“If you listen to groupthink critics on Apple, you’ll hear that the company is deeply troubled by too much reliance on iPhone sales, aging Mac Pro and Mini offerings that haven’t been updated in years and a stagnating market for iPads that has fallen precipitously since Peak iPad occured in 2014,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “They’re wrong, here’s why.”
“The tired tropes of Apple’s ‘troubling’ situation are a form of balloon logic; ideas that seem substantial until you scratch the surface and realize that there’s nothing really there but a thin bit of rubbery garbage stretched out around captive air,” Dilger writes. “There’s a simple explanation for why analysts, pundits and journalists regularly doubt the capacity of Apple — the most consistently, commercially successful tech company ever — while exercising a doe-eyed credulity in the promises of every potential new competitor that announces itself.”
Dilger writes, “Analysts, pundits and journalists needn’t be consciously biased against Apple to repeat fiction about the company; they only need to be selectively informed by Apple’s rivals and lack any capacity for critical thinking or any valid insight into the market.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: They don’t call it FUD for nothing.
Not sure if it is really FUD. Quite frankly, Apple should either kill the Mac Pro and mini line, or come up with the next generation. Silence does not do anybody any favors , and just amps up the criticism that much more. Apple, do something either way, but DO something, jeez.
Great read as always from DED.
Spot on analysis of the rubbish espoused about Apple inc.!
The key now is that Apple Inc. is a fundamentally soup-to-nuts company that controls the whole gamut of their offering from design, silicon, hardware, software, stores, experience & support, that nobody, repeat nobody can touch them …. so what do the “nobodies” do, they waste money on analysts and bloggers to pump their FUD about Apple Inc.
DED was almost dead, from riding what is suggested by your handle on MDN. Occurred about a decade back. I don’t know if he still rides or not.
I’m in complete agreement that the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, App store, Mac Book/Pro and iMac are doing fine, thank you very much. Even the AppleTV has some built-in “potential” now. And Apple is in zero danger of some imaginary meltdown of their empire.
But the MacPro is an embarrassing, self-fulfilling prophecy—especially in light of the resources Apple could invest in that area which wouldn’t affect their bottom line any more than a rounding error.
Don’t build a poorly conceived, overpriced, underpowered, awkwardly upgradable machine, then point to poor sales and say, “See, people just aren’t buying MacPros anymore, the demand doesn’t exist.”
Don’t build a poorly conceived, overpriced, underpowered, awkwardly upgradable machine, then point to poor sales and say, “See, people just aren’t buying MacPros anymore, the demand doesn’t exist.” — Synth
This.
Apple should have introduced the emoji bar on the underpowered Macbook and left the trucks alone.
If I hear Phil Schiller trotting out another piece of sh!7 mac and touting its thinness as a feature…
The Macbook Pro is supposed to be the top-of-the-line, heavy hauler portable. Now it’s not. This is why people are pissed.
Some people still use trucks. Some people still want trucks. We have city boys at Apple that use Prius’s and don’t understand how anyone could need anything more.
Tim Cook is culturally out-of-touch with what customers want.
I’m not demanding that Apple come up with a whole new category of device as they did with Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. (And, I do not think anyone else should either.) I can easily live with Apple only coming out with a revolutionary product every five to 10 years.
My complaint with Apple is that while all current products are evolutionary, many of those are lagging the rest of the competition in capabilities.
I don’t need Apple to come up with a truly radical Mac Pro. Most of us pro users would be happy with an update to 2017 versions of the technologies even if the overall design were to be based upon a 2012 Mac Pro. If Apple took the absolute best in the state-of-the-art CPUs, GPUs, buses, interconnects, interfaces, etc. and packaged them in five plus year old packaging most of us would be thrilled and writing check or pulling out our credit cards before the person introducing/announcing them stopped talking!
Most of us would be happy with the current design for the Mac mini if it were updated with 2107 technologies. Give us a mini that is at least as state of the art as the mini was when it was first introduced, even more current would be better. A mini has a specific niche and many people buy them (or rather would buy them) if they were more state-of-the-art.
Most of us would be happy if new MBPs shipped with 2017 technologies within weeks after all the components were available rather than 1/2 year or more later.
Most of us would be happy if an iPad Pro (12″ or larger) were to ship within a few weeks after the equivalent iPhone shipped (they do use variants of the same components after all). The iPad (especially the “Pro” variant) is becoming the “red headed step child” of Apple’s iOS devices. It really seems to be getting the Mac Pro treatment of seven or eight years ago.
Yes, the Apple fanatic in me would LOVE to see a completely new category of devices come out. We could then sit back with an ear-to-ear grin and say to ourselves, “Well, THAT’S what they’ve been working on all this time.” BUT, I don’t need that.
The problem is that, except for the iPhone and to a slightly lesser extent the Apple Watch, Apple has let *EVERYTHING* else wither on the vine — some more than others, and even kill off some items that people have come to depend upon, e.g., AirPort Extreme.
No matter what DED and his like minded people seem to think, I don’t see any reason to not thing that 2016/2017 is unlike 1993/1994.
Bravo! Well said.
One reason to not think that might be that the 1990s and 2016 presented very different conditions for the computer market, and leadership responded differently. In every way but one, the two eras are very unlike. They are alike only in the general resentment of Apple’s leadership. If that is what you meant, then your analogy is spot on. Otherwise, the present—and the future—will continue their campaign of separation from the past, regardless of the little men supposedly in charge.