BillyShears said:
Yeah, but the average person goes into an Apple store and looks at this tower. "And I don't need to buy a monitor? Well, I guess I'll just use mine since it seems to work fine." Maybe they'd be talked into buying an LCD, but since they already dropping $1000+, they might not.
Apple can't be held
entirely responsible for people with poor sales abilities who can't "qualify" a customer properly in order to find out what they
may or
may not be willing to purchase. It is
those salespeople's jobs to sell a solution and then upsell,
or downsell, when appropriate.
That's why the Apple Shops at CompUSA and the Apple Stores were so necessary and have been so well received. Now customers have a place to go where they can focus on Apple products and talk to people who have been trained on Apple products by Apple themselves.
Not releasing a new,
very distinct [much more upgradeable than a Mac mini
or iMac, much lower price than a PowerMac] and
much needed [$1200 price gap between "similar" products, the $799 Mac mini & $1999 PowerMac... the iMac is
not a similar product] Mac product line for "fear" of driving sales away from another existing product line is a
very weak business model.
Fill all the product line gaps and thoroughly train the sales people on each product line, as well as how to qualify a customer to find out which product line best suits them is what needs to be done in
any sales environment.
If no one released any new products for fear of "taking" sales away from an existing product that is "remotely" similar [yes, the Mac mini would be very different from the Mac Pro mini, and both of those are/would be very different from the iMac], then we would all have one product o choose from.
Doesn't make good business sense, does it?
BillyShears said:
Oh, it would make sense for home users and it would sell well. I don't think it would make sense for Apple. They lose mindshare and their upselling. Right now if you want more than a mini you need to get an iMac (which costs more than a mini tower), or a Power Mac (which costs more than an iMac).
This makes absolutely
NO sense whatsoever.
You say "it would sell", but you "don't think it would make sense for Apple" because they "lose mindshare" and the potential to "upsell"?
WHAT?!!!
Okay, here goes:
If it sells, then it makes sense for Apple, because regardless of which Mac product is purchased, Apple's "mindshare" will increase with
any Mac product sold, and the potential to "upsell" is dictated by the customers willingness and/or ability to pay, whether it's an all inclusive unit like the iMac at that moment because they want it all know and have either set a solid mental budget or have an actual physical budget, or a planned purchase over time like a Mac Pro mini tower now with the intent to buy a display in [whatever amount of time] because they like the upgradeability option of the mini tower which the iMac does not accomodate.
Whew.
It is the sales person's responsibility to qualify the customer taking all of the above parameters [and any others that I may have missed] into account, and sell the appropriate solution which is a
lot easier to do when there is
not huge gaps in the product line and pricing matrix, made painfully obvious by the fact that every other competitor has a product filling that same gap in both those categories.
Apple went Intel [besides the fact that IBM & Motorola blew it] to level the hardware playing field. Apple released Boot Camp to invite direct competition from a weaker opponent on it's own, now leveled hardware playing field. the truth cannow be experienced by the users themselves, side by side and hands-on.
Apple is only one product line [Mac Pro mini tower] away from giving
every peecee hardware manufacturer a swift kick in the (insert sensitive and very painful when kicked anatomical part here.)