“Apple sold 4.13 million Macs during the quarter, a 23 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 16.24 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 86 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 19.45 million iPods during the quarter, representing a seven percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company also sold 7.33 million iPads during the quarter.”
…way back in the mid 90’s I would say “Some day all will be Apple”. I had a LC575 back then.
I have always loved Apple since I saw my first computer, an Apple ][ with 48k of memory back in 1980. I have been following their progress via magazines (I remember when the Mac 128k was released and studying the images pixel by pixel from magazines (I wrote a Apple ][ assembler program to imitate some of the Mac’s features, right down to the font – LOL)
When I saw the iMac (Bondi Blue) I started to get a little excited that maybe Apple may not die (like the Amiga and others)…
When I saw OS X beta back in 2000 I started to get very excited (it was painfully slow on my 233Mhz iMac back then, but I could see where they were headed.
I started to see the company turn around, bit by bit…
iTunes, iPods, the Aluminium PowerBook (which I loved for a couple of years until the screen broke off (first model with weak hinges)), iTunes Store, iLife and iWorks, Tiger, Intel, white iMacs…
Now we have iPhones, iPads, iPod Touch plus an amazing array of hardware and software…
I have missed a bunch of stuff, but you get the idea.
My point is Apple has deserved this turn around. Through a lot of determination and hard work, they have managed to put together a company that doesn’t look like it will die anytime soon. I remember reading week after week how Apple was on it’s last legs (and it was, I guess no analyst could have ever predicted what Jobs had in mind, including Jobs himself).
Maybe my joke that someday all will be Apple wasn’t so far off (but having said that, I would always want Apple to have an equal share with the other players – just so you know) 🙂
Just as there are you who love Apple, there are people like me who despise everything Apple.
Because I grew up in a very MS-Centric world (excluding using acorns at primary school), I had no idea what Apple was until OS X.
I have taken it upon myself to learn about the past of this company I loathe so whole-heartedly, but it does not change how I view the company, or their products.
I love GNU/Linux (specifically, KDE desktops), so I prefer having options.
I grew up using windows, and am used to having near-unlimited options for everything, which I have found are even less limited under GNU/Linux.
Apple strive to lock everything down, make everything bend to their will, and do everything in one way and one way only.
Because of how Apple restrict their users, doing everything in a way that I do not like, not having support for anything other than the default theme in versions later than tiger, not allowing a win-7 style dockbar, etc, I find myself very uncomfortable and irritated at the Apple desktop, because I prefer the KDE way of doing things (and, to a lesser extent, the windows way).
This hatred is only amplified when I see Apple taking from the FOSS community, refusing to give back more than they are required in order to continue using FOSS and screwing over the FOSS community.
I see them releasing inferior products like the iPhone, mandating their walled-garden, which is almost as bad as Sony in some ways, and worse in others, and I see nothing of the legend I have heard from the past.
Apparently, Apple used to be about being different, about offering options for alternative folk, about standing up in the face of goliath.
Now, I see nothing more than the third incarnation of IBM, seeking to dominate and subdue its users, squeezing every ounce of profit from them through a model of planned obsolescence.
For now, I support google (and to a lesser extent, canonical; Mark is being very Jobsian but at least Kubuntu is still nice).
Even Microsoft seems less evil than Apple these days.
What exactly is there to despise? Did Steve Jobs personally pee in your cornflakes? Your just like the other sheep who use Windows cuz MS strongarmed every PC manufacturer into making it the only OS they could ship on their equipment.
See above, your parents probably bought a PC cuz they were cheap and came with a half-functional MacOS knockoff GUI pasted on top of DOS.
Meanwhile folks like me used Atari 8-bits and ST’s and my richer friends had Amigas or obscure expensive UNIX workstations like Sun3’s. All of which kicked the PC’s ass on every front except cheap openness.
Congratulations, cheap commodity shit won while the real innovators died.
Other than an arrogant, often ignorant userbase, what is there to hate about the Mac? I’m no Jobs or iPhone fan but Apple makes good stuff on the desktop.
