Uhm, doorknobs are mute by design. Not that I agree with him, but how exactly does that apply to his comment?
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Apple Claims 91% of $1,000+ PC Market Revenue in June
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Uhm, doorknobs are mute by design. Not that I agree with him, but how exactly does that apply to his comment?
You are vastly exaggerating the amount of maintenance a PC requires there. Vastly. Not to mention that operations such as malware scans and so on can be run by the user while they work.
... while slowing down the computer they are using, and slowing down their work. Uhm, yeah. Good thing there's a dual core processor in there, now a PC slowed down by maintenance, downloading virus updates, etc., can run as fast a Mac that has one processor (pre-2006). Yippee...
I've yet to have an issue with NOD32. It makes sure my thumb drive doesn't have any new Mac viruses on the volume.
I've been putting off getting a basic Kill-a-Watt meter for sometime. With an efficient power supply and plenty of vendors going cool and "green" you're not going to sacrifice much performance if any to use less power. Tighter power management, hybrid sleep, and idle performance modes are found all across the board.
Great solution for those trouble users. I don't see why you should waste anymore time.
I rarely diagnosis my department Macs when I can just image blast them in 16 minutes. Reboot and it's like the user never left.
... while slowing down the computer they are using, and slowing down their work. Uhm, yeah. Good thing there's a dual core processor in there, now a PC slowed down by maintenance, downloading virus updates, etc., can run as fast a Mac that has one processor (pre-2006). Yippee...
The performance hit is hardly noticeable unless your work is video editing or some other such processor intensive task. Since 90% of computing work is simple office tasks not too many are going to worry.
Norton 2009 AV has an idle timer. If I go take a lunch or walk off to for a few minutes it'll spring into action during those unused cycles. They even went as far as to include graphing and logging about its resource usage.
Any load shows up it's quiet time. Apparently all my CPU time is devoted to keeping my machine safe? It doesn't seem to keep HandBrake from doing its work or a benchmark from using 99.99....% of my CPU or GPU.
I had to look twice when I saw 91%, that is amazing. I guess this is what you get when you build your brand image for years, Apple is able to play on the high end while still increasing their sales this quarter by a large margin. You just do not see those kind of numbers in the CE world.
No, this is what you get when your price tags have an extra digit compared to your competitors.
Much different.
If Apple simply put that extra digit on their price tag without the brand image and reputation to go along with it, they would have failed or be in major debt. However all those fancy iPod/iPhone/Mac ads and flagship Apple stores used to display their amazing looking hardware and software that come packaged in trendy boxes have set an image for them. They worked hard to get that image and charge those prices, Asus or Acer could add an extra digit to their products but no customer would bite because they lack the image/reputation to charge those prices.
Which is probably why Apple Legal was upset with Microsoft for the Laptop Hunter ads.
They don't want anyone to notice the emperor's clothes....
ROFL EXACTLY. How is this shocking. It's not as if you have any alternative. You either get a mini or a laptop. Oh wait, this is only about the laptops. In that case, all their laptops are $1000+ so... um... yea... congrats?
This just really points out that people buying windows laptops are typically buying cheaper ones. So, technically, this is sort of both a good and a bad thing for both Apple and Microsoft. On Apple's end, it just sheds light that they don't make a sub-$1000 notebook so this isn't a shocker and you could "spin it" to say that people that are interested in a "higher end machine" are going with Apple.
On Windows side, though, Microsoft could argue that their laptop hunter ads are successful by reminding customers how inexpensive PC's are and that for the same price as any Macbook you can get a windows laptop with the same specs or better for $1000 or less.
So really, this just comes down to how you want to spin it and I'm sure both Apple and Microsoft will spin it in their favor.
I'm pretty sure that this just shows that Apple computers are way over priced, if only 9% of PC users need to spend as much money on their computer as 90% of mac users (assuming 90% of PC's that Apple sells are over 1 grand).
The Microsoft ads are more about showing that you have a choice. Consumers having choices means a broader range of them can find prices and product they find acceptable.
No choice means that is is not a free market and some (to many) will pay higher prices. For some it is going to be about the same prices whether it is Apple or non Apple hardware eventually buy.
Apple doesn't have to do any validation work on any standard parts they don't do for the boxes they do release. Just let folks put the exact same parts off the self and offer an option from their assembly process.
It isn't going to happen.
If Mac Hardware quality was so dramatically and easily demonstratively of dramatically higher class, drop the tying clause for Mac OS X. Let folks run Mac OS X with no support even on non Apple labeled hardware.
Let the users say ... hey this hardware is junk/bad/buggy whatever ... I'm going to return this and buy an Apple label computer... they are much better at running this software.
Not even close - they work "best" in pairs, just like DDR2 memory.
The main differences are:
DDR3 memory provides a reduction in power consumption of 30% compared to DDR2 modules
DDR3 speed gains come from the higher bandwidth made possible by DDR3's 8-bit wide prefetch buffer, in contrast to DDR2's 4-bit prefetch buffer or DDR's 2-bit buffer.
