Apple to flush '£37bn' down the bog if it doesn't flog cheapo slabtops

Re: For $63Bn

Those that can do.

Those that can't become analysts and tell everybody else what they should be doing.

Re: For $63Bn

You'd also think that for his stoopid analyst salary he'd realise that the laptop line starts at $799 well below the $1000 band he's quoting.

Analyst - possibly the easiest most pointless job in the world? Make blindingly obvious predictions and get paid, make wildly unlikely predictions get paid. Its win-win!

Re: For $63Bn

Apparently this analyst thinks if you have two successful products, that combining them into one bastardized hybrid that does neither as well as the two perform their individual roles, that the new product will outsell two individual products?

I guess that's why Surface is taking over the market. Oh wait...

"they believe they can crap in a box and it will sell for 100$"

It does.

The wise know that buying the right crap-in-a-box makes them not only wise, but hip.

They dress as does their emperor, copying his new clothes.

Well if I could sell my crap in a box for $100's I'd do it as well! Apple sell good stuff and make more money than creosote, as other posters have pointed out , if this analyst was so smart he would create a start up and earn than 67Billion himself!

Re: ARM vs x86?

"we would see no reason for Apple not to begin using the A8 in its laptops"

Quite so re the x86s - there is a very good reason why Apple might not begin using the A8 in laptops and that's Boot Camp. At the moment nobody has to make much of a decision between Windows and Mac - buying a Mac allows both. But the A8 wouldn't allow that. There are important applications where the Mac versions are very inferior to the Windows, e.g. Dragon Naturallyspeaking Legal.

Re: ARM vs x86?

OS X is actually fairly easy to port (it started life on PowerPC, migrated to x86, was cut down to make iOS etc), but the prediction is complete crap. Current A series CPUs are something like 1/3-1/4 of the computing power of Core i5 series CPUs. The laws of diminishing returns also cut in, so the chances of Apple being able to repeatedly double CPU performance in the near to medium future are slim.

Re: ARM vs x86?

Apples code is largely in non-assembly language format. And probably has comments in - the original source did! Its not got huge blocks of intertwined assembler that seem to make it impossible to port like some ...sofware... companies.

Re: ARM vs x86?

Don't bother this poor analyst with reality! Never mind OS X - how about all the apps written for x86-based Mac OS X? How about VMs/bootcamp that allow running Windows apps?

This analyst is a complete m0r0n. Apple is losing out on a $63b "opportunity"? Part of his argument goes (paraphrased) "current iPad buyers buy iPads as a supplement to the laptop or desktop.....if Apple made a hybrid, they'd be able to buy just one." Well, uh, isn't it a good thing from Apple's perspective to be able to sell one customer two devices instead of one? Wouldn't they LOSE REVENUE if they now sold this customer just that one hybrid (since the hybrid is to be in the < $1000 range according to the analyst and, therefore, has to cost less than the two individual devices?)

Re: ARM vs x86?

The OS is already ported - not only is iOS over half of OSX's codebase running on ARM, but there have been persistent rumours of ARM MacBook sightings for a couple of years, and Apple would be mad not to be running those experiments. OSX was on Intel for years before the switch in chips, so they have form. They have iOS on Intel experiments too - the dev emulator runs on Intel with native executables.

The trouble with going to ARM chips in laptops is that even the latest gen is slow compared with what we have now. Unlike the PPC to Intel change, where the Intel chips could emulate PPC code as fast as - or even faster than - the previous generation of Macs, ARM chips would run Intel code at ~quarter native speed. Crunchy, and Apple are highly allergic to crunchy UX.

And iOS on a laptop would be a horribly crunchy experience. I've used Windows8 on a nice 10" touchscreen laptop, and I've used an iPad Air with a nice Logitech keyboard case. They were both reasonably unpleasant halfway houses, neither laptop not tablet. I'm really not seeing iOS in a laptop form at all.

The point of jumping would be (a) power consumption, which Intel pretty much already have in hand for laptop class chippery, but also (b) moving the CPUs in-house, which I'm sure Apple would love to do. The groundwork is all in place, going ARM64 was one of the last required steps, but it's a couple of years and a couple of chip generations down the line yet.

Re: ARM vs x86?

"Wouldn't this necessitate a re-write of OS X, considering the A series are ARM processors and Intel are x86?"

Not really. I would expect there have been skunk-works projects to do this anyway.

The underpinnings of iOS and OSX are the same: both use BSD and Mach under the hood. The UI stuff and apps are surely reasonably portable too.

Remember that until 10.7, OSX supported both PowerPC and x86, some of that was done through emulation and some through executables that included both PowerPC and x86 code.

Nothing technical holding it back...

Re: Huh?

Yeah it's odd that, bankers normally want it the other way round.

Re: apple .... cheap

With my first budget to get a laptop in 2000, the clamshell iBook was by far the best choice (what punishment that thing has suffered!), so I left the pc world (temporarily).

MacMini has always been cheap... A few clones appeared at the same price or higher, that was it; self-built comes to a very similar price for a worse-looking, worse-finished, warranty-less thing.

The original iPods weren't cheap, but comparable competitors (Creative Zen, etc) did cost the same or more.

Re: Coined the term iAnywhere?

Sybase got there years ago...

Interestingly, the concepts behind "Apple iAnywhere" have already been demonstrated with Android/Linux. This doesn't mean that the Apple implementation won't get attention and create a market.

Re: Sounds like an eMate

The eMate, Apple's first use of translucent plastic. Basically, a Newton with a keyboard aimed at the educational market. My old school had one, didn't know what to do with it.

Re: Why would they do this?

When they can make more profit selling a second larger cheap to make tablet-keyboard-iOS along side existing tablets instead of X86 Mac with OSX.

If you have a 12" to 21" with BT keyboard you likely want a tablet to travel with or on the couch.

Re: Why would they do this?

They'd be more likely to release OS X (latest, or next-in-line) in an installable form broadly for Intel hardware of a certain vintage and spec and thereafter. It won't make them money. Not today, anyway--but they're giving the OS away in any case *cough*.