As for actual functionality, the OSX GUI layer beats the hell out of X-Windows for most use cases no matter what desktop environment you slap on X. I use X for what it was designed for, network transparent apps. For desktop multimedia, graphics and pro audio work, OSX is far better.
For the record, there’s been a couple similar window systems to OSX’s on top of UNIX in the past. Sun NeWS comes to mind. So does NeXTstep (because OSX IS NEXTSTEP).
Don’t care what whiz-bang options or apps you have, if your platform sucks, it sucks. The PC sucks. It always has compared to the competition. It succeeded because noone ever got fired for buying IBM and they were relatively cheap when the clones hit.
Only on iOS, my mac isn’t locked down. If I don’t like something I can rip it out and find a substitute. I can’t change the GUI theme but that’s a GOOD thing. Means all my apps will be consistent looking with no strange artifacts due to some developer assuming a button will only be so many pixels tall or the background will always be white when my theme could easily vary.
What don’t you like? And besides, how do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t used it for a while.
There’s a lot I can do in the mac UI that simply CANNOT be done in Windows or X due to the deeply object oriented UI and system services available to ALL apps for FREE with no additional coding effort.
Um, NeXT invented the dock back in 1988 and Apple refined it. MS ripped it off. You really have lived under a rock for the last 2 decades haven’t you?
KDE is like an odd cross between the Winblows and OSX UI. I will give you the fact it’s highly configurable but keeping apps consistently looking right with various themes is hard work and rarely done correctly. Plasma is also neat but Plasma was inspired by Dashboard in OSX. In fact, the whole 3D GPU-accelerated UI layer and compositing was inspired by OSX.
Umm…. Apple is almost solely responsible for making KHTML/WebKit NOT suck. You as a KDE fan should certainly know that as your favorite KDE browsers are WebKit based. I remember Konqueror in KDE 2.0 on my 233mhz Pentium sucking in major ways compared to Mozilla back then.
Don’t believe everything you read from Slashdot idiots who weren’t even born until 10 years after I got my first computer.
Apple’s FOSS contributions are FAR greater than Microsoft’s yet you like them.
Apple takes more than they give from FOSS. Show me a leading commercial vendor that doesn’t. Red Hat and Canonical don’t count.
How is the iPhone inferior, it has the slickest most responsive UI I’ve seen on a phone yet. The lack of full multitasking was purposeful (and really an illusion). Under the hood, the iPhone has EXCELLENT hardware for its class.
I agree with not liking the walled garden which is why I’m an android user and not an iPhone user. I vote with my feet instead of bitching about something I probably can’t afford anyway.
As far as the mac app store goes, you are not locked into it. It’s an option. If all the vendors go that way, you’ll still have piratebay and cracked app store downloads.
I miss the openness of early Apple hardware and loathed how closed the 68k and early NuBus PPC macs were but later PPC macs used PCI and newer macs are just PC’s with a slight change in keyboard layout, one button mouse and EFI. BIOS is dead, EFI is the future on PC’s too, Apple was just the first to jump in, like how they introduced USB to the masses.
For the record, newer macs are so open they run Windows and Linux too! WOW! There is nothing closed about mac hardware. If you want a mac with slots and lots of interchangable goodies in slots, you have to buy an expensive Mac Pro but the reality is, most users never do as even Apple’s crappiest integrated video option is more than enough for all but the heaviest of use cases. There’s plenty on flat-panel PC’s similar to the iMac and mini-ITX boxes similar to a mini.
The only reason there was ANY real innovation in PC hardware was because Apple was brave enough to do it first.
Not as much anymore. And they haven’t been that way since the late 70’s, early 80’s maybe. They are about making cool things and making money. And for the record, WINDOWS is the alternative. MacOS predates Windows by quite a bit, MS didn’t have something near on par for about a decade. The Atari ST/TT and the Commodore Amiga were the only real mac competition on the GUI-based system front for a long time.
So you stick it to the man by using a cheap IBM clone which a single vendor, MS, has a chokehold on the entire platform.
Every manufacturer and commercial vendor does this. Welcome to capitalism freetard.
Google is pretty neat.
Apple is evil when it comes to iOS but the mac isn’t near as locked down as you think.
