. She’s in a tree; she’s in a field. At the end, her mom [neighbor] asks her what she is doing with her computer. The girl responds by asking, ‘What’s a computer?'”
“I assume the point is to highlight Apple’s attitude towards computers,” Dvorak writes. “The little girl rejects the notion of a computer itself and thus separates an iOS device from everything you think of as a PC. The ad ends with a mention of iOS.”
“Earlier in the year, Apple ran a short ad where it said that an iPad Pro isn’t close to being a computer. It’s something better, more modern. The subtext of both ads is that computers are stupid or dead or passe. It’s a rejection of the concept of computers,” Dvorak writes. “What does this say about the Macintosh? I’m seeing the parallel with the Apple II and “Apple II Forever” extravaganza. It’s the end of the line… I know that Mac users do not want to see this reality, but the Mac is not a money maker… On top of that, the company is doing extensive custom chip engineering with its ARM licensing and the A9 chip.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s A9 SoC debut in 2015. We’re sure why Dvorak uses a two-generations-old chip as an example instead of Apple’s current state-of-the-art SoC, the A11 Bionic, but we assume it’s for the usual reason: The bloated gas bag is uniformly wrong.
Last we checked, $7.170 billion was larger than $4.831 billion. That’s Mac revenue vs. iPad revenue for Apple’s last reported quarter. Mac unit sales grew 10% YOY and revenue grew 25% YOY. In fiscal 2017, Apple’s Macintosh generated revenue of $25.85 billion. Any company on earth would do just about anything to have a money maker like Apple’s Macintosh.
