They never dumped their desktop computer sales. Sales of the Mac have been profitable for a very long time. It's almost always been a good business. It was everything else that was the problem. They dumped everything else. It was things like the Newton that weren't profitable. Most people don't remember, but Apple used to make disk drives, modems, printers, scanners, speakers, Trinitron displays, and a bunch of other crap. They even made a digital camera and a console. They tried to diversify their portfolio looking for a high revenue item to drive their stock price, and they never found it until Jobs returned and invented the iPod.Quote:
Originally Posted by drdoom
What sells PCs is price. The amount of people who have cared about technical specifications of hardware has always been slim. This forum is not representative of the larger population.Quote:
What sells computers is faster CPU's, bigger hard drives, more memory and better graphics.
I hate to tell you this, but Dell and HP didn't become empires selling good computers. They became empires winning huge corporate and government contracts for 50,000 low-tier workstations at $299. Apple wasn't even part of that market. The only place Apple was ever able to compete was in areas where the POWER PC architecture was superior—and there are a lot of areas where that was true—it just wasn't the home desktop or corporate workstation. POWER is still used today by IBM.
While few consumers cared about technical specifications in the 90s, it's even worse today because no one cares outside of some enthusiasts. Most enthusiasts became engineers and they now care the least of all because the usability of software has trumped raw power of hardware. The MHz race ended long ago. Steve Jobs bet on this back in 1999 and everyone thought he was a bit mad, but he turned out to be right in the long run.
You really can't make the argument that the Mac is a bad business. If you look at pretty much every year end, the Mac has almost always done well as a business unit. A few slipped quarters here and there with the IIGS and early PowerBook IIRC, but that's about it. The Cube was unusually expensive to build for some reason too, I forget why.
Without the Macintosh, Apple would be gone. They probably will get rid of the Mac Pro at some point, because the reality is that it's no longer necessary. The tower is completely obsolete from a technology perspective. If raw horsepower or storage is needed locally it can be sold as an add-on Thunderbolt device. I have a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro and there are few times where I need more processing power and can't get it. This isn't 1998 where the only solution is to buy a new machine. I can just push calculations onto a platform like Amazon AWS and get the work done in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost.
The only problem with getting rid of the Mac Pro is video rendering. Notebooks aren't quite there yet. Fixable with a small Thunderbolt rendering box though.