The primary benefit of DDR3 is the ability to transfer at twice the data rate of DDR2 (I/O at 8× the data rate of the memory cells it contains), thus enabling higher bus rates and higher peak rates than earlier memory technologies
DDR3 DIMMs have 240 pins, the same number as DDR2, and are the same size
The closer to accurate response is that Apple doesn't add another zero.
There some markups here in the $80-300 range across the line. But they are not anywhere close to being $700-1000 markups.
Companies can succeed in the short term by doing that though. Typically this when they are riding out platform like a cash cow.
IBM puts extra digits on mainframe memory and other highly segmented market parts all the time. As much as folks are unwilling to push back from the table and migrate to a different platform you can ding them for higher prices. Sure you will fail in the very long term but that might take decades. (like the Mainframe share shrinking for a while there. ). If can manage to grab your customers by the genitals and yank hard on some business critical hardware/software you can partially throw market forces out the window.
Sure IBM has a baseline brand and quality reputation, but if market forces are in play they can put the "because we can" tax on top too.
When customers don't look around and compare quality and hold Apple's feet to the fire ... prices will get out of whack.
On the Mac Pro QUAD with the 3550 the low end version of that has a CPU price way lower than what previous generation was but the price barely moved.
The Mac mini has increased in price over time... WTF ? Someone going show how the improved the quality/value there given the newly availabe parts over time?
The problem is that other companies find it hard to compete with Apple in the >$1000 ranges. If you look at Dell or HP's offerings, they usually come well ($1000-2000) above Apple's price for their Nehalem workstations. Same goes for laptops. There is a Sony Vaio that is on par with the MacBook Pro line but it goes from $300-1000 more than a MBP depending on the options.
Apple however does not want to compete in <$1000 range because then their hardware would not 'just work' and they would become more like Microsoft which has to support the crappiest hardware (in the past we had winmodems and we still have P-IDE and USB as a result which all rely on the CPU to do the hard work instead of SCSI, Firewire and full modems that have their own circuitry for a lot of stuff) and segment their shiny, new operating systems to do so (Vista Basic vs. Vista Premium, the on/off function of (features in) the Aero interface, the limit on running processes for netbooks).
I know that if I buy an Apple today whether that be a Mini or a Pro that when I buy it and for the at least next 3 years I will be able to run the latest versions of Photoshop, Final Cut Pro etc. I can not trust Dell and Microsoft to promise me the same across their line - heck buy one of their machines in the Mac Mini price range and you'll probably get a 3 year old computer (single core with DDR2 RAM and Intel GMA700). Hard drive and memory upgrades are at least twice or three times as expensive with Dell as with Apple so as soon as you customize your package (to include more than 1G of RAM and 80G hard drive) all perceived savings go up in smoke.
Apple however does not want to compete in <$1000 range because then their hardware would not 'just work' and they would become more like Microsoft which has to support the crappiest hardware (in the past we had winmodems and we still have P-IDE and USB as a result which all rely on the CPU to do the hard work instead of SCSI, Firewire and full modems that have their own circuitry for a lot of stuff) and segment their shiny, new operating systems to do so (Vista Basic vs. Vista Premium, the on/off function of (features in) the Aero interface, the limit on running processes for netbooks).
I know that if I buy an Apple today whether that be a Mini or a Pro that when I buy it and for the at least next 3 years I will be able to run the latest versions of Photoshop, Final Cut Pro etc. I can not trust Dell and Microsoft to promise me the same across their line - heck buy one of their machines in the Mac Mini price range and you'll probably get a 3 year old computer (single core with DDR2 RAM and Intel GMA700). Hard drive and memory upgrades are at least twice or three times as expensive with Dell as with Apple so as soon as you customize your package (to include more than 1G of RAM and 80G hard drive) all perceived savings go up in smoke.
that's just on paper, you need a DDR 3 optimized memory controller in the chipset as well to take full advantage of it
Hm, well when you work doing system maintenance like I do feel free to comment. Otherwise you have no idea what you are talking about. 100% of the systems we have had to service at work are PC's since I started working here almost 2 years ago. 100%. Yeah, we have probably 15 PC's for every 1 Mac, but still, 100% PC fixing, 0% Mac fixing. The amount of money that goes to me and my co-workers to remove viruses, re-image systems, fix Windows when it decides to do stupid things like get stuck on updates or delete user profiles, etc, is mind blowing. So much money gets invested into servicing the Windows operating system and fixing shoddy PC hardware.
Like I have said before, thank you Microsoft and PC makers for designing such problematic contraptions because if every company designed like Apple, I would be out of a job.
Yep. M$ should change it a bit though .. "Hi, my name is Lorna and I am on a mission to buy some crap!"
And good for you for saying honestly what is often the unspeakable by tech support folks.