Apple Doomsayers

Doomsayers have been declaring the death of Apple for decades. Apple is not unique in this regard, of course. Every company has had its share of dedicated detractors announcing their demise. The data is sourced from The Mac Observer's excellent Apple Death Knell Counter [This page appears to have been taken down]. The Mac Observer staff curates the list to include only instances where the speaker is specifically stating the demise and doom of Apple and not include a simply negative sentiment.

Deaths Per Year

Deaths Per Year - Major Events

Below are three markers for historic events in Apple's history: one for the introduction of the iPod, the introduction of the iPhone, and Steven Job's death.

Deaths Per Author

The vast majority of predictions were made by different people. To avoid graphing 50+ data points with only 1 value, I only plotted the results for authors that have more than one prediction on our list. Additionally, we only want named authors so we will also filter out all "Unknown" authors.

Word cloud

For fun, I generated a word cloud using wordclouds.com with all the relevant death knell quotes.

Conclusion

If you're interested in how these charts were built with Nivo, you can find a walkthrough of charts on the other article I wrote Visualizing Apple Deaths.