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Editorial: WSJ stoops to clickbait with silly anti-Mac article
Mac News Network ^ | June 16, 2015 | by William Gallagher

Posted on 06/17/2015 1:55:52 AM PDT by Swordmaker

Ford should stop selling cars because they sell more trucks, paper argues

In case you haven't heard, the Wall Street Journal has run an embarrassingly blinkered editorial called "Why Apple Should Kill Off the Mac" which is, on the face of it, nonsensical. We expect this sort of asinine fodder from the logic-averse scrawls of established nitwits like your Dvoraks, your Enderles -- but the Wall Street Journal was once a respected, legitimate newspaper (at least until Rupert Murdoch bought it).

If it were the guy next to you in Starbucks, you might smile out of politeness -- but your attention would be gone again before he got on to what the Red Sox should really do to fix their batting average and bullpen situation. If it were someone in your office, you'd stop listening. If it were your boss, you might start looking for another job, because you're in a firm that isn't sticking around much longer.

Yet this nonsense is in the Wall Street Journal, and it's behind a paywall. You have to pay to read 1,000 words of an overly-simple argument that we can repeat to you in 10: Apple makes more from iPhones, so it should ditch Macs. Sure, we can say it in 10 words, but not without laughing.

Honestly, I guffawed. Partly at the idea, but chiefly at the bald-faced chutzpah of the WSJ running a piece with no purpose but to get a rise out of readers and ultimately, therefore, a rise in page views. To be able to get a few hundred words out of a premise that falls apart the moment you ask yourself what computer Apple employees would then use if the Mac weren't around is, one presumes, the result of writer Christopher Mims' apparent belief that if you publish enough wooly thinking, you can knit a sweater out of it.

Okay, let's play the WSJ's game. Nobody wins here today, but the Journal is getting its life-giving oxygen of publicity. Still, the more people know this is the level of analysis on offer, maybe the fewer will pay for it. Maybe I'll just feel better for getting it off my chest.

Certainly you should rub your hands and dive in on the comments below the original article, if you can access them. If you're a Windows fan, well, thank you for reading this far, and you're definitely welcome: this is not about Apple per se, this is not about Windows being better or worse. This is about saying something utterly stupid in the sole aim of getting people to talk about it -- and then it's about talking about it.

Whether you take the 10- or the 1,000-word version of Mims' argument, it boils down further to about two points. One of them can be batted aside in a blink: he says that Apple made a mere $6.9 billion from selling Macs in the final three months of 2014, which is (relative) peanuts next to its iPhone revenues. It's easy to bat aside, not just because that's even more money than I make in a year, but because Mims himself doesn't just say "made," he says "raked in" $6.9 billion. He then points out it would be crazy to say any other company should stop making a product that brings in that much cash.

So why is it not crazy -- or at the very least unbelievably bad business advice -- to say that about Apple? Should McDonald's get rid of soft drinks and coffee because it makes most of its money on burgers and fries?

The reason for saying Apple should ditch Macs is the other of the two points: Apple cannot do two things well, says Mims, before insisting that it should concentrate on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and "plus, you know, a car." You could forgive Mims, perhaps, for not understanding that without Macs, you can't make iOS software -- he clearly knows as much about technology as he does about running a business -- but this is why you have editors to stop you embarrassing yourself in print. Apparently the WSJ has laid off their sanity-checkers.

Sorry to harp on about how the paper only ran this as clickbait, but as funny as it seemed at first, it is increasingly angering me -- because rebutting it is somehow elevating it. You can go through point by point, you can entertain yourself reading one of Mims' paragraphs contradicting another one, you can effortlessly make the case against each of his ideas. Yet what you're doing is playing on his turf. It's ground where he says these parts of Apple are separate, and you're agreeing because you're debating the value of the parts instead of looking at the whole.

Apple is one company. More than most, it is a startlingly consistent company -- and has a coherent plan which it does not, and has not ever, shared with us. Doubtlessly the company shifts and turns, it has certainly floundered in the now-distant past, but right now the most we see is a hint of a big plan.

WWDC revealed iOS 9's multitasking and OS X El Capitan's Split View, which both make use of technology Apple brought into Yosemite, iOS 8, and the iPhone 6. It's the classic elephant example: not the elephant in the room, but what it's like when one person can only see the trunk, and another can only feel the flapping ears. Users, journalists, and competitors are all trying to figure out what they can from these bits, but what Mims should have figured out before starting his article is that it's one elephant.

Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches are parts of the same being. What Apple adds to OS X El Capitan is informed by its iOS work -- such as bringing Metal to the Mac -- and what it develops for the desktop becomes crucial on the phone. It's called iOS now, but it was originally OS X on the iPhone, and the development of both boosts the overall growth of the Apple eco-system.

