And it's that time of the, eh, quarter again. The third quarter of 2009 has ended, so IDC and Gartner both published their figures on marketshare and sales. The big news is that Acer has surpassed Dell and is now the number two PC manufacturer in the world.
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Member since:
2006-07-06
why these stories always paint netbooks as poor margin sales. That is what they used to say about desktops. And if netbooks made so little money, why keep making them. Why! because they do make money. These analysts are comparing todays prices with the greed of the 80s. Back then PCs cost more than high end refrigerators.
I happen to own an Aspire One and love it. It does what I need.
Member since:2005-09-27
Margins are not profit. You can make money with low margin products. However you will need to sell a lot of units.
Back in the mainframe days a company who sells a mainframe could get 50% margins on their mainframe so they can sell a small volume and make a lot of money. However if you selling PC's and you have 5% margins on them. then you will need to sell a lot more taking more effort.
So say 1 Mainframe cost 1 Million to the customer. The company makes 500k
To do this for a $1000 PC you get $50 in margins so you will need to sell 10000 units. And selling that many units is much harder as you will need to sell $10,000,000 of product vs. $1 million. So you need to work 10x as much to make the same money
Member since:2006-03-02
Don't forget the support costs. More units means more users having problems, calling in to get help. High-volume mass-produced often cut corners in production, making the probability of failure higher. And that probability of failure applies to more units, making the number of failures vastly higher than the low-volume counterparts.
Sell 100,000 units at $50 margin, and you make $5 million, which you can quicky lose to tech support salaries and warranty replacements.
Member since:2009-08-18
Member since:2006-04-05
Member since:
2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-09-27
Member since:2008-07-15
I can't speak for the Acer Travelmate series, but every Aspire I've ever had the displeasure to have to fix has had a myriad of build quality issues and dirt cheap, corner-cutting components inside. I thought Dell's were bad, but the Aspire series is worse than any Dell I've ever seen. None in recent memory are as bad as the Aspire 5100, but they come close.
Member since:2009-08-18
I have owned two acer laptops and while the actual build was okay, there were numerous problems with things like buggy ACPI problems on all operating systems that weren't windows, not to mention that half the functions keys worked via software and not hardware.
My Dell D420 which I got for about £300 (second hand mind you), has far better build quality, and runs every Operating I could throw at it with zero problems and all the function keys are hardware and didn't require me to install "acer button manager" software.
Member since:
2006-01-23
You have to wonder what happens in the next quarter as there may be incentives to buy from one company or the other.
I wonder how the failure rates coincide with market share. As they build/sell more machines, are there increased failures? I see a lot of HP/Compaq and Acer/Gateway/eMachines refurbished machines for sale and not so many from the others.
Still Dell isn't dead but the people who ran Gateway (into the ground) must be quite pleased at the change.
Member since:
2009-08-19
Member since:
2009-02-11
If you lived in Greece you'd certainly understand why Apple's worldwide market share is different from the US's. I don't know what is going on in countries that have an official Apple presence, but here everything but the actual products is terrible. Support is non existent and you have to wait for a month if you want a Mac Pro with a slightly different configuration than the default. And don't get me started about the price difference between here and the US.
Just to understand how bad the situation is, the largest reseller of the largest city of Greece (that has half the country's population), got 20 copies of Snow Leopard. And that's for the whole chain, not a specific retailer. I was this close to pirating it
