Actually Apple has pulled of a coimputer industry miracle: Selling the same harware for 3 years! How can it be...we still have the same stuff and people are still buying it in reasonable amounts. Pretty good if you ask me. And if you have a problem with the current product, don't buy it. Apple will correct its product line when facing market pressures.
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hm marketshare apple computers USA: pretty stable 5% buying in reasable amounts
marketshare germany: less than 1,5% (more likely <1% of _new_sold ones) but is still on the way down...
i only saw 4 macusers the last...well...4 years (1 pod user in the bus, 1 mother of a friend with her red imac, 2 students at university with 12" ibooks)
oh i nearly forgot those two powermac at university with the paper "out of order" in front of screen ... never saw them in use in the last 1,5 years
personally i never saw sombody switching _to_ a mac in the last years...always _from_
perhaps americans are buying them in reasonable amounts but apple is under very big pressure outside of the us
Well, im afraid that you are infact wrong.
Ok, firstly i would like to point out to you that you have just proved what i was saying about the emac, that a top of the range athlon system can compete with it. Bearing in mind the PC has DDR400 400Mhz FSB and 2.(something) Ghz of processing power.
Ill tell you exactly the position they would be in. Lets take your quote for the PC and say that a PC user will want to spend around about £600 for a PC, now lets look at what apple offer as an equivalent:
1GHz PowerPC G4
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD/CD-RW drive
ATI Radeon 7500
32MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem
128Mb SDRAM !!!!
An ATI 7500, how many years old is that???
a single data rate bus, and a 1Ghz CPU.
you call that a viable alternative???
"I'd love to hear how there's 'no alternative,' since Apple has a whole product line full of them."
You see youve missed the point, how is a PC user that can afford a £600 PC meant to be able to consider anything in the mac line when the equivalent offering has a GPU that is 3 years old. What? you expect everything in apples product line to be a alternative to someone who can only spend around £600? Ridiculous.
If you think that emac is a reasonable alternative to that monster spec PC, you obviously havent tried photoshop on an emac.
Now im not saying that that PC or any PC is as good quality as mac, the fact is that a PC just doesnt have the design and finish to be considered as good quality. But when it comes to spec, the macintosh offering is poor.
Now, as for the rest of your argument. You dont have much knowledge of product design obviously, so i will clarify. When we talk about quality, we are not on about spec, we are talking about several things:
The finish of the product (i.e the materials used and how they are put together)
The design of the product, both aesthetically and ergonomically.
The products' durability.
Your speaking as if these qualities are only available to people who pay more. If you think that then you are living in the 1980s, alot has happened in the last 10 years, it is no longer expensive to manufacture a product at a high quality, assembly line standards have improved so that now a durable and well finished product can be very easy and cheap to manufacture. And there are enough good designers coming out of my country atleast that a cheap Mp3 player can look and feel as good as an expensive one.
For example, excluding if you look at an mp3 player from iRiver and compare it to an mp3 player from say creative, generally they will both be a good design, both work as well as each other, and both last as long as each other. Where the difference lies is in the storage space, it is a technological gap that creates this price point. The quality is the same, its just the specification that isnt.
The honda example is a very good one, a honda civic type R is a good quality car. It has VVTi, a torquey engine, good handling, a stiff suspension that also rides bumps well, and a great chassis. Where it would differ from say a BMW 3 series, is in the performance, size of engine. The BMW is just a higher spec car, both are equally good at what they do, both very high quality in design, manufacture, and finish, both have tight shut lines. The fact is it just costs more to buy a higher performance car than a lower performance, but both are high quality.
I dont know about apple being anti-business, but certainly they havent made the best business decisions. You may come up with all these good points for apple business-wise, but they obviously arent doing apple all that good, seeing as their market share hasnt budged significantly over the past 3 years. The correct thing for apple to do would be to make macs more available to the mass market, they have a strong foundation of high end users that will not budge from using a mac, so that market is safe and apple are always guaranteed sales. So now apple has a defence it should be time to eat into the PC market with a cheap mac.
You have demonstrated quite a typical mac attitude. That a PC user with not as much money should be considering a high end mac. Its not on.
Originally posted by thatwendigo
Hector's even worse than DHM, so I'm not touching that one.
Instead, let's hit the fun part, and play with the money trail!
Quality - n, pl. - Superiority of kind; Degree or grade of excellence
No, actually, it looks like the cheap player is really unlikely to be the one that is as quality a product as the superior one. True, different price points can serve different needs, but the most excellent of your products will be the one that is truly a "quality" purchase.
Really?
