

What the 2010 Mac has in common with the 1984 Apple II - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2010/06/08/mac-forever/

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mattmaroon
"it wasn’t hard to envision a future Apple that (A) didn’t sell Macs and (B)
was at least as successful as Apple circa 2010."

I think that's exactly wrong. Macs are already the trucks in his earlier
analogy. Apple only sells 5% of computers, but they're the highest-priced 5%,
so they make an outsized portion of the market's revenues on them.

The iPad doesn't disrupt high-end notebooks and desktops one bit. It disrupts
the low-end, the $600 Dell and HPs that make up the bulk of sales by volume
(but which are really little more than loss leaders for the manufacturers).

Even if tablets get to, say, 75% of the market, it will mostly disrupt cheap
PCs. If most of those tablets are iPads (debatable, but certainly not
impossible) Apple will make a hell of a lot of money.

Apple would seem to think this way as well. Otherwise they wouldn't introduce
a $500 product that disrupted their $2,000 products, especially when they
think that nobody else will make a compelling tablet if they don't.

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troystribling
People seem to be associating the apparent neglect of Macs at the WWDC, the
marketing focus on the iOS products and the delay in OSX 10.7 as the beginning
of a phase out of the platform. It is most likely just a focus of scarce
company resources on launching the new product line.

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jonhohle
How can an unannounced product (10.7) be delayed? from what i recall, Apple
has never even mentioned OS X 10.7 in any capacity.

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MrRage
> PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around. They’re
> still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out
> of x people

Boy, you can tell Jobs lives in a bubble, or else he would know this truck
metaphor is shaky. Lots of people buy trucks, they just don't live where Jobs
lives.

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ugh
Ok, help me out there. I don’t know a single person who ever bought a truck. I
live in a small town in Germany. Am I out living in a bubble?

(That quote is missing some context, maybe that’s were the confusion stems
from. He was talking about cars in the US being used in predominantly
agricultural contexts in the beginning and the change away from those “trucks”
to leaner cars. He did not say that nobody buys trucks anymore. In fact, just
that was his point.)

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MrRage
The context is trucks and SUVs (which are technically trucks) are wildly
popular in the US, but less so in some areas like on the West coast. This
remains true in large cities, i.e. it's not just a rural thing.

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dkarl
The relegation to a niche of desktop computers at the hand of tablets and cell
phones is supposed to evoke the death of Apple II at the hands of Mac?

This comparison is false in at least two dimensions: complete death versus
relegation to a niche, and a product family versus a form factor. The Apple II
brand was being replaced by a new generation of fundamentally similar and
fundamentally more advanced products; its death was foreordained by Apple. The
devices that will kill desktop computers don't exist yet, nobody is sure how
deeply the desktop market will be eroded by tablets, and Apple shows no desire
to abandon the Mac's share of the desktop market. What similarity are we
supposed to observe here?

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stcredzero
_The Apple II of 1984-1993 was based on archaic technology; thinking back,
it’s kind of amazing it lasted as long as it did._

This is the power of mindshare. Apple II had a vibrant ecosystem.

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_delirium
I think some of it might have been based on the somewhat less glamorous aspect
of just having a large installed base, though. Schools in particular had huge
numbers of Apple II machines and lots of sunk costs in software and training.

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stcredzero
That's just the grimy underbelly of mindshare.

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chipsy
I would be pretty stoked if Apple commissioned another song like "Apple II
Forever."

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Retribute86
Good call!

