Apple built its PC business on the backs of creative professionals because they were among the few groups who thought Macs were worth more than $0.00, thanks to its superior experience with Adobe's creative suite when compared to Windows.
Apple now has a dominant position in the PC market, not because they catered to creative professionals, but because they listened to their initial creative audience and focused on making their computers better.
Apple doesn't focus on the Mac Pro because they want to abandon creatives, it is simply because the Mac Pro doesn't enable any meaningful use-cases not served by the 5k iMac or its notebook line.
Form-factor, screen quality, battery life, weight, speed of I/O, and all the other design goals the author dismisses, are perhaps the most important metrics meaningful for the current generation of laptop buyers, including professionals.
"Apple doesn't focus on the Mac Pro because they want to abandon creatives, it is simply because the Mac Pro doesn't enable any meaningful use-cases not served by the 5k iMac or its notebook line."
Well said. This thought has been banging around in my head half-formed for the past couple of days. Thanks for expressing it so succinctly. I think this also answers why Apple has made the decision to limit/remove expansion and upgrade options in their hardware.
"Apple built its PC business on the backs of creative professionals because they were among the few groups who thought Macs were worth more than $0.00, thanks to its superior experience with Adobe's creative suite when compared to Windows."
This idea of creatives being the core market for Apple during its early years is often floated. I'm not questioning its veracity, though I'm curious if anyone knows of references that backs this up with numbers or research? Education was a pretty big market early on as well. How do they compare?
> This idea of creatives being the core market for Apple during its early years is often floated. I'm not questioning its veracity, though I'm curious if anyone knows of references that backs this up with numbers or research?
Check out Steve Job's first keynote after returning to Apple in 1997 starting at 18:35. He enumerates the assets the company still has at its disposable to claw its way out of almost imminent bankruptcy. He specifically mentiones creative proffesionals and educators and backs them up with some interesting stats.
- 80% of all computers used in advertising, graphic design, prepress, printing
- 64% of Internet websites created on Macintosh
- ~ 10-15% Mac sales traced back to people using Adobe Photoshop
- Apple single largest education company in the world
- 60% of all computers in education were Apple
- 64% of computers teachers use were Apple
- Over $2 billion business in education
Also of note: Steve was not wearing a black turtleneck.
So it's pretty clear what segments of the market Apple was dominant in.
The question in my mind is related, but slightly different: what percentage of Apples revenues and profits came from these segments? Were there other markets out there that perhaps Apple wasn't dominant in but still contributed significantly to Apple's overall revenues? That said, I wouldn't be surprised if these two segments were the majority.
> The question in my mind is related, but slightly different: what percentage of Apples revenues and profits came from these segments? Were there other markets out there that perhaps Apple wasn't dominant in but still contributed significantly to Apple's overall revenues? That said, I wouldn't be surprised if these two segments were the majority.
Unfortunately Apple's financial reports don't break things down in detail necessary to answer your question, but because of the power hindsight, we know that Steve gave this keynote when Apple was months away from folding (http://www.macrumors.com/2011/09/19/steve-jobs-apple-almost-...).
If Apple had other significant sources of revenue, he likely would have touted them as prominently as he did educators and creative professionals. Since he didn't, we can conclude with some level confidence that these were the only sources of ongoing significant revenue.
> Apple now has a dominant position in the PC market, not because they catered to creative professionals, but because they listened to their initial creative audience and focused on making their computers better.
> That doesn't make them dominant in any way. That's only a good thing for apple shareholders and bad for their customers.
Yes it does. They are the envy of every other device manufacturer, and not just because they make the most money.
The reason why Apple gets more profit than its competitors despite lower market share is because customers are willing to pay high prices for a better computer. How do we know this? When surveyed, users have consistently give Apple top marks in customer satisfaction. They've done it 13 years in a row.
A lot of video shops also used Mac extensively for decades. It seems it wasn't only good marketing, they were alright for this profession.
Saying this lightly, I was a kid in the 90s, but I do remember a lot of ads for large Mac stacks (towers, disks, video cards, etc). Tiny SGIs in a way.
Presumably you mean video editing shops and not blockbusters? Our video shops were green screen terminals on DOS until... well until they ceased existence.
I couldn't say which precisely, maybe only part of the market, maybe some part of the post production pipeline. Surely lots were done on Flame like systems, which AFAIK weren't Mac based.
> Apple now has a dominant position in the PC market
Mmmh... how so? Internationally, Apple has less than 5% market share compared to Windows PC. And that number appears to be destined to drop if the reactions to the new generation are any indication.
That number is nonsense. If you follow the source, it comes from Dediu, who's a well known Apple apologist, and if you read his own article, there's no substance to it.
I'd love it if we could find actual, objective numbers.
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Kolide is a platform that enables you to ask computers important questions, get back immediate answers, and take decisive action. Kolide does all this by leveraging the awesome power of Facebook’s osquery framework and extending it with built-in security and operations expertise. Mike Arpaia, the creator of osquery at FB is a co-founder. Investment was lead by the creator of Snorby, Dustin Webber, and that investment was matched new practitioner lead Hack/Secure investment syndicate.
Anyone interested in joining a dream team cyber security company at an early (yet well funded) stage should consider reaching out.
Stack: Golang, React, Docker
We need Golang back-end engineers and we need a front-end dev comfortable with React. Check out the job details at https://angel.co/kolideco/jobs.
Apple now has a dominant position in the PC market, not because they catered to creative professionals, but because they listened to their initial creative audience and focused on making their computers better.
Apple doesn't focus on the Mac Pro because they want to abandon creatives, it is simply because the Mac Pro doesn't enable any meaningful use-cases not served by the 5k iMac or its notebook line.
Form-factor, screen quality, battery life, weight, speed of I/O, and all the other design goals the author dismisses, are perhaps the most important metrics meaningful for the current generation of laptop buyers, including professionals.