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Microsoft Releases Second 'Laptop Hunters' Commercial
- Thread starter fpbecker
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There's a huge difference between a midrange PMG5 and the non-existant Core i7 desktop: Intel. BootCamp. Gaming. The death of the midrange G5 was a reflection of the limited software availability for Macs. It was too weak for pros and lacked the ability to run the software that a prosumer would need a desktop for.Oh great, you had to mention mosx. Now he's back
Fine. Their desktops were profitable because you say so. Don't forget though that Apple has been selling the iMac and Power Mac in tandem for years, and yet the iMac still survives and gets updated in 2009, but the mid-range PowerMac G5 died a slow death back in 2005.
You're saying that Apple killed the product line out of spite or something ? Because if it was profitable, that's the only explanation.
They don't want to make a consumer desktop because...
A. They've already invested everything in the idea that an all-in-one is all the desktop a consumer will ever need. And this started long before the first iMac. Heck, the 1984 Mac was the first iMac.
B. They'd be going into a segment where you can't compete with fancy exterior design (because these things go under desks never to be seen again), only with price and/or raw power.
C. There's no innovation potential. They're hell bent on innovating, and there's only so much you can do with a square box with a power button.
D. They promise to repair desktop machines on-site (iMac is excluded but a consumer tower model wouldn't be), so they make sure to sell as few of those as possible. With millions of consumer desktops out there, they'd suddenly have to work, and we can't have that.
Can't help them with A. Only they can swallow their pride.
Can't help them with B. If they simply must have that unusually high profit margin on everything, they're not gonna like consumer desktops.
As for C, I think they could have a little fun with the form factor. They know how to pack stuff together tightly (Mini, MBA), and I bet they could make a very nice looking microtower with 1/2 or 1/3 the size of a minitower and still leave a couple of PCI slots open. This could be a decent compact gaming machine provided they get the cooling right, but it could also be OK as a media machine hooked up to your home cinema or whatever.
D... well, at some point their market share will reach a point where they just have to bite the bullet and start offering better service.
I'm trying. My first batch of a half dozen Studio XPS Core i7 systems should arrive Friday.
I'm preparing an order for another batch of Precision T3500 and a few T5500 to go out before the end of the month.
If those samples work well, we'll probably order another 50 or 60 to upgrade the team before the end of the fiscal year in June.
You mean management incompetence, no?
A few back someone claimed that Apple dropped an affordable quad-core mini-tower since it wasn't profitable. (As if anyone here really knows anything about product line financials at Apple.)
We don't even know individual model sales anymore.
Look again, the Second gen CRT machines got as low as $799. When those were discontinued they were replaced after a short gap by the eMac.
But they did sell for the mid $1000 range which is a far cry from $2500.
Here one of the many unfortunate traits of the modern Mac community, the inability to recognize segments beyond the two extremes, its either a pricey professional system or a sub-$1000 budget system. No room for anything else.
Is that true because of actual facts or because its comes from an extremist in a black shirt and blue jeans which automatically makes it indisputable gospel? Have you ever talked to actual people? Have you asked them if they don't have an unlimited budget? But then again, but you're unwilling to pay any price, not matter how far its been jacked up, you're just cheap and unworthy right?
I'm pretty sure Shareholders are the sole important people in a company. Management isn't going to stay at the helm long if they piss off shareholders. Of course, maybe Steve has a free pass, having seized so much attention for himself that his health is now a factor in the stock's price itself.
I think this particular point isn't true. Look at the blue G3 and the Graphite G4. Those had pretty much run of the mill specs and pretty average pricing compared to most PCs (like most of the Mac line-up). However, the design of the case itself and the way components were positionned for easy access and ugradeability was just amazing. Pop the clip on top and the whole motherboard flipped with the side of the case, not disconnecting a single cable. You could do this while the machine was running.
In fact, we'd often do it to our Power Mac G4 at one of my earlier jobs. The Apple fanboy that was always using it never actually listened to us when we needed support, being too absorbed by the candy interface of OS X. So we'd pop the case open, rip out the RAM and then we'd ask our question. His face was priceless each time. Also, we never managed to actually damage anything doing it, which is a testament to its reliability.
About two years ago, before they were bought out, eMachines sold about the same number of computers as Apple. eMachines had a market caps of about $700 million, while Apple at that time was worth about 100 times as much. Why? Because eMachines made about one dollar profit per machine sold in a good year; in a bad year, they lost one dollar per machine sold. Where are they now? Sold to the highest bidder.
How did that work for enron or the dot com companies? Apple's profit right now depends a lot on the cool factor. If people start cutting back their budgets or if the fad ends as they tend to do, Apple could find itself in a lot of trouble. The thing about arrogantly burning bridges or turning away users is that you might need need them someday. Apple's current lineup has the possibility of success, but it also has the possibility of a massive fall if just a few things start to go wrong. Always best to cover all your bases and leave nothing to chance.
