One of the last great consumer companies is going B2B

Apple always had a B2B component. This is just the latest attempt to not make it completely subpar.

This sucks. This page makes it clear this is the motivation for "Ads on Maps", as they talk about it prominently here - they are now directly selling the attention of their device consumers to their business customers.

I guess they were doing that before in the App Store, which is of course also awful.

	▲	Barbing 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Their voice assistant is somewhat opinionated about how it will search the App Store for you https://i.ibb.co/zV8d9gbc/IMG-2177.jpg They dynamically reveal 1-3 results and only show a “see more options in App Store” button when they feel like it.

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amelius 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They need to go OEM.

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nhubbard 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They did it in the 1990s and it failed so hard that it almost took down the company.

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amelius 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Why can others do it?

	▲	nielsbot an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Apple's entire success story is their vertical integration. They can't do that and OEM. As for the PC makers: they don't innovate. Microsoft doesn't care who sells PCs, Intel doesn't care who sells PCs. Every PC maker is essentially an assembly company. If you appreciate Apple's innovation in the laptop space over the past x years, then you don't want Apple to be an OEM.
	▲	dhosek 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Who has successfully managed this kind of transition? The obvious case is IBM which is now essentially a consulting company and doesn’t sell PCs anymore.

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lvspiff 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

its the only path to go to be able to continue to support their pricing models - they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch and so B2B is the more sustainable paying population.

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swiftcoder 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> they've priced the consumer/pro-sumer out of the market prettymuch

I'd argue that (the low end of) Apple products are the cheapest they've ever been - the $599 iPhone 17e is below the inflation-adjusted price of the original iPhone, and at $599 the MacBook Neo is the cheapest launch price an Apple laptop has ever listed at (not even adjusting for inflation!)

The maximum amount you can spend at the high-end has certainly gone up over time, although the basic MacBook Pro Max config costs roughly the same as it's peer from 10-15 years ago - nobody's forcing folks to shell out for the 128GB of RAM (something that didn't exist on laptops at all till very recently)

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kstrauser 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The company that just made a $600 Macbook?

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bigyabai 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, the phone company that is known for taking home a bronze medal in personal computing for the past 30 years running.

Apple knows the score internally, this won't change the world any more than the 12" Retina Macbook did.

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mpweiher 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The world's firs trillion dollar and three trillion dollar company. Yes, completely insignificant.

The company that captures 60-70% of the global PC industry's profits. Definitely completely insignificant.

Apple has known the score internally for decades and is laughing that score all the way to the bank.

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bigyabai an hour ago | parent [-]

None of that refutes anything that was said. macOS is a third-class citizen measured by market share, and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year.

Consumers do not want the Mac. Datacenters don't want Apple Silicon. People want the iPhone, they want Airpods, but the M-series Macs have spent 5 years changing absolutely nothing.

	▲	philistine a minute ago \| parent [-]
		> and the total sum of annual Mac profits is lower than what the iPad ecosystem makes in a year. So the company that makes between 50-60% of all profits in personal computers has created a market where it makes 100% of the profits, but albeit smaller than the whole PC market. That's terrrrible, what was Apple thinking! Market share is far from everything when people live in poverty and do not have money to spend on good hardware and software. Apple makes stuff for affluent people, and then makes a ton of money from those rich folks. Making Apple the most valuable company in the history of humanity. Boy, that's a terrible place to be in!