Apple is approaching MS on the evilness scale to a point. I would like to see OSX opened up a bit to make it easier to run on non-Apple hardware and sell it on more shelves. I run OSX on a cheap box I put together for $300 and it runs flawlessly.
Oh and not to forget…. Apple also developed the first mass-market turnkey personal computer and basically started an industry no one thought would succeed. Without the Apple II and it’s early success, the IBM PC would probably not have happened. Prior to the Apple II, most machines had to be bootstrapped toggling in a bootloader on a frontpanel in binary. I guess EPROMs started getting cheap in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
IBM of course didn’t REALLY want the personal computer/home computer market to succeed, were hoping it wouldn’t and ended up pretty late in the game.
The Apple II predates the PC by several years. So does the Atari 8-bit platform. I only used Apple II’s in school as I found them inferior to my Atari 800XL (later a 130XE) in most ways, especially graphics and audio. The expansion bus on the Apple II would have been nice to have though. I didn’t hate them though, they were ok machines, just liked my Atari more.
Don’t have time to argue everything you said but why does PC suck? Any normal argument? You can say anything but you have much more options with PC including hardware (including quality and price, the way to assemble it, so on) and software options (starting from OSes and ending by any other application category and ease to use them). Even Mac is now the same PC as others but with less flexibility to use what you want (so how can it be better than any other PC except Mac OS X which is not a holy cow too?). I agree that some competition died out which deserved to stay in my opinion (DEC Alpha, Sun workstations, others) but you can’t compare them even with current Macs or PCs… The price did it part but it wasn’t the only reason for PC popularity (only blind people can say so).
You do know today’s Mac hardware is in fact a PC platform, don’t you?
Yes, you do.
But PC sucks, you said above. Go figure.
Are you confusing Wintel platform with PC platform, by any luck?
And that explains Apple switching to PC hardware platform for their laptop, desktop and server platforms, sure. They invented it all great stuffs in PC hardware by themselves long time ago, and then choose to wait a lot of time before using it for their own products. Make sense.
I didn’t remember Apple inventing PCI bus.
I didn’t remember Apple inventing x86 processors family.
I didn’t remember Apple inventing SATA bus.
I didn’t remember Apple inventing PCI-based graphics daughter cards.
I didn’t remember Apple inventing TCP/IP.
But I’m not yet senile enough to forget about proprietary hardware busses, now obsoleted 68k & PPC processors families, SCSI bus, onboard (not interchangeable) graphics chips on a desktop/pro machine, NuBus bus failure, proprietary(!) 168-pin DIMMs for memory slots and AppleTalk proprietary protocols suite over Ethernet (EtherTalk) while TCP/IP was already well available…
I’m not saying Apple didn’t invent many. Because they did and still do.
I’m saying Apple didn’t everything part of a today PC, because it’s just not true. Apple suffered a lot of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrom on hardware design, and while it’s clearly why they’ve invented many stuffs, far less have spread outside their own field.
I consider Apple’s best hardware contribution to personal computer platform to be USB. It really improve PC expandability, which was quite limited at time. And everyone could thanks Apple to make USB specs free. It was a win-win situation: Apple needs USB devices being manifactured for their Mac customers, and no manufacturers will made one only for the small Mac market. That was a clever move, a real innovation which spread beyond it’s own inventor.
But today, Apple’s personal computer hardware is made of x86 Intel multi-core processors, PCI-e bus, SATA bus, DDR slots and PCI-express interfaced GPU processors. Which they didn’t invent themselves.
And they made that shift because they could recognize when NIH is counter-productive. In the mid 90’s, it was killing them, in fact.
Only because it’s now based on a open hardware platform, also known since long under the name of “PC” platform.
😉
And if you remember a bit, it took some public opinion pression to make Apple release an official way to boot something else than Mac OS X on a Intel mac.
By public opinion pression, I mean some people jailbreaking Intel Mac’s EFI…
I see a recurrent pattern here. Am I alone?
And how is it different to what Microsoft tried but failed (you can’t jail hardware with just software) to do with PC platform long time ago?
You can always break a software lock. It’s way harder when it’s a hardware one.
That why customers should care about hardware manufacturers *evilness* and less about software-only companies.
