Apple Ditching the Mac and "Crazy" Talk
Over on ZDNet, David Morgenstern claimed that I was a Chicken LIttle because I pointed to the margin imbalance between the iPhone and Mac and dared wonder if, given Apple’s historic fondness for high-margin business, whether there might be a future for the company without making a computer.
Ah, David, David, David, an Apple loyalist through and through. However, this isn’t about fanaticism, and it’s also not about taking one statement and turning it into another. What seemed to set him off was the following:
That raises the question of whether Apple plans a complete shift away from Macs. It needs them for now, but if it can bulk up enough on iPhones and the upcoming tablet, it may be that the Mac becomes an unnecessary endeavor.
Then he focused on the last two words and ignored everything else. Of course, if you really want to understand something, you have to see it in context. And that’s his problem, and the problem with the Apple Core members chiming along in the comments. They don’t want to consider that when it comes to understanding business, you have to stop being a fan and realize that things don’t necessarily stay the same. You can’t shout out the whisperings that perhaps one day the Dodgers will leave Brooklyn.
Let’s start by being clear — I said that there “may be” a future without the Mac, because Apple’s business will change as the rest of the world changes — as it must. I said nothing of the sky falling. Ultimately this is all about the business model. Maybe David and his readers didn’t bother to read the additional link I had to my post showing that the average net sale for a Mac has been dropping steadily for at least the last 11 quarters and had lost nearly 17 percent of its value. Now, David and company might want to wave that away as unimportant, but as average net sales drops, so does the total pot of money available to Apple for manufacturing, development, and profit. Low margin is not a business model that Apple likes or does.
But then, I’m sure that there were many people in 2000, possibly including David, who would have scoffed at the idea of IBM getting out of the PC business. Unthinkable, right? Except that happened in 2006. Oh, and by the way, according to what IBM’s CTO of mobile research told me, one of the big reasons that the company got out of the PC business was because it saw the ongoing price fall and the growth of the mobile device. Sound familiar?
Perhaps these people who are so sure that life will never change should consider history and facts and possibly get out of the barnyard for a bit.
Erik Sherman is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Technology Review, the Financial Times, Chief Executive, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter.
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