Microsoft will sell 5.000 of each of those this year, while Apple will sell 25 million watches.
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Microsoft Debuts 84-Inch Surface Hub Touch Display, HoloLens Augmented Reality Headset
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Microsoft will sell 5.000 of each of those this year, while Apple will sell 25 million watches.
I'll take that wager. 25 million. Not a hope in hell. Galaxy Gear sold 50,000 in a shortish time which is quite low. Its a better watch too. But a watch is novelty, yes many will buy and love it, many will buy and not use it after a month. I reckon 1 watch per 30 iPhones over two years. That even sounds too high
Huh! how, if something fails years down the line, how could Apple really know about it. How on earth can they QA for that? They're not panel experts. They're not designing or building those things.
It is not like they're buying the cheapest components out there either. They buy from the same gang as most others top end makers... Because like I said, there's not that many choices out there in top end panels.
They expect good quality from their suppliers too.
If indeed there is such a large scale systemic issue across years and tech don't you think somebody else would have seen it?
Also, kind of weird that one person has all those issues while in my whole extended family dozens of devices I've never heard of any. That's one insane run of bad luck there...
Apple's a quiet company that plays its cards close to its chest, with a fairly small selection of hardware and software. While the occasional rumor does pop up, there's not that much info passing around to sustain an Apple related enthusiast site throughout the year. You can only bring up the iPad Pro, the Apple Watch, or the 12" retina MBA before it starts getting kinda redundant and boring.
Hence why you see news about the competition. It gives people something to talk about during the Apple rumor mill downtime.
So why do they continue to call the site Macrumors? Because Mostly Macrumors Plus Some Other Stuff Other People Are Doing doesn't roll off the tongue quite as nicely.
Conservatively, they'll sell 10-15M (high to low estimate) in the first year, that's 5-7.5% of annual phone sales if you want to do the math. That's pretty much in line with the average of current industry estimates.
Second year, sales would be about the same with fence sitters coming in. The main question is the third year, does it stall or you have a continued strong growth?
ASP of about $500 (if you count extra bands too). About 65% will be $350 watch (6.5-9.75M), 34% the $500 one (3.4-5.1M), and 1% (100-150K) the top end one. If they give the ability to upgrade the innards, there could be more top end watches sold.
That would mean revenues of 5B-7.5B revenues and 1.5-2.25B in profits.
That's a pretty good start.
They've got an enviable position in a highly valued part of tech publishing and would be entering an already crowded industry where they'd be bit players. Don't destroy your brand by leaving behind that which you do best. That's reason enough not to mess with the formula.
10 to 15 players and their fingerprints on the screen - That sounds cool...
Apple announces hardware when it's guaranteed to be successful, but it means they release very few "new" products.
Microsoft and Google both announce products often when they aren't commercially ready, but we see them stumble and learn in the public eye.
Which approach is better is always hard to tell. It's not as if the first iPhone was without its faults. There are simply some things you can never learn about until released into the wild.
Even if products like HoloLens aren't perfect, it at least shows these companies are thinking out of the box. Google Glass failure wasn't showing it off too early, but not appearing to be committed to the project at major developer conferences years after.
Microsoft and Google both announce products often when they aren't commercially ready, but we see them stumble and learn in the public eye.
Which approach is better is always hard to tell. It's not as if the first iPhone was without its faults. There are simply some things you can never learn about until released into the wild.
Even if products like HoloLens aren't perfect, it at least shows these companies are thinking out of the box. Google Glass failure wasn't showing it off too early, but not appearing to be committed to the project at major developer conferences years after.
Yep. Ad while MS isnt an Apple news story, it is in other ways, its a competitior showing off its future wares, and will Apple use those wares, or create its own, or continue on its own path? An example is iOS + OSX or W10 (which covers desktop/tablet/phone)
What I am saying is this MS news and other stuff is desktop and /or tablet and /or phone tech news, so its relevant
You've been here a lot longer than I have, so you'll have a better view of how Macrumors has changed over the years, but from what I've seen, they're not changing things around that much.
It's probably a much busier site than it was back when, but they're still 99% devoted to Apple news and rumors. I don't think the occasional aside will do much to harm the site as a whole, or mar its reputation in any way.
Or...
What he said.
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Remember the Microsoft Surface? No, not the crappy tabtop, the Tabletop! Remember when that was widely released?
Oh right. It was vaporware. There were a few places where it got tested and then everyone realized it was a $10K table that wasn't really much more useful than a $10 table with a $500 tablet on it, except it cost 20x as much.
So Microsoft has been known to make really futuristic stuff that completely flopped. So has Google (Google Glass). This Hololens thing sounds like it'll do better than Glass did, but we'll see.
