Sorry, Apple-haters, but Cupertinian doom not on the horizon

Re: Mac sales decline is the problem

"Phone and tablet markets are far too volatile for such a large company to peg its future on,"

Oh OK. I guess they should be pegging their future on a product category that's now more than a quarter of a century old, declining rapidly, which Apple makes barely 10% of it's revenues on and which no other company in the market can make money in.

Tim Cook will be ringing for more advice any second now.

Re: Competition is good.

Android is open software but the hardware it is dominated by four or five major handset manufacturers, all of whom seem inherently conservative, unable to innovate without Google's help, and as a result none of whom seem to differentiate their products significantly.

Worse, the handset manufacturers seem to be using Android version upgrades as an excuse to shift new handsets, rather than adequately supporting their existing user base with timely, reliable updates. My Atrix was effectively "end-of-life'd" by Moto only a few months after I purchased it. Its replacement, a HTC, is stuffed with gimmicks and bloatware that cannot be uninstalled.

On that basis, I'm not convinced that the Android ecosystem for me long term. As an Apple desktop user, I will probably move to iOS. If I were a Windows user I'd definitely move to Windows Phone, dare I say probably a Nokia. I'll be interested to see if I am representative of the market over the next 12 months.

I agree that it is good for competition and I dearly hope that Apple will implement a more ICS-like notifications screen, and a proper 'services' hooks to allow inter-app sharing / integration like Android does so well.

Re: Competition is good.

How quickly they forget... or much more likely: never even knew.

If only the fanboise apologists had been aware of the cool stuff companies like HTC and E-Ten already had on the market when Apple announced their plans for the jEsusphone to the devoted. How I laughed at the time... gosh, last year's glofiish with an incrementally improved touchscreen and all the cool stuff removed... coming next June... for twice the price! No thanks.

Of course, iTards, being rather insular technophobes, they had never heard of E-Ten, HTC, et al, so rushed out bought Apple's phone offering in droves.. and now they appear to be trying to rewrite history to exclude the things they were ignorant of. Some sort of mass-denial to conceal/excuse the mass-hysteria perhaps?

I agree with points one and two but as for three, there's an old trick of deliberately undersupplying the market when you've got it cornered (in this in the new shiny) to keep your cool/scarcity factor in place and justify the high asking price.

Re: iPhone 4 Demand

The iPhone 4 is free. That's why there is so much demand for it. iPhone 5 starts at $399. The demand curve has nothing to do with device itself, other than cost. There really aren't any huge innovations between 4 & 5 that aren't offset by the low cost (free) version except for the most die hard iFool.

Re: Mac sales are down by a million units

It won't be Mac or Chromebook that challenges Windows. It'll be iOS and Android. If you consider a smartphone to be a "computer", they already outsell Windows. If you only count tablets, they'll likely outsell Windows in a few years. 2013 is already predicted to the year when tablets outsell laptops.

Some will complain that tablets (and especially smartphones) are consumption only devices, but the majority of PC users are data consumers not data producers. There are many people who only bought PCs to join the email & web revolution in the mid to late 90s, but they don't particularly need a PC - or certainly don't need more than one which many now have.

In addition, before long you'll be able to connect your iOS or Android phone to a TV/monitor, and combined with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse run a traditional non-touch desktop to allow stuff like writing long emails, typing in papers, organizing photos, etc. That's what will really damage Windows, and why Microsoft is frantically scrambling around trying to figure out a way to get more than a few token percentage points of share in the phone market.

The desktop GUI layer may look/act like OS X on iPhone and Chrome on Android, but since the hardware people are running it on won't be the desktop/laptop hardware Microsoft dominated for so long, their existing relationship with the OEMs will be meaningless. That's why they're willing to screw their poor OEMs over so overtly, by making a relationship with Nokia, releasing their own brand tablets, and now rumored to be buying a chunk of Dell.

Re: Mac sales are down by a million units

Chromebook? The only place I've seen them is on the odd banner ad. As far as the real world is concerned, they might as well not exist.

Also, when you have problems getting stock into stores/warehouses, as Apple did with the iMacs, etc, sales going down is quite natural.

Re: Fruity Bookkeeping

"Once every six years Apple adds an additional week to the first fiscal quarter to better align fiscal quarters with calendar quarters. Apple's fiscal quarters are usually 13 weeks in length. "

http://seekingalpha.com/article/318471-apple-s-monster-quarter-will-deliver-monster-sized-results

Re: Fruity Bookkeeping

For every US company I've every worked for or with, while quarters and years are the reporting periods, "months" are the data points. Months usually are subdivided into weeks, and have either 4 or 5 accounting weeks; and there are either 52+1/7 or 52+2/7 weeks to a year. Therefore there will always be at least 4 months with 5 weeks, and every 6 years or so you'll get an extra week, making 5 months with 5 weeks.

So, yeah, last year may well have been had a "leap (accounting) week" to reconcile the fact that we don't have an exact number of weeks in any year, yet accountants like working with weeks (largely because we all do).