It's not as if this is news! Apple gets derided for how it locks you into its eco-system, and Google does too for the same reasons (if not necessarily to the same degree or effect). Apple gets praised for it too -- I take phone calls on my Watch now, Captain Kirk style. I do start a sentence on my iPhone and finish it on my Mac.

I'm one person, and I am using one thing, it's just split out into iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. I'm one person, and Apple is one company.

I'd like to argue that there is more than money in this too, that Apple won't toss aside the Mac because it fails to reach some financial goal. I could be wrong there: MacNN managing editor Mike Wuerthele argues that Apple would kick puppies if that were what made it money. Apple is big business, it isn't your friend, and it does exist (but not solely) to make money -- even if the money is then used to make better products.

I buy the line that Apple consistently says about it being dedicated to making the best products it can -- but the key thing to take away from this is not that I buy PR lines, it's that I buy. I buy Macs and iPhones and the rest, I buy them because they are the best things I have found for my work. That's certainly true of each individual part, but for me it's geometrically true of the entire Apple system working together.

The Mac will die. Apple will cease to be the biggest company in the world. It's going to happen at some point, and that's true whether Apple does stupid things or some other company does the same things better.

But it's not going to happen because the Wall Street Journal had no other ideas for a click-bait analysis column.

--


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Society
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 06/17/2015 1:55:52 AM PDT by Swordmaker
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To: ~Kim4VRWC's~; 1234; Abundy; Action-America; acoulterfan; AFreeBird; Airwinger; Aliska; altair; ...
The Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims editorialized the day before yesterday that Apple should kill off the Mac for the specious reasoning that it only "raked in $6.9 billion in the last quarter of 2014 from Macs while making a lot more from selling iPhones and Apple should concentrate on selling iPhones because Apple can't do more than one thing and should concentrate on iPhones, iPads, iPods, AppleTV, and maybe an . . . Apple Car. Say what?

Yesterday, MacNews Network's editor William Gallagher calls Mims and the Wall Street Journal on the carpet for idiotic thinking and publishing a "Click Bait" article. Good Read! Includes a link to the original pay-walled WSJ article. — PING!


No, won't idiotically kill off the Mac
Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

2 posted on 06/17/2015 2:04:27 AM PDT by Swordmaker ( This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users continue...)
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To: Swordmaker

As you know, I am not a mac fan. Or an Apple fan. but killing the mack would be the height of corporate stupidity.


3 posted on 06/17/2015 2:12:20 AM PDT by Norm Lenhart
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To: Norm Lenhart

Christopher Mims’s article might be ridiculous. But in the twenty minutes (I’m probably being generous here) it took him to cobble that BS together, WSJ likely paid him more than I made working all day today.


4 posted on 06/17/2015 2:17:23 AM PDT by kevao (Biblical Jesus: Give your money to the poor. Socialist Jesus: Give your neighbor's money to the poor)
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To: kevao

Yea but of the two of you, only one displayed stupid for the world to point at and laugh. I’d rather be broke and not have the world realizing what a fool I was, but granny said everyone haz a purpose. His is to serve as a bad example I guess.

You’ll have to forgive me. I just realized I defended Apple. Anyone got a Seppuku blade I could borrow briefly? ;)


5 posted on 06/17/2015 2:33:03 AM PDT by Norm Lenhart
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To: All
And another article from a slightly different viewpoint. . .

Macbeth syndrome: Killing the Mac won't stop the voices
The Macalope — Macworld —Jun 16, 2015 7:00

Before we begin, please extinguish all cigarettes and put your tray tables in their upright and locked position. Because you're going to want to jam that cigarette in your eye and hit your head against the tray table when you read the "modest" suggestion of the Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims.

"Why Apple Should Kill Off the Mac" (No link, but tip o' the antlers to @lvdjgarcia and Joanna Stern)

The Macalope is going to go ahead and say that this is a terrible idea and not just because he has a head shaped like a Classic Mac.

Apple Inc. has the kind of “problems” few companies in history could dream of.

Chief among them is the constant fire hose of absurd suggestions as to how they can "improve" their already amazing business. Replace Tim Cook! Give stuff away for free! Cut out giant parts of your business!

Not to put too fine a point on it but these pieces do nothing more than show how clearly there's a very good reason why Apple's executive corps is paid to run Apple and these pundits are paid to not run Apple.


