Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 22nd Oct 2008 22:36 UTC
Apple has presented its financial earnings for the 4th quarter of the 2008 fiscal year yesterday. Despite an across-the-board slump in growth, spectacular iPhone sales more than made up for the lost growth, beating the ten million iPhones claim. You can read all about it at Ars. What's more interesting were a number of remarks from Jobs regarding netbooks and cheap computers.
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Member since:
2006-02-09
Apple has always touted themselves as education friendly. While in the past this might have been true, the current budgetary crises that states find themselves in only emphasizes the phrase, 'more bang for your buck'. Education buyers in the K-12 segment of the market only care about one thing, getting the most out of their limited funding.
Since Apple refuses to make low cost computers, buyers in this segment are forced to buy PeeCees. The large majority of computers that are used in K-12 Ed. are used for two things, Internet access and word processing, both of these tasks do not require expensive, high-end, hardware. Computers that are cheap and easily replaced when damaged or no longer servicable are now essential for education.
Because Apple wishes to maintain high gross margins for its products they will never produce a low-cost device for the K-12 market segment. Consequently, they will lose out to the cheap, low-margin, PeeCee makers like Dell and Lenovo. In return, education gets strapped with devices that are harder to manage and have higher TCO, that will ultimately cost much more than any Apple product that they purchase.
I, for one, don't care what the product looks like as long as it runs OS X and I can use the tools and technologies that allow me to manage the nearly 1000 Mac computers at my school site as easily as I do now. Unfortunately for Apple, they continue to make it harder to justify their expensive products to administrators who don't understand spec comparisons and only make decisions based on dollar signs.
If Apple doesn't want the little money that we have, I will gladly buy cheap 'netbooks' like the MSI 'Wind' and a copy of OS X and hack them all to run it. I still come out ahead because I still get to use a technology that 'just works' and I get hardware -that I can toss in the recycle bin when it breaks- at a two-for-one price advantage. Sorry Steve, but until you realize this and meet the customer demand, you will continue to lose ground in this market segment.