minitower/OS again
Thanks for the comments.
To aswitcher:
I know that Apple has probably looked at a small tower-but maybe not. There seems to be a cultural bias against making a less expensive machine. Apple people I have spoken to have said that it couldn't(!) be done. I am simply pointing out that it can be done without going to cheap plastics etc. I did say that the idea wasn't insightful. I'm not claiming to be original with the basic idea, only to have come out with a half decent analysis of how.
I still think that the current iMacs have run most of their course. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who will buy them. But when a product begins a decline in sales, as Apple has shown us with the iMac, it means that the product line is becoming replaceable. GM has discontinued one of their auto lines even though they still sell millions of them.
If Apple comes out with a G5 iMac and the sales uptick for a quarter but trend downwards again, that would tell us for certain. Would pretty flower cases make a difference? They tried that before with the original line when it's sales were down.
I do work for the ED system here in NYC(unpaid advisor). I helped to write the technology plans. We have 1160 K-8 schools here. The high schools are now being put in the same control line as the K-8 which will add another 275 schools to that list. Macs are pervasive in the K-8, but rare in the 9-12. All-in-one Macs(before the iMac) original iMacs, and eMacs make up the bulk of Macs, as they do in other school districts around the country.IBooks have gotten a lot of publicity, but constitute well under 1% of the installed base. The new iMacs have been shunned in education because of the reasons I gave before. This was the whole purpose of the eMac. Perhaps in a college it is somewhat different.
Linux is not a threat "decades in the future". It is beginning to become a threat now. It might be fun to be a Mac user (as I am) and shrug off anything that we don't like as being inferior and unimportant, but it is not so. Analysis by IDG and others have shown trends that Linux might be the second largest desktop OS in less than five years. IBM is moving its desktops to LINUX. We are talking about 60,000. Other companies are are watching this. Governments are moving to LINUX, state as well as foreign. Big money is going into the ease of use problems.
The price of the OS is a publishing question. This is subject to the same economic laws that determine how volume of sales affects prices. Apple is selling about 1,250,000 to 1,500,000 copies retail of the OS every year. Production costs go down as larger volumes are produced. When my company supplied manuals with our machines, we ran into the same situation. It's the same thing with CD production etc. Look in the back of MacWorld for the ads from the CD and card publishers, and you will see what I mean. A book's cost goes down until it reaches the base cost. Below that, the price can't be lowered any further. A hard cover's cost goes down until about 4 million are produced, though it varies. A soft-cover is less.
If Apple sold 3 million a year the cost to produce it would drop almost another 20%, to about (from the numbers I know) $32. This includes marketing. The cost of that would not change much, and so would decline per unit sold.
The idea would not be so much to make a startling profit on each sale, but to get the latest versions out to their customers, something that they are not doing now. The latest programs require the latest versions of the OS for many of their new features, or sometimes won't run at all. Surely you have read the many discussions about the disappointing price points from other Mac users? Now that there are almost 10 million OS X users, Apple has to see that they remain current
Even with Mac users paying good prices for the hardware, there is anger at the pricing of the OS. Even Steve himself had to come out and say that it was worth it in response. Human nature is funny in that way.
Apple is trying very hard these days to sell to the "cubical jungle". That is what the Xserve and the raid is for. This is a way of wedging their way back in. If companies like these, they may take a look at Apple's other products. By the way, Apple is the LOWEST cost solution in that market. Remember that after that first $999, they GIVE AWAY OS Server client for as many seats as required. Even Red Hat and IBM don't do that with their LINUX offerings. It's always the hardware. That's why IBM is giving up their own operating systems.
As for LINUX users, if Mac users whine, why can't they? LINUX users buy hardware just like we do. Sometimes expensive stuff. That doesn't mean that they want to pay over $100 every 14 months or so for an updated OS. I know a number of LINUX users who buy used G3's or G4's for $500 to $1,000, and then put Yellow Dog LINUX on it. They don't have to buy an Apple LCD, as I pointed out, they could get a $75 17" CRT, if they didn't already have one. Same thing with Powerbooks. Most of these guys would love to get a G5 for a thousand bucks. Most of them would use OS X if the price is right. I use X11 and UNIX programs, it's EASY!
If software companies didn't offer upgrade pricing, would you be inclined to get these upgrades once a year or so, or would you wait?
And, I'm not talking about a commodity box, but a genuine, heavy gauge anodized aluminum box, just like we have now. There is nothing cheap about it.
To ffakr: I don't think that much expandability is important for most users either, most people I know never add a board to the slots, and Pc people I know with 8 slots never use them. The problem is perception. Remember the cube? It was more expandable and up-datable than most people knew, but one of the reasons that it didn't sell was because people thought that for the price it should have had more slots and room for two drives.
To CalfCanuck: I don't think that LINUX is the future, industry analysts think that it might be. The price I quoted was the amount that Apple got for the retail sales of the boxed copies of OS X, as they did when I bought 10.2 and 10.3 at their store here in NYC. Internal accounting is a very different matter as the costing is different. They charge themselves much less because the distribution costs are subsumed into the cost of the hardware, and packaging costs etc. are less. Not quite that simple but you get the point.
I don't think that as a retail product that it is a drag on Apple's finances, as in profit and loss as they are doing now. I think that it is a drag on Apple's potential finances, as in product sales.
I am only talking about sales, not operability. I agree that the OS is fine tuned to do what it does best. I'm not saying that Apple should get rid of it, just change the focus of their marketing of it. I don't know where you get any ideas that I want Apple to drop it.
To Rincewind42: I think that I addressed most of your comment about price, but remember that retailers stock many programs for $29, and $39 as well. The R&D costs to produce the OS will, I believe, not bear any direct relation to the selling price of it. What is the OS worth in an eMac selling to a school for $650? The OS is priced the way Microsoft prices theirs. What do we think this is worth, and how much can we get? Is XP home Edition worth $199(other than what we feel as Mac users, of course).
Apple is still a hardware company. All the fine(REALLY fine) software it sells, is there to sell hardware. Sometimes it sells (and gives away) cross platform software as well, such as Appleworks and Filemaker. But this is mostly because they need to be cross platform to sell these products at all, and they need to sell the software to sell the hardware, so we are back there again. A good example is iTunes. MusicMatch sells their software, Apple doesn't. What is it worth? It sells tunes, but Steve says that they don't really make any money there. So? To sell iPods. They make money there. But not that much. They make far more selling 730,00 computers than the same number if iPods. But people who use iTunes, and perhaps buy an iPod are primed to think Apple. Think Apple, maybe think Mac. There we go.