6 posted on 06/17/2015 2:42:47 AM PDT by Swordmaker ( This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users continue...)
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To: Swordmaker
You have to pay to read 1,000 words of an overly-simple argument that we can repeat to you in 10: Apple makes more from iPhones, so it should ditch Macs. Sure, we can say it in 10 words, but not without laughing.

Moronic!

First come the Macs ...


Re:publica conference, Berlin, May 2015

Then come the goodies created on them!

If the Mac spirals down the porcelain chute, the rest of Apple will soon follow.

7 posted on 06/17/2015 2:51:35 AM PDT by cynwoody
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To: Norm Lenhart
You’ll have to forgive me. I just realized I defended Apple. Anyone got a Seppuku blade I could borrow briefly? ;)

No problem. I'm a Linux guy myself. But if there's anything I hate worse than bloated OSs (Windoze) and outrageously priced hardware (Apple), it's shoddy journalism. And the referred article should get the prize for Dumb-Ass.

8 posted on 06/17/2015 4:09:42 AM PDT by kevao (Biblical Jesus: Give your money to the poor. Socialist Jesus: Give your neighbor's money to the poor)
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To: Swordmaker

One of the more ridiculous articles from WSJ.


9 posted on 06/17/2015 4:37:25 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks ("If he were working for the other side, what would he be doing differently ?")
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To: Swordmaker

In defense of the WSJ, this is a single column and columnist. On Fox Business (co-owned), another WSJ writer admitted to total disagreement the same day of the article. Me, I think that Apple will happily keep making computers, phones, watches and retain the ecosystem that can be seen as building into the intelligent house dreamed by SciFi for years. For a SF example, read “Beyond This Horizon” by Heinlein - protagonist tells phone to wait 10 minutes to give message. For a 1940s story, pretty durn long to wait for reality!

I so want a telephone that I can voice command ‘no calls except from family’ from 8pm to 8am and NO RING at all in those hours. I presume that, like my fellow FReepers, the money-bomb bombardment is incessant in all conservative households.


10 posted on 06/17/2015 5:12:30 AM PDT by SES1066 (Quality, Speed or Economical - Any 2 of 3 except in government - 1 at best but never #3!)
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To: Norm Lenhart
Anyone got a Seppuku blade I could borrow briefly? ;)

Nah, save the effort for when you start complimenting Microsoft for its top-of-the-line management, hardware and software. Do that and you won't need a blade, just jump INTO the shark tank!

11 posted on 06/17/2015 5:15:18 AM PDT by SES1066 (Quality, Speed or Economical - Any 2 of 3 except in government - 1 at best but never #3!)
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To: SES1066

Actually MS high level stuff is quite the bargain. I mean you gotta pay big bucks at a brothel for abuse like that ;)


12 posted on 06/17/2015 7:34:47 AM PDT by Norm Lenhart
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To: SES1066
I so want a telephone that I can voice command ‘no calls except from family’ from 8pm to 8am and NO RING at all in those hours.

You can pretty much do that now on the iPhone. Set up your family contacts as "Favorites" and you can set "Do Not Disturb" mode on, with settings to allow calls from Favorites only. You could even schedule DND mode to come on automatically. I'm unsure (haven't tried) to use Siri to engage/disengage DND, but if it does, then you also have the voice control.

13 posted on 06/17/2015 7:40:36 AM PDT by kevkrom (I'm not an unreasonable man... well, actually, I am. But hear me out anyway.)
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To: SES1066
I so want a telephone that I can voice command ‘no calls except from family’ from 8pm to 8am and NO RING at all in those hours.

I have a land-line telephone that does some of that. I know, it sounds archaic having a land-line phone. Some years ago I bought an answering machine with five wireless handsets. It's programmed to have different ringtones for immediate family, friends, business and to be quiet for unknowns. Also announces them by name. When we hear the family ringtone or the close friend ringtone followed by name, we immediately pick up. The money-bomb calls are blocked. Wish my cell smartphone had these features.

14 posted on 06/17/2015 9:51:29 AM PDT by roadcat
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To: Swordmaker
One of them can be batted aside in a blink: he says that Apple made a mere $6.9 billion from selling Macs in the final three months of 2014, which is (relative) peanuts next to its iPhone revenues.

It wasn't too long ago (less than 15 years?) that the total worth of Apple was less than $4 billion. Now they're raking in that much in a quarter, in profits, just from Macs. Amazing! No company would walk away from profits like that.

15 posted on 06/17/2015 9:55:57 AM PDT by roadcat
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To: Swordmaker

I actually read the article, and I saved a copy for later reading. It was quite funny.


16 posted on 06/17/2015 5:05:58 PM PDT by amigatec (2 Thess 2:11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:)
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