Quote:
Originally Posted by pdmtong
I used to work near the center of what is now the spaceship a long time ago.
It was a myriad of the vanguards of the time - DEC, HP, Tandem. Names that no one under 30 has probably heard of.
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HaHa! Here's to us old guys! I designed & coded pricing models, and by extension trading strategies, on Sun Microsystems SPARCstations many years ago. Boxes that had the MIPS & MFLOPS that are now bested by an iPhone!
Quote:
Originally Posted by FlashUNC
The problem is, for the better part of two decades, Apple owned the creative class. It was de rigeur for all sorts of designers, audio and video pros, the works. But they've transformed -- beginning under Jobs and continuing under Cook -- to become another consumer electronic conglomerate. They bought Beats for Pete's sake. Computers have taken up a smaller and smaller percentage of their sales, and their growth hasn't been in those devices. As others noted, they've all but stopped developing professional-grade equipment.
Microsoft has happily moved into that gap. While bumpy at launch, the Surface is now the go-to for so many creative types I know. That was heresy even just a few years ago.
So we'll see what it means long-term, but the lack of real development in the computer space is going to catch up with them sooner or later.
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I hear you. I don't know anything about the creative class demands on computer hardware but I'd surmise that it is still a subset of computer hardware technology demand relative to smartphones. With networking and cloud computing there is a steady diminution on the primacy & demand of desktop compute power so it seems normal to me that that workstation hardware market likewise diminish.
The point being, Apple can't rely on just workstation hardware even if their hardware is/was the current darling of an industry. Sun Microsystems were once big on Wall Street and Silicon Graphics ruled the roost in early CGI. Both gone.
I'd also guess that the applications are fairly mature (Adobe?) so the hardware to run Adobe can be satisfied by any number of platforms. For example I still build my own desktop with Supermicro motherboards running dual Xeon multicore CPUs. If Apple can't offer hardware that offers proprietary advantage over what I can mix n' match myself, why would they emphasize that business? They will service that market but the R & D curve for that market had crested long ago - Intel controls CPU development, Nvidia ATI & others control GPU development. There's not enough upside to creating Apple MacPro motherboards for a market that doesn't want desktop computing outside of a niche market.
Microsoft was seeking relevance and refuge from their exposure to a declining desktop market so it seem reasonable that they try anything else to get a foothold anywhere. Relative to Apple's growth requirements, that niche creative tablet market would not have been a prioritized objective for Apple anyway. Nature, like capitalism, abhors a vacuum so Microsoft stepped in.
If a worldwide smartphone market beckons, Apple would be crazy to not preserve its dominance in a market it largely invented.