WWDC - One Day More... Final Thoughts

[MasterX (OSiX)]

People today are weird. Apple used to have a market plan like this:
Ultimate performance for what we do (which was then simply design and not much else)
Easiest to use
Best for education.

Then the G4 got blown away in the Ghz race and prices had to be cut on high end machines.

Then Dell cut into school sales and prices had to be cut.

Then XP came out and Windows was better looking and overall easier to use.

Back before the iMac came out (which marked the change of the Apple Macintosh as a computer for 'the rest of us', if more expensive) when you saw a G3 PowerMac in a graphics lab somewhere you almost ****e you pants, they were reveared darn it. Once people started owning high end PowerMacs they lost their allure, as well as $1499 PCs which can run equally as fast. I predict that Apple plans to replace their crown with the 970, offering a system which YOU CANT AFFORD and APPLE DOESNT CARE, just like it should be. crap about how its overpriced all you want while me and my commercial art and pro DV buddies laugh at you because we use the machine to make money and love running FCP4 so fast it makes Wintel users on Premiere heads' spin.

In reply to an earlier post, with post prod houses switching to windows rending, this is why Apple is ferverent in their suport for Real Time rendering in software and with hardware cards, and FCP4's improved support for EDLs, etc. Keep a Mac in the editing room where it belongs, but if you must, export to something more expesive to render or whatever.

 

[wizard]

Well this I have to disagree with. From IBM or Dell you will get a feature rich machine. From Apple you get an outdated processor and (barring firewire) outdated ports. Genrally the machines I see advertised by these and other PC manufactures also come with 2 to 3 times the ram and a bigger harddrive.

I've never been able to walk into a CompUSA and find Apple hardware anywhere near equal PC (from the big manufactures) hardware price wise. I'm talking a $500 to $1000 dollar difference.

Thanks
Dave

The last time I compared a Mac to a PC feature for feature Dell and IBM both were within $200 of the same price as a PowerMac. I'm sorry but overpriced Macs is a myth unless you are building your own PC which can't rightly be compared as you are putting your own labor into it which isn't being added into the cost on top of you don't have system warranty o any support.

 

[jimthorn]

Re: DVD Player

Originally posted by SPUY767
Did anyone else see the application in the panther screens that looked like a new DVD player? Perhaps with Hardware acceleration? I'm not sure, but it looks awful suspicious.

I sure hope it's new and improved. I don't own an actual television, and when I watch a DVD, it's on my Mac. And sometimes DVD Player chokes. Something faster and more stable would be nice.

 

[Brent Turbo]

BMWs are overpriced crap. You're an ass if you buy one, because you can get a Yugo for less than 1/10th the cost!

Here's a funny notion: people should be allowed to buy what they want, for whatever reasons they want to buy it. Why is does this strange need to tell others what to buy only occur in the computer world? Who cares?? They're just computers and they're infinitely less important than friends, family, and a whole lot of other things. They're tools that will be thrown in the trash in a few years.

 

[hayesk]

Originally posted by thies
And I was criticising the price of the whole range. Even the lowend models are alwas ridiculously overpriced. Each model compared to a Dell box of similr features, wqhich a switcher will compare a mac to, is vastly overpriced, which is why Apple is **** out of luck with increasing it's marketshare in a significant manner.

I love armchair CEOs. Apple tried that in '97 - it didn't go over too well. Lowering the price may increase some sales, but it's not guaranteed.

Apple has a 30% profit margin on PowerMacs, yes. But Apple has to pay for OS development, R&D, marketing, and sales channels for the entire platform. No other computer company has to do the whole thing. If Apple sold as many Macs as Microsoft sells Windows licenses, then you would have a point.

Macs can *never* be a cheap as PCs until they expand there market greatly. Lowering PowerMac prices by a few hundred dollars may give them a few extra percentage points of sales, but not beyond that. It's not a viable long term solution.

 

[Jeff Harrell]

Originally posted by wizard
Exactly; and just where are PowerMac sales right now????

Yes. Apple's Power Mac sales have been so dismal that they've been completely unable to drain the channel in advance of the upcoming product announcement.

