Comment by danford

Are less and less people buying iPhones, or more and more people buying phones? (Not a rhetorical question, I don't know whose numbers to trust for mobile stuff.)

Apple's business is not one that has to own a market to make gobsmacking amounts of money. As such I doubt they see being outsold by Chromebooks as being a serious problem; they've been being outsold in the laptop market forever and are still making yachtloads of cash.

Eh, while it may be accurate enough to say that to a first approximation Apple is an iOS company now, I don't think that's an unsustainable thing to be by tech standards. They may not need new triumphs to be very profitable for a long time: think of the golden decade or so MS had after '95 mainly from milking its already-existing successes.

This is simply false. More and more people are buying both iPhones and iPads.

And as to sustainable business models - the iTunes Ecosystem alone is a large as half of Google's entire business and is growing faster.

I know Chromebooks outsold MacBooks but I don't think you can compare them. Chromebooks are like disposable cameras. If they are referring to the cheapy plastic things, I wonder if people are buying them as devices to use whilst on the toilet or in areas where mugging is a risk?

Most Chromebooks are glorified phone hardware. Even the one with the whizzbang screen has lousy soldered-on local storage, so it fails as a microcomputer. It essentially is a terminal with a fantastic screen. I certainly wouldn't attempt to use one to develop on (and I mean develop on, not RDP/VNC/SSH to a box elsewhere). Could I write C++ on it for multiple OSes thanks to virtualization on a Chromebook? I know my needs are niche but I don't think Chromebooks compete with MacBooks, even if they look similar-ish and one has outsold the other. Out of interest, have Kindles outsold MacBooks? Would that be the death-knell for MacBooks? Really is comparing Apples and Oranges I think.

Ah. Apple is doomed. I see.

Chromebook costs 1/10 of the MacBook

"Except, you know," that it's a highly conservative company and offering a line developer a Mac is, in my experience, kind of weird.

  The only thing Apple wins is the mindshare of relatively 
  wealthy (American) people and an enormous amount of 
  hedge and institutional fund investment. 

So they're only dominating in terms of profit share in wealthy countries. And also in most if not all customer satisfaction and retention metrics. And also killing it at retail.

But other than that, not dominating at all.

I hope I can achieve this level of non-domination in my lifetime. Seems pretty cushy.

While this is true I think there are some differences. In particular, an essential sector of the Mac death spiral was people switching to cheaper Windows PCs as soon as they were a good-enough alternative. For various reasons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6496030#up_6498257 I think iOS devices have a better chance of sustaining a lifestyle-brand price premium without losing too many users even if the alternative is broadly good enough.

Wow, no. That is not my logic at all.

Lambo is profitable, evidently, but they have an absolutely miniscule share of the auto industry's profits.

Profits, profit margins, and profit share are related but really distinct things. I hope nobody lets you run a business!

Profit margins != profit share.

I'll get downvoted for this one but they have a similar characteristic as well:

they both catch fire!

I had a 2010 MBP go up in flames and an immediate colleague's one screen went phut and melted. Lambos do this too (google images)