Which, for Q1, means that Apple sold a paltry $6.5 billion worth of Macs.
A decade ago, Apple’s total revenue for the whole company for the fiscal year was only $5.74 billion. Apple has grown Mac revenues a significant amount over the past decade, it’s just been greatly overshadowed by the iPhone and now the iPad.
This is old, but it’s a pretty telling graph:
That’s worldwide PC revenue and profit share as of 2009. It’s just from computers.
The anti-Apple fanatics will whine that the products are overpriced and should be reduced in price or portions should go towards saving the third world.
Why does it matter that they didn’t make as much during their “rough period”? When you judge a competition, the winner is whoever is ahead at the end; you don’t say, “Well, sure, Joe was ahead at the END of the race, but he certainly wasn’t ahead early on!” It just happens that in this race, Apple has lapped the other companies several times over, with no signs of stopping.
You’re having a completely different argument. We’re not talking about the PC/Mac war; we’re talking about the Apple-vs.-every-other-computer-company war. By that standard, and by any definition of “winning,” Apple has won. Yes, Apple only has 12% of the desktop market, which is about as relevant as saying that Ferrari “lost” because they only have 1% of the automotive market, or that McDonald’s “won” because they have 60% of all burgers sold.
The fact remains that, regardless of marketshare, Apple continues to be wildly profitable from its various markets, including computers, while other companies are racing to the bottom and competing for razor-thin profit margins at the low end.
I’m still confused how people can call Apple’s products “overpriced” or nothing but status symbols or whatever. You have to be fucking delusional or wildly ignorant to continue making such stupid claims.
The answer is so simple, and is pretty well-summarized in this post from NeoGAF:
Not to steer the conversation away from specs, but the more I think about it the more I really find myself struck by how awesome the day I switched my phone and computer at an Apple store.
I decided to jump to the iphone from my Droid X and to a macbook from a acer laptop. I called and made an appointment to meet with someone at the Apple Store as I am unfamiliar with the Mac OS.
When I arrived the person at the door knew my name and greeted me. They had an area already set up with the items I was purchasing already unboxed and waiting. We sat down and someone came by and asked if I wanted a drink. The gentleman who was helping me spent a good ten minutes just asking how I used my computer and phone, what I had been using, and what i liked and disliked about my old machines.
He then proceeded to spend two hours with me, showing me the ins and outs of ios and the mac OS. He moved all of my files over, taking care to explain to me exactly where everything was going. We finished with a few more questions and tips.
A week later I received a follow up email wanting to make sure that I was happy with my laptop. I replied that I was, but I think I should have gotten a macbook air instead of the pro. Within half an hour I received a reply telling me to simply bring the laptop back and he would glad to move everything over to an Air. No restocking fees or BS.
This was done quickly and professionally. I was treated with respect and courtesy. Their retail model is incredible, and something that I feel adds real value to the products. That to me is worth more than saving 10% or getting a slightly more powerful processor/GPU.
People don’t give a shit about specs. They care about stuff like that.
The original point was about comparing relative strategies to their resulting success. Certainly, at this point, apple is extremely successful. Their business model is also totally different.
You can’t attribute their current success to the way they chose to approach the desktop PC market, because, frankly, that approach was a dismal failure. Their current success is due to their development of totally different markets.
Ding!
Look at the graph that Michael Fortson posted above: Apple has the highest share of operating profit of any PC vendor. Anyone. That is the exact opposite of a “dismal failure.”
But they also almost went out of business, and then totally changed everything.
I mean, they also made a Mac in the eighties that cost TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. They sold maybe two. I wouldn’t tend to attribute their current success to that brilliant game plan.
If a football team wins the game, it doesn’t really matter if they were behind by 35 at halftime. They still won the game.
But it matters if you’re evaluating the strategy they were using for the first half.
But we aren’t. Are we?
Oh bah. Yes, it was 10,000 dollars. Back when a comparable IBM C cost 8000 dollars, and by “comparable”, I mean with an inferior processor and less memory, back when both of those things were horribly expensive. This is relevant to Apple’s current fortunes how?
Microsoft scrapes out a small slice of profit selling to a huge market share. Apple cuts off a large slice of profit selling to a small market share.
Apple’s way sounds like a lot more fun.
You heard it here first folks, the tech war is over. It ended on 1/24/12, coincidentally, the day Apple released its latest quarterly report. In what can only be summed up as a masterful long-term strategy, Apple won. Bringing itself from the brink of bankruptcy (during its founder’s last absence) to the first over the finish line in the space of ten years was no small feat. Apple is lucky to have the race over now, shortly after the demise of said founder, whom by all accounts was a guiding visionary for the company. If the race had gone on another ten years, who knows what might have happened?
No, I’m not talking about their normal, high priced machines.
At some point… maybe in the 90’s? Apple released some kind of ridiculous computer, basically targeted at rich people. It was absurdly priced. They had commercials for it with guys wearing tuxedos and white gloves setting it up for you.
I’ll see if I can find the actual name of it… It was like some kind of mac super deluxe idiot edition or something.
It was a horrible failure, on every possible level.
And that’s the point… Their success today is in spite of that decision, not because of it. You can’t look at their success today, and their giant mountain of money, and say, “Hey, every past strategy of Apple’s was awesome and wonderful, because look at them now!”
EDIT:
Found it. Came out way later than I had thought… I remember seeing it, and thinking it was so ridiculous looking that it must have been earlier. So, this came out in 1997… and its MSRP was actually “only” $7499.
It came out right before Jobs came back.
What a strawman, who in this thread has made a statement anything like that? You won’t find long-term die hard Apple fanboys who agree with that statement because they’re the ones who suffered through the years of Apple having totally lost its way and almost putting itself out of business.
Are they conducting their computer business differently than they were in the 90s? No shit. But despite the growth of iOS, they are presently drinking up the milkshake of the other PC makers with the Mac alone. Are the successes of iOS and Mac interconnected? Of course, but Apple hasn’t slacked off in their computer efforts and as a result are selling more Macs than ever. It’s not like they’ve let the Mac atrophy to concentrate solely on the iPhone and iPad.
The interesting thing is that they continue to sell more computers as they winnow their focus. In another few years I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac line has condensed into just three models: further evolution of the MacBook Air, the iMac and the mini, with the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro retired (with the exception of an educational model, I think the MacBook is already gone). They aren’t quite there yet, but that’s the trajectory.
Damn, you beat me.
Good point: It makes Apple’s success story that much more incredible, given how horribly mismanaged the company was up until that point.
Yet no one has said that. Ever.