AMD Athlon "Barton" 3200+ XP, 400Mhz FSB, 512k L2 - $220
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 8x AGP, 128MB DDR (no secondary manufacturer, since Apple uses ATI cards!) - $298
2x 256MB OCZ PC3200 Dual-Channel DDR - $125
Seagate Barracuda 120GB 7200RPM SATA - $105
Asus K8V Deluxe Motherboard - $137
17-inch Flat CRT (take your pick) - $120
Pioneer DVD-RW/+RW DVR-A06 - $144
Those are all taken from newegg. Without the chassis and power supply, that's $1149 US, or £621, if you build the machine yourself.
What position would that be? Not knowing the difference in hardware integration and ease of use in the mac? Perhaps you meant to say that they've only used Windows, and they haven't had enough exposure to the mac world to know how much easier the average consumer has it with Apple than with an unstable Windows box?
I'd love to hear how there's 'no alternative,' since Apple has a whole product line full of them.
Anti-business?
We're talking about a company that offers more than one product, doesn't have a lock on the market, and doesn't make the legislative decisions regarding the market, right? If so, then I'm really, really failing to see where Apple isn't behaving exactly like a business with a very particular plan. Illuminate us, DHM, and explain how the recent growth figures for Apple aren't signs that things are going right.
Ok, firstly i would like to point out to you that you have just proved what i was saying about the emac, that a top of the range athlon system can compete with it. Bearing in mind the PC has DDR400 400Mhz FSB and 2.(something) Ghz of processing power.
Ill tell you exactly the position they would be in. Lets take your quote for the PC and say that a PC user will want to spend around about £600 for a PC, now lets look at what apple offer as an equivalent:
1GHz PowerPC G4
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD/CD-RW drive
ATI Radeon 7500
32MB DDR video memory
56K internal modem
128Mb SDRAM !!!!
An ATI 7500, how many years old is that???
a single data rate bus, and a 1Ghz CPU.
you call that a viable alternative???
"I'd love to hear how there's 'no alternative,' since Apple has a whole product line full of them."
You see youve missed the point, how is a PC user that can afford a £600 PC meant to be able to consider anything in the mac line when the equivalent offering has a GPU that is 3 years old. What? you expect everything in apples product line to be a alternative to someone who can only spend around £600? Ridiculous.
If you think that emac is a reasonable alternative to that monster spec PC, you obviously havent tried photoshop on an emac.
Now im not saying that that PC or any PC is as good quality as mac, the fact is that a PC just doesnt have the design and finish to be considered as good quality. But when it comes to spec, the macintosh offering is poor.
Now, as for the rest of your argument. You dont have much knowledge of product design obviously, so i will clarify. When we talk about quality, we are not on about spec, we are talking about several things:
The finish of the product (i.e the materials used and how they are put together)
The design of the product, both aesthetically and ergonomically.
The products' durability.
Your speaking as if these qualities are only available to people who pay more. If you think that then you are living in the 1980s, alot has happened in the last 10 years, it is no longer expensive to manufacture a product at a high quality, assembly line standards have improved so that now a durable and well finished product can be very easy and cheap to manufacture. And there are enough good designers coming out of my country atleast that a cheap Mp3 player can look and feel as good as an expensive one.
For example, excluding if you look at an mp3 player from iRiver and compare it to an mp3 player from say creative, generally they will both be a good design, both work as well as each other, and both last as long as each other. Where the difference lies is in the storage space, it is a technological gap that creates this price point. The quality is the same, its just the specification that isnt.
The honda example is a very good one, a honda civic type R is a good quality car. It has VVTi, a torquey engine, good handling, a stiff suspension that also rides bumps well, and a great chassis. Where it would differ from say a BMW 3 series, is in the performance, size of engine. The BMW is just a higher spec car, both are equally good at what they do, both very high quality in design, manufacture, and finish, both have tight shut lines. The fact is it just costs more to buy a higher performance car than a lower performance, but both are high quality.
I dont know about apple being anti-business, but certainly they havent made the best business decisions. You may come up with all these good points for apple business-wise, but they obviously arent doing apple all that good, seeing as their market share hasnt budged significantly over the past 3 years. The correct thing for apple to do would be to make macs more available to the mass market, they have a strong foundation of high end users that will not budge from using a mac, so that market is safe and apple are always guaranteed sales. So now apple has a defence it should be time to eat into the PC market with a cheap mac.
You have demonstrated quite a typical mac attitude. That a PC user with not as much money should be considering a high end mac. Its not on.
I dont mean to be harsh.
Just pointing out to you why apple doesnt have a very large market share considering.
And pointing out little details on product design and R&D.
The fact is that quality in manufacture does not cost a significant amount these days. And i dont care how good the software is on a mac, you cannot consider buying an emac over a PC. The margins are just too large.
Just pointing out to you why apple doesnt have a very large market share considering.
And pointing out little details on product design and R&D.