These days, it stands for Apple iDevices, but also Motorola smartphones, HTC nand lock and so many hardware manufacturers (or their mobile carriers partners) which believes that their customers are not entitled to do what they want with their *own* property…
Edited 2011-01-19 10:33 UTC
What? Apple didn’t invent USB. Perhaps you’re confusing it with FireWire? Which has been relatively succesful but nowhere near as USB.
EFI didn’t get jailbroken, EFI is just a piece of firmware capable of booting an OS, the only difference being that the OS you boot needs to support it…
At the time, Windows didn’t support EFI at all, and although Linux technically supported it there were no distributions configured that way. What Apple came out with was a BIOS emulation to allow legacy OS to boot on the EFI based macs.
[quote]I consider Apple’s best hardware contribution to personal computer platform to be USB. It really improve PC expandability, which was quite limited at time. And everyone could thanks Apple to make USB specs free. It was a win-win situation: Apple needs USB devices being manifactured for their Mac customers, and no manufacturers will made one only for the small Mac market. That was a clever move, a real innovation which spread beyond it’s own inventor.[/quote]
I don’t know what the previous poster was smoking, but Apple didn’t invent USB, nor did they use them right away.
According to wikipedia;
The USB is a standard for peripheral devices. It began development in 1994 by a group of seven companies: Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. USB was intended to make it fundamentally easier to connect external devices to PCs by replacing the multitude of connectors at the back of PCs, addressing the usability issues of existing interfaces, and simplifying software configuration of all devices connected to USB, as well as permitting greater bandwidths for external devices. The first silicon for USB was made by Intel in 1995.[5]
I don’t see Apple on that list anywhere.
What Apple did push and use first was Firewire, which is probably what the previous poster was thinking about, but said USB for some unknown reason.
Firewire actually is a better protocol, but it was just more expensive to put into PCs at the time, and of course the ‘PC’ industry at the time also had a very “not invented here” problem.
I despise the way their products work.
I find them to be unintuitive and irritating.
I got my first computer in 1997 (I am 20 now).
They bought a stock-standard win95 PC, I am glad it did not have an apple-ripoff UI, because I hate the dock.
I find Apple’s GUI to be bloody hideous (grey, grey, grey, shiny grey, grey), and I hate having a global menu and that stupid dock.
I want a single panel. Up the top.
Menus belong in the application window, hidden until I tap alt.
I can not talk about “pro” applications, but when using apple’s desktop at uni, I ended up organising it into a tiling UI with two terminals and a firefox session. Even then the stupid thing kept beachballing at me – despite using a 2008 mac with Leopard.
It is not as comfortable as KDE, and has so few features it makes me ill.
Firstly, PC = Personal Computer. Which the mac is.
Secondly, how does the IBM-compatible suck?
I hate the apple way of doing things, and like the MS way.
PERSONAL OPINION.
You like the Apple way (more power to you).
I HATE the Apple way.
I can not understand how I got downvoted for stating an opinion that is the polar opposite. It was an opinion, just like that of the mac-lover I replied to.
I like having multiple desktops (which the mac FINALLY got), a single top-panel that stretches all the way across the screen, contains widgets and app launchers as well as currently-open app management (think win7 start bar crossed with ubuntu top-bar)
I like menus to be in the application window, but hidden until I press alt.
I like tabbed windows, and not just for browsers or filemanagers.
I like split-pane filemanagers with a terminal inbuilt.
I LOVE the system tray. No OS is complete without it.
Can you see how my *personal preferences* are directly opposed to Apple’s?
I hate the dock because it is not a panel, really.
Either it hides, which I do not like for no reason, or it takes up room.
I like a slim panel that I can snap windows against.
It *has* to span an entire window because I find unused space on the sides disconcerting.
I do not like Apple’s implementation of the dock, plain and simple.
I know that stardock copied some older OS, then NeXT ripped off stardock, which was brought-forward into Apple’s OS, but I still hate that it is not a panel.
I like defined edges and squareness.
I never use webkit browsers, as there has not been a single one released that I actually like.
I prefer Firefox and Opera.
