And how exactly would them (Intel in this case) selling commoditized, low margin, products make it better for them?
Isn't it even worse, even quicker, for low margin players when their stuff doesn't sell?
He's gone, and Apple has stopped doing that. Apple is now losing marketshare. (Android is estimated at 82%.) Their app store is globally under half of the market. They are projecting a year over year decline this quarter.
It probably won't be visible to the untrained eye in the next 5 years. It won't be missable by anyone in the next 10. But Apple's best days are behind it.
Actually they did just that with the Apple Watch -- which added ~6 billions to their revenues, and even as an early v1.0 eclipsed all "wearables" to date. http://www.cnet.com/news/thanks-to-apple-watch-smartwatch-sa... http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/26/apple-watch-apple-tv-rec...
And their services dept doesn't do that bad either: http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/20/as-a-standalone-co...
They've also keep improving the Apple TV (people who haven't followed Apple forget how slow and incremental the rise of the iPod was -- from 2002 to 2007 people gathered at Keynotes to cheer if it got silly features like Wifi or a color screen or some smaller sibling), working on a car, and other things besides.
>Apple is now losing marketshare.
Barely -- from April 2015 to now, they've gone up and down, some quarters winning over Android, others losing. http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Re...
Besides I've never understood this "let's pin Apple, a single company, against the whole of the industry put together". They've never had the "most" market share -- just the most of the most lucrative (higher end, high margins) segment of the market.
>It probably won't be visible to the untrained eye in the next 5 years. It won't be missable by anyone in the next 10. But Apple's best days are behind it.
I think I've read that again, in 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2015 etc. A.k.a "Apple is doomed".
The iPod never meant you don't need a Mac.
The iPad never meant you don't need an iPhone (and hardly ever meant you don't need a Mac/PC).
The idea that a device should replace previous devices was never much of a concern. The only thing that qualifies 100% in that story is that the iPhone was by nature also a portable music player -- and if you had one obviously you didn't need the iPod. Apart from that, all were individual lines, with their own strengths and limitations -- not supposed to replace one another.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-c...