And that's why we love Ikea, which despite being the #1 global furniture manufacturer doesn't have a single shareholder outside its walls -- it's privately held. They don't have to kiss up to a bunch of whiny, greedy shareholders, they can produce whatever the hell they want, hire as many people as the want, they have their own bank...
But bridges haven't been burned and no one has been arrogant at Apple about the line-up. Products and price points were simply dropped in favor of better shareholder value, like any other company.
In the end, trends and fads will always shift. As long as you can keep ahead of the curve, you will be healthy. It's also important to know your strenghts and weaknesses. Take the netbooks. Apple knows they can't compete there right now, with what they have on the software side.
OS X would probably require too much hardware, cutting into their margins which they'd have to make up with volume. As saturated as the market is right now, no one can garantee volume.
iPhone OS is just not ready for this market either. It would probably work on hardware and Apple could set a decent price point, but the features just aren't there yet for the iPod Touch 7-9" to work. People will want a more complete experience than just "That big iPhone".
Plus they have those awesome sweddish meatballs in their cafeteria, with a coke and fries, on the cheap.
Apple Store in Lakeside, Thurrock is next door to the closed down Woolworth store...
Apple store on Saint-Catherine street in Montréal is stuck between about 3 strip-clubs. Of course, none of them offer WiFi, which sucks.
True, but they came out at a time when nearly all computers were desktop towers and all of them were beige. Anything with even a hint of color or interesting design was bound to blow the competition away. Today, only gamers are interested in pimped out desktops, while professional machines like the Mac Pro and the high-end Dell and HP workstations are almost defiantly anonymous, like they were air conditioners or something.
As for access to the internals, yeah, Apple was always good with that on their desktop models (nnnnnnot so much on laptops and iMacs, no). This tradition dates way back to the Lisa. If you've seen anyone take apart a Lisa (which takes about 3 seconds) you'll know that the whole idea of the Mac Pro's internals (cable free, modular etc) is almost 30 years old.
Ugghhh, that'd make me stay out of the store. Nastiest tasting coffee in the world! The corner 7-11 has better coffee. The Majik Market has better tasting coffee!
Let's look at the "can't make a profit" argument
For our "Desktop Hunters" ad, let's have Julio go shopping for a "Nehalem quad core under $1500". (This is an attempt to keep the discussion tied to the Microsoft ad topic .)
Instead of hitting Best Buy and Fry's, this ad is online shopping.
The Mac Pro is a "huge beast of a computer", but when he looks at the prices, Julio sees:
Wow, $1700 Apple Tax for a simple quad core tower.
We know how the ad ends....
==========
But, that's not where I'm going here.
Dell is making a good per-box profit here (I know, because I buy these for my corporation, and we pay quite a bit less than $1069 for them). (Of course, this is just sale price minus manufacturing cost - "profit margin" overall includes development and marketing overhead.)
What could Apple do here....
How about "innovate" and offer the system in two or three different models:
Let's do the two larger ones, laid out so that they can use the same motherboard. (Motherboards are cheap to design, but let's err on the conservative side.)
The only difference is expandability - the larger one has a couple more usable slots for IO and disk/optical.
Now, what about the all important issue of margins?
We know that Dell is making about 20% on the $1069 box (sales price - manufacturing cost). We also know that Apple is big enough so that their prices on commodity disks, memory, optical and whatever will be much the same as Dell's costs.
So, let Apple price the box at $1399.
They'd "fly off the shelves like hotcakes" or whatever is the current cliché for a popular product.
For our "Desktop Hunters" ad, let's have Julio go shopping for a "Nehalem quad core under $1500". (This is an attempt to keep the discussion tied to the Microsoft ad topic
.)Instead of hitting Best Buy and Fry's, this ad is online shopping.
The Mac Pro is a "huge beast of a computer", but when he looks at the prices, Julio sees:
Code:
Dell Studio XPS Core i7 64bit Mac Pro Quad
======================================= ======================================
Price $ 1,069 Price $ 2,748
Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1, Mac OSX, 32-bit kernel, 64-bit app
with media, 64-bit
Quad Core Intel® Core i7-920 Quad Core Intel® Xeon® W3520
2.66GHz, 8M L3, 4.8GT/s, Turbo 2.66GHz, 8M L3, 4.8GT/s, Turbo
4GiB, 1066MHz,DDR3 SDRAM, 3GB, 1066MHz,DDR3 SDRAM,
NECC (4x1GiB DIMMS) ECC (3x1GiB DIMMS)
512MiB ATI Radeon HD 4670, 512 MiB NVIDIA GeForce GT 120
640GB SATA 3Gb/s with NCQ 640 GB SATA 7200
16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD 18x DVD+/-RW
and Roxio Creator Dell Ed
Dell USB Multimedia Keyboard Apple Keyboard with numeric pad
Dell Premium Laser Mouse Apple Mighty Mouse
3 Year Basic Limited Warranty and 3 Year AppleCare
3 Year InHome ServiceWow, $1700 Apple Tax for a simple quad core tower.
We know how the ad ends....