Oh, wait.

I'm not sure what world you live in, sir, but in the world I inhabit, Apple sells more or less every machine they make. Demand is almost always higher than supply, modulo a few exceptions that prove the rule, like the G4 Cube.

Now, let's ask the larger question. Why are you so enamored with the idea that Apple is somehow failing? Why do you reject, out of hand, the evident fact that Apple is, instead, doing precisely what it means to?

 

[TMay]

rumor me this

So, Apple drops all of this cool stuff at WWDC. Rumors are for some consumer stuff throughout the rest of the year.

In case we all have forgotten (I bought one of the original mac's within a week of announcement in 1984 so I never will forget!) Macintosh's 20th anniversary is coming up next January.

What could Steve drop on us that would match the impact of the original mac on the industry? A tall order to be sure.

 

[hayesk]

Originally posted by wizard
Well this I have to disagree with. From IBM or Dell you will get a feature rich machine. From Apple you get an outdated processor and (barring firewire) outdated ports.

What ports are outdated other than USB? USB2 is a crappy protocol for high speed devices anyway and is better served by Firewire.

On PCs you get serial and parallel - those are outdated ports.

Macs give good value. Those sub-$1000 PCs don't. To get them to be useful you have to upgrade the hell out of them.

 

[Wonder Boy]

Originally posted by h'biki
\ buy a mac. get laid.)

Thanks for the new away message.

 

[MasterX (OSiX)]

This "vast" and "ridiculous" overpricing of Powermacs isn't as blaring as you think. First of all it's only a few hundred bucks, and in Apple's market that's not a whole lot. You ever wonder why the people cheer so much at Keynotes? They're press, they make 6 figures, to them they can own the whole Apple spectrum, a laptop, desktop, display and iPod and be fine. $500 is crap to them if they get to use a nice interface. That's one. Secondly I think Apple used to make 30% proffit on their Powermacs, but now I'm thinking it's just 30% hardware proffit. Apple's R&D spending is huge. Comparative in size Apple has to spend a lot more, in part because Dell (etc) don't R&D crap. They spend their cash on commercials. Everything they need is provided save sostware and cases. How many millions does it take to make a new ugly case? Not that many. I'm sure they use lots of custom parts, like motherboards or whatever but that's not a lot of work considering they'll be selling 10x more than Apple. Apple knows they sell less product, and for them to keep competative they need to spend more per machine. Don't think cutting costs is going to make Apple make better products. It's the other way around, spend more get more. Maybe not today, but in the future. At which point feel free to buy a mac, I think you'll enjoy it. In conclusion feel free to complain about performance or cost, but not both.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by wizard
Well this I have to disagree with. From IBM or Dell you will get a feature rich machine. From Apple you get an outdated processor and (barring firewire) outdated ports. Genrally the machines I see advertised by these and other PC manufactures also come with 2 to 3 times the ram and a bigger harddrive.

I've never been able to walk into a CompUSA and find Apple hardware anywhere near equal PC (from the big manufactures) hardware price wise. I'm talking a $500 to $1000 dollar difference.

Thanks
Dave

I'm sorry but a Dua 1.42 or 1.25 Mac is very comparable to a P4 machine in the 2.5 to 3GHz range. They aren't grossly oudated as you seem to think. Anything above that will cost as much or more then a PowerMac if you buy it from a reputable company and don't build it yourself anyway. In any case go to Dell or IBM online and configure them to have equal hardware. I haven't done it in the last couple months but as I have said, in the past the difference was as little as $200 and the most it ever was was $500 and to me the OS is worth that much. Microsoft products suck. Hell I'd pay a $1000 more to have the MacOS. My friends have nothing but problems with XP and the other Windows varients and no they aren't idiots they know what they are doing it's just they are like me and are constantly installing and uninstalling software and trying out different things and playing with this and that and bingo crash. I do that on my Mac and keep up with the normal maintenance i.e. permissions repairs etc. and it never crashes.