The fact is that quality in manufacture does not cost a significant amount these days. And i dont care how good the software is on a mac, you cannot consider buying an emac over a PC. The margins are just too large.
By the way the reason why apple has had a steady 5%, is that there is a market of people who just will not consider anything but mac because they rate product quality and design over performance in leaps and bounds. And when it comes to product design there is no-one that touches apple, if there was, then apple woul be dead.
V.A.Toss - fair points but do you think you could limit your rantings to just a few paragraphs please! We've got to read these and as much as I agree with what you said a lot of mac fanatics are going to stop reading after a few sentences.
P.S. Honda Civic Type-R (good car) as good as a top end BMW 3 series...no chance pal (I take it you own a Civic hehe)
P.S. Honda Civic Type-R (good car) as good as a top end BMW 3 series...no chance pal (I take it you own a Civic hehe)
Nope, actually i own a 1970 Alfa Romeo 1750 coupe. Styled by the late great Bertone.
Im not saying a civic is as good as a 3 series. A 3 series (whilst dull and bavarian) is an exceptional piece of engineering. But im saying they are as good quality-wise, youd be sursprised at how well designed a civic typeR is, i certainly was, and the technology under that is pretty astounding. And when u drive the thing, it sweats torque.
The fact is, a civic does what its meant to do as well as how the Bima does what its meant to do.
Different cars, different needs. Same/similar quality.
Im not saying a civic is as good as a 3 series. A 3 series (whilst dull and bavarian) is an exceptional piece of engineering. But im saying they are as good quality-wise, youd be sursprised at how well designed a civic typeR is, i certainly was, and the technology under that is pretty astounding. And when u drive the thing, it sweats torque.
The fact is, a civic does what its meant to do as well as how the Bima does what its meant to do.
Different cars, different needs. Same/similar quality.
not dull to drive, i drove the latest 3 series 2 months ago (my barber drives one), its a very good drive, and very well balanced. Just looks and feels uninspirational, hardly beautiful, and very very german.
I have to say though, I think most of the rest of the world's population havent driven one.
I have to say though, I think most of the rest of the world's population havent driven one.
well i have a MGB with 35,000 miles weber conversion and looks like a 63 and i love it but its Time to get back on thread guys, remember the Emac?
OK, OK lets end it here cos this is not the forum's issue, hehe. I love Alfas and I kinda think I know how your thinking, but BMWs are beautiful cars and as for the M3, well it's a stunning car. How anyone can say they look boring and look simply functional (compared to fords/GM's lot) is beyond me. Well it's not, you like your car's designs with a bit more flair.
What's an MGB?...No NO! The thread, THE THREAD!
I think they should scrap the eMac line altogether and bring in a new iMac with that 'thing' that the original had (a cuteness? Was it more 'loveable'). The new line of iMacs should start pricing around the cost of the eMacs.
Of course this would mean the new design would have to use cheaper materials or whatever to keep the retail price down but hey they're not selling any at the moment anyway!
I think they should scrap the eMac line altogether and bring in a new iMac with that 'thing' that the original had (a cuteness? Was it more 'loveable'). The new line of iMacs should start pricing around the cost of the eMacs.
Of course this would mean the new design would have to use cheaper materials or whatever to keep the retail price down but hey they're not selling any at the moment anyway!
on topic:
i whink we can all agree that apple has to do something about their entry-consumer line computers... ibook/powerbook/powermac are all as they should be ...but something should be changed about emac/imac/ [perhaps 3. form]
off topic:
hm your guys are talking a alot about BMW ?
perhaps for somebody living in center europe, german cars aren't so special at all....
they are well manufactured....(well designed would be _more_ correct..only the development & finally assembly is made in germany: engine: steyr in austria, body: peugeot in france, drivetrain: switzerland, some parts at Skoda, some in spain etc.)
the new 5 & 7 and roadsters are very good but the rest looks boring like VW,Audi, or Skoda (my opinion perhaps i only see to much of them)
i whink we can all agree that apple has to do something about their entry-consumer line computers... ibook/powerbook/powermac are all as they should be ...but something should be changed about emac/imac/ [perhaps 3. form]
off topic:
hm your guys are talking a alot about BMW ?
perhaps for somebody living in center europe, german cars aren't so special at all....
they are well manufactured....(well designed would be _more_ correct..only the development & finally assembly is made in germany: engine: steyr in austria, body: peugeot in france, drivetrain: switzerland, some parts at Skoda, some in spain etc.)
the new 5 & 7 and roadsters are very good but the rest looks boring like VW,Audi, or Skoda (my opinion perhaps i only see to much of them)
You do my friend. Think of the UK, Audis for one look great, let alone next to a truly boring ford or vauxaul (opel).