App Store VP Departs as Apple Prepares for Organizational Changes

[Dark_Omen]

well i always find the staff friendly, quick, efficient and knowledgeable.

perhaps they learn to react to the customer

Try asking them what processor the latest MacBook Air has. I bet you'll get crickets.

 

[Minghold]

Consumers don’t exactly hate closed ecosystems, which is why the groundswell of support that Epic was hoping (when Apple booted Fortnite from the app stores) ultimately didn’t materialise.

Creative professionals, the very people whom Apple hopes to market its highest profit-margin machines to, hate closed ecosystems. The consumers who don't care the most, K-12 schoolkids, are barely seeing Apple computers at all anymore.

At the same time, even if I were to switch to using an android tablet some day, there’s no reason to buy such a cheap device when I could get a better experience by spending more (and I am not averse to doing precisely that). Cheap devices just mean more landfill down the road (something people here have been curiously very silent on when it comes to android hardware).

Tablets occupy a weird niche where they're too big to be phone and fit in your pocket, and too limited to serve as an actual computer. In other words, they fail at both jobs -- except: disposable dross that schools taxpayers can buy heaps of and not terribley care when the kids break them. So phone+pute it is: I bought a used Galaxy S10+ 128gb phone for $100, and the first thing I did upon turning it on was go straight to settings and shut off automatic updating. Runs like a scalded cat on Android 10, and have yet to encounter an app that needed anything newer. If I have serious work to do, I'll bring along the 15" i7 laptop, unless weight is an overriding factor, in which case an 11" Macbook Air weighs less than a current-model Apple tablet + keyboard.

Suggesting that these factors sound the death knell for Apple is as ridiculous today as it was 10 years ago.

Ten years ago, Marvel and DC thought they could coast forever even though they hadn't sold a comic book to an actual child in a decade. Then their movie and TV franchises cratered, and valuations collapsed. Apple's current market-cap is $3.45 trillion; Dell's is $80 billion, and Lenovo's is $15 billion -- and both are currently outselling Apple. Apple hopes, like the comic book companies before it, that it can segue into streaming-entertainment...except for one thing: it's losing money at it, and audiences are less than a quarter of the pump-monkey propaganda cited by Wikipedia. APPL stock would have to lose 98% of its valuation to shrink to Dell, and 99.5% to shrink to Lenovo.

I wonder how long the poor guy's legs can hold out.