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Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by falcor84 on Thursday June 14, 2018 @01:28PM (#17313434)
The Mac line brought them ~25B revenue in 2017, in one of their best years ever.

Looking at a business of this magnitude, I don't see how it matters what percentage of the total revenue this is. There's so much money to be had here and, unlike an individual, a company's attention shouldn't be so limited as to essentially make them forget to collect this additional revenue.

Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by mortenjorck on Thursday June 14, 2018 @01:50PM (#17313673)
This is the part I just don't understand. The Mac is a $25B business by itself, and yet it seems to be operated like a vanity project, largely limiting itself to flashy launches like the Touch Bar or iMac Pro instead of maintaining a steady update pipeline like any other B2B product company.
Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by menacingly on Thursday June 14, 2018 @02:00PM (#17313791)
I have no idea if macs only account for 10% of Apple revenue, but assuming it's true, it doesn't matter what dollar amount that 10% works out to.

We find percentages useful precisely so that we can see through deceptively high dollars to the truth that they don't really play a big part in total dollars brought in.

The fact that it's 25B (if it is, again, no idea) only serves to illustrate the heart-stopping scale at which Apple does business. We're talking about a company for whom even such a sum is a bottom 10% priority from a pure revenue standpoint.

Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by nikdaheratik on Friday June 15, 2018 @02:11AM (#17317832)
Taken separately, this makes some sense, but they already delivered the hardware on this and put in the work on the designs. It doesn't make sense to fail to even put in the minimal amount of work to update the line in a well run company.

The only reasons I can think of are that they have taken designers completely off the mac line and put them all on the iPhone and other lines or else that they have put alot of designers on some kind of secret project, like moving to a different architecture and it's taking longer than expected to get it right. And even these don't seem to match up with how the company of 10-15 years ago would run things.

Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by menacingly on Friday June 15, 2018 @03:55AM (#17318187)
Oh definitely, I wasn't weighing in on how apple views macs, just that countering "it's X%" with "but that's $Y" doesn't really work.

As to the actual matter at hand, I hope the output we're seeing now is the result of a de-prioritization, because I don't like to think of these results as best efforts.

Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by sandworm101 on Thursday June 14, 2018 @01:44PM (#17313613)
>> a company's attention shouldn't be so limited as to essentially make them forget to collect this additional revenue.

For a publicly-traded company all that matters is stock price. One would assume that collecting revenues has a direct impact on that price, but we are not in so rational a world. Today it is all about growth potential rather than current revenues. Apple could be turning huge profits on laptops, but if they see that as a mature market then they will and must ignore it.

Given Apple's grip on users, they may even see laptops as a competitor to their iPhone business. Time on the macbook is time not on the iPhone. The intent may be to transition all macbook devotees away from lap/desktops altogether.

Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by sulam on Thursday June 14, 2018 @01:54PM (#17313722)
> For a publicly-traded company all that matters is stock price.

Really? You don't want to qualify that at all, maybe?

If not, please explain the first 10 years of AMZN.

Re:On the Sad State of Macintosh Hardware by scarface74 on Thursday June 14, 2018 @02:11PM (#17313918)
He said potential growth. People see Amazon as a growth business.