Also if Macs are so damn slow and such a pain to use why did they use them for the basic preproduction for the Lord of the Rings movies, The Hulk, and about a million other films. It's because the artists find it easier to use and this lets there imagination work because they aren't having to constantly deal with this or that not working.

 

[soggywulf]

Originally posted by h'biki
The machine isn't marketed at them. Its aimed at professionals for whom the cost isn't that much of an issue.

There aren't that many of these that need to use macs. Most of them can switch to PC if the price is wrong. IOW, they can't price these just for the professionals who don't care about a few hundred more or less. There aren't enough.

Originally posted by h'biki
I ask what the hell kind of consumer needs a dual 2ghz 970?

Ask the thousands of consumers who buy 3 gig p4s for games. Why is your "work" more important than my "games"? Again, get off the horse. Who are you to say what I or any other consumer should do with my Mac?

 

[MasterX (OSiX)]

Originally posted by hayesk
What ports are outdated other than USB? USB2 is a crappy protocol for high speed devices anyway and is better served by Firewire.

On PCs you get serial and parallel - those are outdated ports.

Macs give good value. Those sub-$1000 PCs don't. To get them to be useful you have to upgrade the hell out of them.

I'd have to agree with this. Granted the sub $1000 PC is going to give you USB2 and serial and parallel and maybe even FireWire. But did it occur to anyone else that when you get a mac running OSX 10.2 OUT OF THE BOX you have an AIM client, Mail program which doesn't suck, web browser (soon to be Safari with 10.3 machines), Photo organization with support for almost every camera, video editing with support for almost every camera, a kick but music jukebox with an online store to buy more music, software for syncing your addressbook, the ability to read Word and Xcel files, calendar app, DVD Player (most macs) and so much more. Well duh PCs do all this, you don't need to tell me that. But it occured to me that when i installed OS9 on a mac, or windows on a PC the first thing i had to do was download about 200MB of apps, with OSX i install photoshop and FCP and i'm done. And don't talk to me about video editing and DVD players on PCs, i get more tech support questions from my friends about those two things than anything else, so don't start. Apparently because there are 20 DVD player apps for windows that makes it harder.

Plus in terms of hardware you will need more ram most of the time, although they're good with HD now. And a lot of those machines dont come with Office in them, saving money on the cost, so that doesn't work to their advantage either.

 

[wizard]

Man I wish you guys would tell me where you are shopping because this simply isn't the case around here. Lets face it PC's are dirt cheap realtive to and apple. I'm not talking about the $499 pc using yesterdays technology, even though many of them out perform Apples. Comapring current hardware to current hardware apple always looses big time.

The dual porcessor Macs on the market "today" do not out perform most of the single processsor P4 machines. So there is little need for dual processors at the lowend of the PC market. Not to mention also is the lack of OS support for SMP in some versions of Windows. In any event if you really want a dual processor PC they are available, but then there is nothing comparable performance wise from the mac world.

I'm surprised that more people don't see the wireless networking technology as a security risk.

Firewire is quite ocmmon on PC hardware so whats up with that. Same with DVD writers.

Generally I find that the Apple hardware is what you have to load up. Usually you need to add ram and increase disk size before you can compare to contemporary PC's! You also have to compensate for the aged CPU


Please understand that i'm hoping that the new machines eliminate alot of these issues. Hopefully processor peformance will no longer be an issue

I have found that to be true as well. The problem is in order to make a real apples-to-apples comparison, you have to really load down the PC.

? dual processors
? 802.11g or at least b (do any PC's even have built-in wireless antennas? not notebooks, but desksides?)
? FireWire 800, or at least 400
? Bluetooth
? DVD writer

And even then, there's the software to consider. What's iTunes' equivalent on the PC? Is it free, or do you have to buy it? Remember, iTunes isn't just a player; it's a music library manager. What's iPhoto's equivalent? What's iMovie's equivalent? These things have to be taken into consideration.

If you want all of these things, a Power Mac is definitely the better buy. It will cost less (in money, probably, and in time+money, definitely) and work better. If you don't care about some or all of these things, you can get a PC that satisfies your checklist for less. If you can live with the user experience, that's what you should do. Apple is not now, nor has it ever been, an "all things to all people" company.

