thatwendigo said:
You know nothing of economics.
To the contrary my good man do know a bit about companies and how they fail. Our recent history is filled with examples of companies where the only thing of intrest was profits, profits that bypassed the share holders and went right into the pocket of the company officers.
Sustainable profits require that a company focus on its customer needs, providing good value and keeping an eye on the competition.
Success depends on turning a profit and keeping your company alive, not on appealing to a huge range of customers. If your assertions were true, there would be no Maserati, no specialty hardware of any sort for that matter...
True but you do have to focus on your core customers. Success first depend on generating and keeping a base of customers. After that you get the profits. Unless you are contracting with the government the money is not likely to come first.
A successful, even an established, company is constantly working to maintain its customers. That is always the number one goal, no customers no profit.
I know that car analogies are tired and not entirely accurate, but it still remains true that BMW doesn't price themselves into the Chevy market because they provide an experience rather than just a device. You're paying for quality and engineering, even if something far cheaper might give some pale shade of the same thing.
While nearly every computer company in the world was hemorrhaging money, Apple has been turning a profit for some time now. They're successful.
iPod succesfull yes, iTunes yes, computer hardware I'm not to sure about.
It would be great if the iMac would take off and sustain sales for more than a few months. But apple really needs to figure out how to move desktop hardware.
While I agree with you that the cost issues will be a bigger defining factor than anything else in the eMac, you have got to be joking about there being no legs left in 32-bit computing. There are extremely limited circumstances where it is advantageous to a home user to have the extra data paths, pointers, and integer-length available, most of which have to do with not only using but even having more than 4GB of RAM.
Nope not joking at all!
I might be off by a few months but I expect that by 2007 all desktop hardware will be sold as dual processor 64 bit systems on both i86 and Apple platforms. The advantages for all that addressing range will be with respect to the OS. Since a large number of i86 systems ship with base RAM of 1GB I don't think I'm over extending things at all here.
Just as a note, Kingston's value series ram in matched pairs would run you more than the the cost of the eMac for PC3200.
The cost is $449 for one pair of 1GB sticks, which means that having 6GB and being able to use it would cost you $1347.
Yes and a few months from now the price will be half what it is now. Two years out 4GB sticks should be in the same ball park. This really shouldn't surprise anybody in this industry.
That's, of course, if you had six slots to put it in. Even if the costs halve in the next two years, that's still over $600 in RAM just to have some advantage from the bitness of your processor.
If you have followed computing for any length of time you would realize that RAM price drops quickly after introduction. At this point we are in a transistion to a new DRAM standard which might put a bubble in the ramping to larger size memory arrays but after the bubble bursts we will still have the same reality. That is that competition and demand will drive the cost of the next gen memory systems down just like it does today.
So, can we quit it with the baseless claims?
Absolutly nothing is baseless here. Just follow trends in the industry. There was a day when 24K of memory was a big deal, it has been upwards and onwards ever since.
It is farily easy and economical, today to put 2 GBs into the average desktop. By this time next years I expect that 4 GBs will be in reach also. The hardware is just coming on the market, so the prices are already at the top of the slope, it is only down from here.
Dave
