I think "New Product" means "New Product." I suspect Apple is going to release an upgradeable mid tower so many people have been clamoring for.
Yup, all
twelve of them
The iMac is good for a lot of people but not for people that want to have the ability to upgrade their video card or people that want more then two memory slots.
If that's the case, then the solution is a Mac Pro. If you can't afford a new one, then simply do the same thing that people who want a Porsche for 1/2 the MSRP:
buy used.
The Mac mini pretty much has the same issue, hasn't been selling well and has the same form factor as Apple TV (another product that's not doing that well.) The Best thing for Apple would be to release a Mid Tower and then put an optical drive in AppleTV and have the Apple TV and OS X GUIs (installable option) available as two different users.
But if the problem is canabalization, then not reducing the total number of 'close contenders' will solve the problem ...
how?
Traditionally you would think that a mid tower would cannibalize iMac and/or MacPro sales, but with so many people moving to portables it would help to galvanize Apple's position on the desktop for a lot of people that have major complaints about Apple's desktop strategies and go about building Hackintoshes to attempt to resolve those problems.
But you've just walked right past why Apple's desktop position can't really tolerate even more fragmentation: with 50-70% of consumers buying laptops, the remaining piece of the pie is already divided into 3 major slices (mini, iMac, MP) and to add the proverbial xMac to the lineup would invariably have to canabalized *something*.
Similarly, while we keep in hearing about huge demand for people who want the ability to upgrade video or more RAM slots,
the reality is that over half the market is voting with their wallet for laptops, which offer neither of these upgradability features.
I've never understood Apple's desktop strategy...
The general issue is that desktops are the " yesterday's horse & buggy" that has been overtaken by laptops. From there, its merely a question of how to handle a transition without too much vulnerability...just look at Film vs Digital to see how things can move a lot faster than the marketplace suppliers could have expected.
If I could plot a graph of xMac likelihood, I reckon it would be peaking right about now, albeit at around 25%. Between intel's roadmap, the recession, and the conflicting rumours about the mac mini getting bigger/smaller with less/more features and power, the promised land cannot be far away.
By some reports, up to 70% of all sales are already laptops. To then add the xMac as a "slice-of-a-slice-of-a-slice" of the desktop simply can't result in numbers as high as 25%. To split the share up equally four ways (mini/TV, iMac, xMac, MP) would result in a ~7% share.
And when you realize that
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/31/HNindianotebooksales_1.html stated (2 years ago) the following:
"Business buyers accounted for 77 percent of desktop sales during the period, with home users accounting for the remaining 23 percent."
...it wouldn't then be unreasonable to assume that since Apple has very low market penetration in the Enterprise that the percentages of consumers choosing notebooks is even higher, which means that you have even a smaller pool of potential desktop buyers to offer an xMac to. As per the combination of the above, it seems reasonable to project that the total consumer desktop market is 23% of ~30%, which is 7% of the total, which is currently split up amongst the mini/TV, the iMac, and the MacPro ... which if we then split it down further by adding the xMac means that each gets around 2%.
Thus, the business case question is if you're going to design, build & support a new product that's going to only be worth 2% of your business, or if you're going to ignore the 'opportunity lost' so as to better focus on the bigger items in your portfolio?
The fact is that something drastic has to happen to apple's desktops now anyways, purely because of the way nehalem is being rolled out...there is no way apple can twiddle their thumbs waiting for mobile variants whilst dell gets a 6-month lead on this generation of processors.
Sure, but the current Mac Pro is now a year 'stale' and Dell still hasn't really beaten it on price/performance.
Come fervent product-line-gap-denying zealots, fanbois, protesters of cannibalism and even the few rational observers of apple's nichey marketing strategy (by which I mean you, Tallest Skil): heap your venom upon us. For my own part, i'm used to it.
FWIW, I'm not denying that there isn't a gap, but merely that the market forces are such that I don't see the viable business case to try to bother to plug it.
In addition to the desktop --> laptop trend, we need to keep in mind that the common underlying reason for the xMac fan club is because its customer demographic is one of
frugality through extension of the useful lifespan of their hardware by pulling DIY upgrades.
Since this customer gives less money to Apple in the long run (because the upgrades won't be bought from Apple, nor will they be buying an entirely new Apple system as frequently),
the business case you're trying to argue that Apple should pursue is to take action to cut their own revenues.
Of course, "never say never". Sure, I'd love to have one too, but I simply don't expect it to realistically happen, unless there's some reason, such as a profound legal surprise in the Pystar litigation and Apple needs a rear-guard action to counter a potential explosion of Dell-distributed Hackintoshes.
-hh