I meant their recent actions against google, being dicks when some other companies released phones that were better than theirs.
They take the printing stack, parts of BSD, KHTML etc, and only give back what they have been working on improving if it was GPL’d (mostly because the FOSS implementation is often the best, or has the most potential).
I like Microsoft because they do make good software, with really weak copy-protection.
Granted, their media player is no foobar2000, their web browser is no Firefox, and the ribbon is horrid, but I still like what they put out more than what Apple put out, because it has pages and pages of options, and actually allow things like third party DLLs modding it.
I use an HTC desire, which I purchased without a lock-in or carrier discount.
I had tried the iPhone, and I was irritated by its single-button, single-app layout; much preferring having the android buttons, and access to apks from any source, as well as knowing that Fennec would be ported. Flash is nice too, as I like flash animations.
I will probably use MeeGo if it actually takes off.
Mac hardware is far more expensive than building my own computer, and they only come in grey/white.
Their OS is not available for use with non-apple PCs, and they do not use AMD processors (I refuse to use intel because 1) We need competition, and AMD are good value for money. 2) Intel have workers in Israel, which is stolen Palestinian land.)
Apple do not make the hardware, Intel have been the main source of innovation because they have competitors hounding after them, producing everything just one generation behind, meaning they need to keep on their toes.
I would say that gaming is actually what pushes consumer hardware development the most, and EFI is being pushed because BIOS’s limitations are really showing now.
I was born in 1990. Hence the perspective.
I thought that Apple were still like that in the 90s, as I was repeatedly told this. However, I suppose people still say it, despite Apple being the antithesis of GNU/Linux.
I stick it to the man by rolling my own PC, using free/pirated software, and running mostly FOSS for everything. Except video games, which I do buy through steam.
Oh, the mac is only locked down in that it will not let me mod its UI to look like windows’ (which I prefer) without my installing x-windows and actually running KDE.
Technically illegal (stupid, I know).
I think that MS have really let up on the evil recently, but only because they are being really pressured, and would love to go back to their old ways.
Apple are allowed to get away with stuff MS never would (iTunes installing safari, etc), so they are enjoying their malevolent dictatorship for now.
IBM used to be an awful company, but look how much it is doing for GNU/Linux now.
IBM are pretty much awesome.
equating more choice with superior functionality is the folly of the indecisive.
In other words I would rather have one consistent and effective method of performing an operation on a device than 100 “what ever you can think of” mostly inefficient options.
Love ’em or hate ’em you have to respect that Apple, like no other tech company, really sweats the details and tries to find the optimum solution to any given feature, function or design challenge. They don’t always get it right or perfect but I think the consistently increasing numbers speak for themselves that with the market they are targeting there are more hits than misses.
Achk, you hit my apple arrogance nerve.
In many situations, there simply cannot be a single solution that meets everyone’s needs optimally. It is the height of arrogance to suggest otherwise. This is what originally caused me to dislike using macs. On a windows machine, there was often more than one way to do a given task. Furthermore the same task would be optimally performed in different ways depending upon the situation.
That what I’ve written above is so bleedingly obvious to me and yet so vehemently derived by many an Apple fan ( Usually more so by the olden school OS 9 is better than OSX and Power PC was always faster than Intel crowd of fact deniers).
Just wait a few years, and they’ll turn 180° on the subject. Like they did with UI consistency.
They already did. There is an article on OSNews about this switch one or two weeks ago about that exact topic.
Search for “UI consistency is so 90′” or something alike…
If anyone is being arrogant it would most likely be the poster I replied to.
My point was not that there should only be one way to do any given task but that the more complex a solution becomes the more potential for confusion and error to creep in. I find Windows and Linux software can tend to be needlessly complex and subsequently fall prey to this issue.
From a creative perspective I also appreciate limits. Limits can be good when you are starting a project from scratch. If given “limitless” options it is very hard not to waste an incredible amount of time and effort trying to decide on the best path to take. What can happen is that you decide one path and then switch to something else down the line as the solution develops and then either have to start again to keep things coherent or cover every option and leave it up to the end user to decide what “suits” them. It’s not that any particular option is bad but rather it can become an extra burden that may have been avoided.
