You misunderstood me. I'm talking about the middle "hole" between iMac & Mac Pro. The one that is filled by boxes built with parts in the Hackintosh community.
Unfortunately, what a lot of posters don't fully appreciate is that there is a huge difference between there being a "technology hole" and a "marketplace hole".
Thus, we can all agree that there's a substantial 'gap' from a hardware/technology perspective between an iMac and a Mac Pro...but the simple fact that it exists does not mean that if Apple were to build a product to "plug that gap" that they would automatically be a financial success in business.
Yeah, I wish I could get a Ferrari for $25K, a Rolex for $300, a latte for 50-cents, my girlfriend a LV handbag for $20... and a Mac Pro for $900 because that's what it costs to buy a car, watch, coffee, handbag or desktop from elsewhere. LOL.
Afterall, that latte only costs me that 50 cents to DIY it from home...particularly when I ignore my labor costs, tool costs, dishes costs, dishwasher costs, cost for a square foot of countertop, etc...
What a load of horse manure. Computer parts are what they are.
Agreed 100% ... if and only if they're a
commodity item.
From a manufacturing standpoint, as soon as the item becomes a non-standard (non-commodity) part, you break the 'Economy of Scale' rule.
The challenge is to demonstrate where one can go purchase the Mac Pro motherboard as a commodity from someone other than Apple. Specifically, at that comparatively low price that one finds on NewEgg for "commodity" grade motherboards.
Computer parts have a set market price: SRP, and a discount price: SRP -alpha. Labor and manufacturing also are known variables. If the seller is asking more than these it's deemed "over-priced" - end of story.
That's still when only addressing "commodity" parts.
What's missing is the cost to develop & set up a manufacturing line for a non-commodity item...and then across how many units of production you have to amortize your fixed costs in order to break even.
What's missing from this entire discussion are a couple of big Elephants. As a starting point:
- What Apple's NRE development costs are for the Mac Pro
- how many Mac Pros Apple sold in 2008
- how many they expect to sell in 2009
We need to remember that cost = (variable costs) + (fixed costs)/(units)
...and that the number of units sold is a projection of future performance, which frequently incurs risk.
While we would all like to believe that Apple sells enough volume to amortize their development costs, the grim reality for desktops is that they're now less than 30% of the ~10M/year sales volume of Macs.
As such, threre's five (5) major desktop product variations (the mini, 20" iMac, 24" iMac, Quad Mac Pro, & Octo Mac Pro) that sum to this (10M*30%) = 3M units/year. Assuming that they all sold equally well
... which we know can't be true ... then each of these 5 desktop permutations sells 600,000 units/year.
As per
cultofmac, it can be suggested that Apple's gross on desktops was roughly $4B/year ... which at 3M units was an average unit sales price of $4B/3M = $1,333. With the Mac Pro averaging to at least $3000 (before options), this infers a sales ratio of roughly three (3) mini's sold for each Mac Pro. Since IIRC the iMac is the most popular desktop model, this infers at least 6-7 "non-Mac Pro" desktops gets sold for each Mac Pro, so its sales volume
was (in 2008) was probably less than 375K units/year...probably IMO 300K at best. Now with the economy's contraction, the 2009 guidance would have been revised and then all of the fixed/variable manufacturing cost factors (and the rest of the product development & lifecycle support) recalculated to see the consequences. Assuming a 50% cut, we could be looking at only 150,000 Mac Pro units projected by Apple to be sold in 2009...with all of the consequences of the financial implications of pricing to recover the fixed costs of development & support of all of their unique "non-commodity" items that they can't simply buy off the shelf from Bubba's Computer Parts Bin.
-hh