 

[MasterX (OSiX)]

Originally posted by soggywulf
There aren't that many of these that need to use macs. Most of them can switch to PC if the price is wrong. IOW, they can't price these just for the professionals who don't care about a few hundred more or less. There aren't enough

Really? Because it's worked for the last 20 years....

 

[The Grimace]

Regarding Panther pics

Kinda off topic, but I noticed something a few moments ago when I erased a CD-RW using Disk Utility. Check out the image, and notice how many bytes are used on the CD-RW: 0,00 (not 0.00). The other disks use a decimal. I bring this up because the authenticity of the pics of Panther was brought into question in part because of something like this in the pic of the Activity Monitor.

Just thought I'd mention it.

(tig)

 

[copperpipe]

doh!

I wonder how many powermacs were sold today? I imagine some completely clueless person probably bought a new powermac somewhere.

Anyway, I for one think it would be way cool if Apple brought back "the cube" as a an iApp computer, not powerful enough for real pro work. Say an 867 G4 w/256 ram or something - like the eMac without the monitor, for like $500. iThink that would be just dandy.

 

[yzedf]

Originally posted by makkystyle
I think you better start learning how to read financial statements before you start giving advice on how Apple should price it's products. For FY2002 (that's "Full Year" in case you didn't know) apple had only a 1% return on net sales (see apple's 5 year financials here ). For FY2001 they had NO return on net sales because they made a loss. I'm not quite sure how reducing profit margins so you can afford to buy a machine would help them. They aren't making a "decent profit" as is much less if they start cutting margins. If you want to rant, rant about something you have an education on.

Getting back on topic, I expect that prices might rise a bit for the mid and higher end machines because as stated in previous posts these are the machines that professionals who really NEED the speed will buy. I still think that they will try and keep the low end at current levels (although, this might not be true if they decide as someone suggested to continue selling one G4 model, like the dual 1.25??). I'm waiting for monday to see if this is worth a graduation present.

Another interesting factoid is that the dollars spent per year is within $1 million between Apple and Dell. Obviously, someone wastes a lot of money (inculuding giving CEO 1/4 of profits as salary/bonus) when compared to the number of units sold per year.

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by wizard
Man I wish you guys would tell me where you are shopping because this simply isn't the case around here. Lets face it PC's are dirt cheap realtive to and apple. I'm not talking about the $499 pc using yesterdays technology, even though many of them out perform Apples. Comapring current hardware to current hardware apple always looses big time.

The dual porcessor Macs on the market "today" do not out perform most of the single processsor P4 machines. So there is little need for dual processors at the lowend of the PC market. Not to mention also is the lack of OS support for SMP in some versions of Windows. In any event if you really want a dual processor PC they are available, but then there is nothing comparable performance wise from the mac world.

I'm surprised that more people don't see the wireless networking technology as a security risk.

Firewire is quite ocmmon on PC hardware so whats up with that. Same with DVD writers.

Generally I find that the Apple hardware is what you have to load up. Usually you need to add ram and increase disk size before you can compare to contemporary PC's! You also have to compensate for the aged CPU


Please understand that i'm hoping that the new machines eliminate alot of these issues. Hopefully processor peformance will no longer be an issue

I'm sorry but your statement that the high end dual macs don't keep up with even most of the single P4s is totally wrong. It may be the case for a P4 of 2GHz or higher when running one program. Try running 10 programs at once and come back to me and let me know how you did. I don't notice a speed drop at all on my dual mac. I know from experience that a Dual Mac can trounce even P4 at 3GHz if given a multitasking situation. I had a friend bring his PC over and we ran the tests side by side. Burn a DVD, convert a video file, play a movie and play QuakeIII (this was a year ago). Guess what my poor old Dual/1 GHz machine was getting higher frame rates in Quake then his P4 2.8 when running all those tasks. That is just one example of the tests we did. We also ran some simple ones such as web browser email client, Music player, and movie player all at once and guess what his P4 got jerky in movies and my Mac played through. Benchmarks never show the real world possibilities of a machine wether it be computer or car or anything inbetween. If you choose to live your life by a bunch of lab numbers more power to you.