==========
But, that's not where I'm going here.
Dell is making a good per-box profit here (I know, because I buy these for my corporation, and we pay quite a bit less than $1069 for them). (Of course, this is just sale price minus manufacturing cost - "profit margin" overall includes development and marketing overhead.)
What could Apple do here....
How about "innovate" and offer the system in two or three different models:
Let's do the two larger ones, laid out so that they can use the same motherboard. (Motherboards are cheap to design, but let's err on the conservative side.)
The only difference is expandability - the larger one has a couple more usable slots for IO and disk/optical.
Now, what about the all important issue of margins?
We know that Dell is making about 20% on the $1069 box (sales price - manufacturing cost). We also know that Apple is big enough so that their prices on commodity disks, memory, optical and whatever will be much the same as Dell's costs.
So, let Apple price the box at $1399.
- $130 extra for a "more aesthetic" case (the "Ive Tax")
- $200 extra for added profit margin (the "Apple Tax")
They'd "fly off the shelves like hotcakes" or whatever is the current cliché for a popular product.
Of course the Dell doesn't have ECC memory, Fiberchannel option or a Xeon processor, but I guess as far as Microsoft ads go, that doesn't mean much .
Didn't we already beat that dead horse ?
.Didn't we already beat that dead horse ?
That's a rather stupid comparison. Enron went bankrupt because except for their scams in California cornering the energy market, they didn't make money anywhere. They just created more and more companies (4000 in the end) that pretended to make money by forging their books.
Dot-coms went bust because they got tons of money from investors and wasted it as fast as they could on brain-damaged schemes that couldn't possible be profitable. They would sell (insert whatever you can think of that nobody wants) and would make tons of money because of the Internet, and then it didn't happen because nobody wanted their stuff.
Apple has so far made 28 billion dollars profit. Do you think these 28 billion are because of "the cool factor"? Seriously? I think this imaginary idea that people buy Apple computers because of "coolness" and "fashion" (plus the "reality distortion field" and the inevitable "Apple cult") are just an invention by competitors who just don't get what Apple is doing. People don't buy an iPhone because it is "cool", they buy it because it has more features and more useful features that people can actually figure out how to use than any other phone in the market.
To be honest, people don't go to strip clubs for the WiFi. As long as the coffee is better than Starbucks and served with a
by the waitress...
Of course the Dell doesn't have ECC memory, Fiberchannel option or a Xeon processor, but I guess as far as Microsoft ads go, that doesn't mean much
Didn't we already beat that dead horse ?
I really think those aren't $1700 differences.
The fact remains: Apple computers are ridiculously expensive. Not a good value at all, no matter how much we piss and moan.
To be honest, people don't go to strip clubs for the WiFi. As long as the coffee is better than Starbucks and served with a
Why not ? iChat + WiFi + iSight + Strip-club = profits.
Look in this very threads to see that that computer even beats the living snot of out the Dell Precision T3500 that comes with 1 GB of RAM and a 80 GB HD for 1000$.
You can't compare consumer systems to pro systems.
I have a feeling that "Julio" never asked for a server-grade Xeon processor, the whole point here is that Apple isn't offering anything else. Fiberchannel? It starts at $600. Does Julio work at Pixar now?Of course the Dell doesn't have ECC memory, Fiberchannel option or a Xeon processor, but I guess as far as Microsoft ads go, that doesn't mean much
Didn't we already beat that dead horse ?
Yes you can. They're both computers, aren't they?
There isn't a force field around different lines of computers.
My Dad has a $1000 Dell with a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo and 15 inch screen but a $1000 MacBook beats it on everything but processor, screen size (but not resolution they are the same) expansion USB and the card reader.
The bad part about the Dell:
80 GB HD, intel graphics, 1 GB RAM no camera VGA port serial (Yes it has serial).
I would take the Dell over the MacBook if it had 1440*900 screen GForce 9400M Mac OS X and 120 GB HD mainly because the Dell has a trackpoint.
Yes you can. They're both computers, aren't they?
There isn't a force field around different lines of computers.
Ok, why don't we compare it to the Mac Mini while we're at it, and call the Mini underpowered and all sorts of other things.
My car has a computer to, maybe we should compare it to the Dell box also ? Of course, it doesn't even have networking or a display capability of some kind, so it's also probably going to be called underspecced...
You do understand that not all computers are alike right ?