You forgot about that really cool looking smart watch that's too expensive to actually wear. Or yet another year of failing to update their decrepit overpriced monitors. Because maybe focusing on giving $200B back to the stock holders instead of bringing new stuff to market is what their customers are looking for?
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This!!
Unfortunately...
Cook = Ballmer
Sure is starting to look that way. At least MS is trying some new stuff these days. Seems like all Apple can do is drop hints about cool patents that they never bring to market.
Except for that stupid watch...
Frankly, I really really doubt all this.
1) OSX almost certainly already works on ARM. There just isn't any real benefit of switching right now. You don't gain any performance edge over Intel, and you run the risk of breaking many apps. And emulating Intel on ARM isn't gonna give you close to the same performance as emulating years old PowerPC chips on the latest Intel chips via Rosetta did (and even that was fairly slow).
2) I doubt Apple would have beaten MS to the SP3 under Jobs. If anything, Apple was even more conservative under him. Remember that Jobs didn't even want an App Store. Whereas under Cook, we just had an iOS release which caught up on almost every area where iOS had fallen behind Android.
I think in general Apple has become way too conservative, and it seems to me that it started during Jobs's time there itself.
Not sure that I agree with the characterization of Jobs as being conservative. I think stubborn and arrogant are better characterizations and he allowed those traits to blind him to certain realities in the marketplace.
But having said that, I think your overall point is a good one. The underlying point that I was making is that if Apple wanted to make a convergence move with the iPad similar to the SP3 they would have to either put an Intel chip in an iPad or port MacOS to ARM.
In the past Apple had no problem making bold systemic moves (PowerPC to Intel). That's because their market share and market cap was significantly less than it is now (more to lose and more people to piss off).
IMHO Apple doesn't really give a damn about MacOS. They are essentially a mobile hardware company that sells a boat load of "apps" and music for those devices. With the paradigm shift from downloads to streaming in music, Apple is guilty of the same thing that the record companies were in 2000. They were too greedy and too blind to actually work with Napster to create a viable legal solution for downloading. They wanted to ride the high margin physical product train for as long as they could.
IMHO Apple is doing the same thing with downloads. Ride that 30% margin as long as you can before ceding to streaming. Hopefully for their own sake it won't be to their own peril like iTunes was to the record companies.
Also one of the reasons that Apple can't seem to get a significant foothold in the streaming video market is because the video providers recognize how Apple cornered the market for music in the early 2000's. I'm sure that many of them are saying no mas...
Just a few random ramblings from the mind of a former Apple Kool-Aid drinker who still longs for the sweet taste every now and then...
Agreed. This is only good news for techies everywhere. Microsoft is finally giving Apple and Google some worthy innovative competition. It can only be a matter of time before Apple produces something similar and, hopefully, even better.
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There is something to be said for not fixing what's broke. The trick is to not allow said unbroken thing to become obsolete. Personally, I have faith that Apple is working on its own version of this. They'll release it when the technology has matured enough to make viably. While I am eager to try this MS Hololens at my local Microsoft Kiosk, I have doubts as to how stable the overlay image relative to the background really would be. I hope they have solved that problem.
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Fair assessments at first glance.
For all that I love Apple and its shiny toys, it is still a company run by fallible human beings. Personally, I prefer to see them keep their focus narrow and be the best at what they choose to do. Even then, not everything they produce is perfect or even close to it (iWork, iCloud, Maps, and Apple TV come to mind). But man, they make awesomely beautiful hardware.
This isn't a minor update/release to old technology.
This is game-changing.
MS HoloLens is to iPad what Google Glass is to Newton.
And
has nary a hint of HMDs of any kind. needs to match & beat this.
25 million seems high. But your one per 30 iPhones over two years would still be quite a lot more of these watches.
Look there are accusations of folks being apple fan bois. I don't believe that group makes up a serious percentage. Most folks buy the iPhone because it is a really good phone and they know it will work well. But of the hundreds of millions of iPhone users, there must at least be a one or two percent that are rabid Apple Fan-Boys and then there are one or two percent who are rich and can buy this on a whim. So we are quickly at the multi-millions mark. And selling in the millions should make this a hit product.
Both OS's go back to the 80's. In OS X's case, the late-80s in the form nextstep and a significant amount of the current os x is in fact nextstep. But nextstep was derived from bsd unix which goes back to the early 70's or maybe late 60's.
Back in the 90's the original Mac OS was so bad that Apple started shopping for a replacement. It's ironic that the Mac OS was replaced with a far older but superior OS. So it's not so much how old the operating systems are as much as what the companies have done with them.