budugu said:
Ibooks, powerbooks (12") sell because there is no 12" laptop at that price range untill very recently (dell 700m etc). Most of the time laptops are mainly used for giving presentations, websurfing etc that not really platform specific! Exclusiveness in a market segment is the key to ibook success. i am not saying that they being cute is hurting them either. allowing people to customize the stuff for their needs definitely helps. As a small example i donot have to buy Dell XPS to get a gaming machine. A 4700/8400 + good 200$ graphics card would be fine and a lot less. Dell is not forcing me to take that Gaming machine down the throat. letting the end user costomize what he wants is some thing parallel to listening to the customer; Apple has a much more top-down kind of an approach where you need to fit into their offereings.
Yes but that's part of going the Apple route. They've built machines with soldered in processors and video in the past when PC manufacturers were building stuff out of a modular bucket of parts that were built in large factories in China by subcontractors that plug into industry standard sockets. Apple is about making healthy margins per component, and their customer-base will support that because they support Apple's existence regardless of whether or not their hardware at every pricepoint is bleeding edge. That's not the issue at all. The issue is the user experience as Apple gives it to them, with the performance that they're given to work with. The only people that compare the 2 are people who cross shop or are platform agnostic, and that is a smaller group. Some Mac users do know that the PC's are faster in some key areas... but they know that having to run Spybot on a daily basis is also not their cup of tea either, and being sold down the river to 1 OS vendor that controls the whole kit and kaboodle and fires off draconian tactics, or another OS that's open-source, widely available, not quite as polished, and lacking in certain key applications is their 2 roadmaps to deal with.
Both sides have pro's and con's... I can build a cheap PC that's a gaming powerhouse. Correct. Yet... I can't build a Mac out of spare parts. Apple's days of that being a dream died the minute Jobs told Motorola to take their CHRP-based clones and shove 'em. Get used to it... because it aiiiiiiiiiiin't comin' back m'friend. It wouldn't have lasted long anyhow. Apple would've died. End of story. Jobs did what he had to do, whether he wanted to do it or not (I tend to think so) is something you'll have to take up with him.
Apple can't and won't compete with PC's at the BTO-level the PC manufacturers can sustain. There's far more parts created for the PC to do this, and they're available at dirt cheap pricings with tight margins. The fact that the Mac's endian-ness + driver support aren't there for every single PC add-on card under the sun puts it in a position where it makes due with what it can. Apple can invest into areas where it sees a need... but you can't expect them to match what's available on the open seas of PC-dom. Whereas Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq, eMachines, et al. can tap into a huge sea of available hardware options, and present them in guise that is compatible with their OS. For anyone that's tried to boot Mac OS of any variety on a non-Apple spec'ed optical drive... you tell me the success you've had?
In fact... high margins are the Apple way. The more Apple can eek out of you, the more likely you are to see a product surface. I think it's only been the iPod that's slowly starting to change this philosophy some as they see what marketshare can and does mean. I think that with Apple's reserve from mass leadership in the handheld audio market, that they're going to do what they can to build the marketshare up in the Mac market by a slightly more cut-rate machine. I guarantee though they won't play toe to toe with the marginless badboys at the bottom of the barrel with the speculated machine of record in this thread, and they'll be smart if they don't. Comparing the low-end Mac to the low-end PC is like Apple's to well... oranges.
Yet the difference between the person intrigued by some variety in their diet comes down to how cheap said Apple's are in comparison to said oranges. I think $499 is close enough to whet their appetites.
Might just give them enough fodder to "Think Different" for a change.