I agree that one size cannot fit all but some times it does and that should be embraced where recognized rather then added to out of obligation or a misplaced sense of completeness.
It also depends on your goals and activities. I love how in Windows I can get pretty deep into the OS to trouble shoot an issue. What I hate about Windows is how often I tend to have to when I’m trying to do something completely non-techie. I get frustrated when the OS gets in the way of what I want to do – kind of like a child seeking attention and always interrupting or being distracting.
I think I understand what you are trying to say, but I prefer the way Larry wall said it
Too often Apple stops at the first part of that quote and Windows windows just does the second part.
Yawn… why do people talk like companies are people that deserve shit, all they want is your money. So dont be sad when one dies, since another will pop up in its place that wants your money just as badly.
Clearly “antennagate” killed sales of the iPhone 4.
lol, true – it is amazing how for every idiot who man handles their phone and screws up the reception there are thousands of users not having a problem. Like anything related to tech giants such as Apple and Microsoft there will be people who will blow things way out of proportion simply to generate traffic and clicks on the ads. ZDNet being the best example of that – filled from top to bottom with the online Glenn Beck equivalent of IT punditry.
They’re not having a problem, because they are using a phone case that mitigates the problem. The new design ( being used for the version iphone and the att iphone) fixes the problem. But the original was flawed, as is every phone. Apple’s successes and failures are always magnified.
My co-worker and I own an iPhone 4. Both of us didn’t have any problems (we do not use cases) with so called “antennagate” issue. Never. Ever.
Well, then you apparently have a different phone grip than many people. This can’t really be argued that its not a design flaw. Its just physics combined with ergonomics. You can’t deny the physics of the flaw: short two antennae with your finger and the frequencies received and sent changes. Nor the likely hood of someone bridging the minuscule gap by holding the phone in an obvious position.
Yes you are right about physics. I live in Europe and as I understand we have much better reception here in general than in USA. That’s way I’ve never experienced such issue.
I’ve tried to reproduce this in different places and always failed
Edit: about design flaw. I don’t believe that engineers at Apple knew nothing about physics while designing such antenna.
Edited 2011-01-19 15:41 UTC
As for the physics, are you really suggesting that Apple put form *before* function??? The *shock* is overwhelming!
Yeah, see my other rant against apple. They assume weird things about people’s use of their products.
These numbers would give an annual revenue of around $10G, reportedly with rather high margins. How come the company with such earnings can be valued at over $200G?
From TFA, “record revenue of $26.74 billion”. So Apple is more like $100 billion company revenue wise and somewhere around $20 billion annually profit wise. That means they have a price to earnings ratio of 22.49. In comparison, Google has a P/E of 25.89 and Microsoft has a P/E of 12.30. So Apple’s overall market cap is not out of line compared to their peers. And, FYI, their market cap (i.e. value) is over $300 billion.
I think I’ll go and grab a coffee. 😉 Their phones must be a lot more expensive than I thought. Nothing excuses me for mistaking quarterly results for annual ones, though.
BTW, perhaps P/E of over 20 is “not out of line” with the rest of the industry but is not exactly what I’d call “normal”. I don’t often hear about people putting their money to work expecting they will break even in 20 years, especially in an area where the leader changes at least once a decade and the companies don’t own a whole lot of hard assets.
Look at the P/Es of any (not failing) hardware or software company and you’ll find that they all land between 12 and 25 or so. It really is normal for the computer industry. If you want crazy, look at Redhat (91.84) or VMWare (P/E 137). And, regarding assets, Apple has $47.5 billion in total assets of which $31.5 billion is cash.
Haters gonna hate.
Of course, because good sales figures make all the bad stuff irrelevant!
Yes. Exactly like profit makes dirty money irrevelant for some people.
No, because Apple are undeniably successful and this riles up a number of people who can’t accept that the world doesn’t operate how they imagine it does.
Remind me again, what were Google’s profits?
Remind me again, what were Google’s profits? [/q]
I want those days back where Apple fanatics always brought up Microsoft whenever they ran out or sensible things to say (usually quite fast). Now it’s Google-this and Google-that all day long. Boring.