Also in 6 months when I haven't had a crash and haven't had to do a reinstall because my OS isn't slowing down I think I have saved time. Remember downtime is what kills a project delivery date not slow computers.

Also you ask where we have been shopping but I have said twice before where I have been shopping check Dell.com and IBM online.

 

[Jeff Harrell]

Re: rumor me this

Originally posted by TMay
What could Steve drop on us that would match the impact of the original mac on the industry? A tall order to be sure.

The iMac. But he already did that.

 

[MacBandit]

Re: Re: rumor me this

Originally posted by Jeff Harrell
The iMac. But he already did that.

The original iMac yes. Though in a way it was just a reintroduction of the Mac to the worl. It had a very similar form and function as the original Mac. I mean they are both all in one CRT computers with ease of use as the key priority. Also Macs had fallen out of the publics minds so again it was just like the first introduction all over again. Nothing will ever actually rival 1984.

 

[astrocity20]

Apple definently needs something on the low end market to compete with the PCs but at the same time it has to be comparable in speed and performance for the price.

As for people who would need 2ghz duals or a Pentium 4... most likely a consumer would need it to play games (whether that be Quake 3 at 3000fps or future games at at least 60 fps) and the fact that they don't want to upgrade, otherwise its just for porn usage lol.

 

[MasterX (OSiX)]

Re: Re: Re: rumor me this

Originally posted by MacBandit
The original iMac yes. Though in a way it was just a reintroduction of the Mac to the worl. It had a very similar form and function as the original Mac. I mean they are both all in one CRT computers with ease of use as the key priority. Also Macs had fallen out of the publics minds so again it was just like the first introduction all over again. Nothing will ever actually rival 1984.

Unless 1984 has been Steve's personal goal to beat since 1984, with 1998 being a close second. Let's hypothesize he started a project designed for performance to be the top priority and they called this project the PM970

 

[wizard]

Yes. Apple's Power Mac sales have been so dismal that they've been completely unable to drain the channel in advance of the upcoming product announcement.

Oh, wait.

I'm not sure what world you live in, sir, but in the world I inhabit, Apple sells more or less every machine they make. Demand is almost always higher than supply, modulo a few exceptions that prove the rule, like the G4 Cube.

Well yes they do the question is, when in comes to PowerMacs are they selling more of them than in the past. The answer is NO! I think you know this but probally have issues admitting to reality. Its not like the current sales numbers are a big secret. The fact that they sell ever unit they make is more a sign of good management than it is robust sales.

Now, let's ask the larger question. Why are you so enamored with the idea that Apple is somehow failing? Why do you reject, out of hand, the evident fact that Apple is, instead, doing precisely what it means to?

When did I ever say Apple was failing. The PowerMac line as it is today isn't doing the corporation any favors, but that doesn't mean that apple is failing. Please don't attribut things I have not said to me!

If Apple can not change how it approaches the market with the PowerMac I'm certain that the hardware will disappear. Apple as corporation is to large to carry a product that does not contribute to the bottom line. Frankly we will see 6 months to a year after the 970's come on the market, if apple has a viable marketing plan.

Thanks
dave

 

[MacBandit]

Originally posted by astrocity20
Apple definently needs something on the low end market to compete with the PCs but at the same time it has to be comparable in speed and performance for the price.

As for people who would need 2ghz duals or a Pentium 4... most likely a consumer would need it to play games (whether that be Quake 3 at 3000fps or future games at at least 60 fps) and the fact that they don't want to upgrade, otherwise its just for porn usage lol.

Agreed. I think a headless eMac 970 would be the perfect answer if they sold it for about $600 which I don't fine too unreasonable. Also think about most gamers that buy the highest end machines. They pay $4,000 plus for the best of the best. Yes you can build something similar for cheaper but you would never get the customer support or the upgrade policy like you do through the high end companies. No Macs don't have a upgrade policy but they sure do hold there price well.