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Apple’s problems are mostly of its own making.

They are facing the “tyranny of size” problem - growth forever is simply not possible. From here on out it’s going to be hang on to market share and don’t let profit margins erode. They don’t know how to do this.

The bigger, longer term problem is that their stuff is not significantly better than anyone else’s (in areas like their desktops, their products can actually be MUCH worse, Google “Apple Laptop Keyboards”), and they are much more expensive. People are catching on to this. The young, the source of their fanboi base, is simply is not willing to upgrade (i.e., toss) what they own every few years anymore. I was on a tech website today frequented by Millennial geeks, and I assure you that the tone was very nasty.

Apple’s hardware products are nearly unrepairable, by design and mostly assembled with glue and tape. Compare that to a Dell, which has incredible support from Dell and third parties. If you as a technician can’t take apart and repair a Dell product, you should not be allowed to handle small (or possibly any) tools. This is one of the reasons that you won’t see a business own Apple products unless their is absolutely no alternative. With Adobe Suite running on Windows, the number of “must have” Apple-only apps is small and getting smaller.

The only things that keep my interest are:

1. SOME of their software is very good. I had an upset on my phone where I lost everything. Two hours later I was back to where I had been a few days earlier (when I did a sync with my desktop) via a restoration that was as easy to execute as a fart. I didn’t even know that my phone was being backed up in the first place!

My wife lost her hard disk drive a few years ago (in an iMac) and same deal. She was running 30 minutes later off of her backup directly, no restoration needed. Apple fixed the machine in a few days and restoration back to where she was before involved clicking “Yes”.

Microsoft can only imagine, in their dreams, of anything that sophisticated and they have had 30+ years to do it.

2. Apple’s “stores” are very good AND they are essentially curated. Apple examines (pretty thoroughly) all apps in their store and extremely few apps that do bad things or take unneeded data get through. I would actually look at an Android phone but I would NOT DARE use anything from their store and I trust Apple a hell of a lot more than I trust Google.

I’m willing to pay a certain amount of “Apple tax” to keep safe, but that tax is getting very, very high and I’m not getting enough for it.