If you ever needed more proof that statistics are about as bendable as a string of cotton, here it is. While various Mac websites report that Mac sales in this quarter 'may beat estimates', eWeek reports that 'a dip in Mac sales [is] on the horizon'. Turns out they are both right, as analysts expect sales to be 5-10% short of expectations. eWeek just interprets them differently. Elsewhere, Mossberg has the first review of the Apple TV.
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Member since:2005-10-12
No, its not a crusade against Apple. Its a sober account of a very interesting business strategy problem.
The hardware issue is that at a component level, the components are identical. A Seagate drive is a Seagate drive. Samsung memory is Samsung memory. This is not a reproach, but its an issue since it makes the strategy of locking the OS to the hardware increasingly difficult. As OSX86 shows. And as the retail release of Leopard for Macintel may also show.
It is true that at the moment as kaiwai says, Apple is targetting a small percentage of the overall PC market. The business question is whether this is sustainable with the tools they are currently using, and perhaps equally interestingly, if not, what tools it will take to sustain it.
Or, will they change the strategy?
If you think about it in terms of the difference, up to the move to Intel, the difference was unassailable. The machines were based on different processors, there was no way that you could take MacOS and run it on any but an Apple machine. Well, you could get PPC main boards and copy the rom, but there was no point, it was ridiculously expensive and difficult. So the strategy of differentiation by selling the only hardware that would run OSX was very robust.
However, it ran headlong into price/performance issues. These forced the move to Intel. At that point, the robustness of the lock became sharply lower, as OSX86 showed. But it didn't vanish, because there were no retail copies of OSX for MacIntel available anywhere, and because EFI equipped machines are not available anyplace off the shelf except for Apple.
The strategy works so far. It keeps price points high and margins high, and it is classic in the sense of picking low market share/high margins with differentiation. Whether we like Apple or Macs is not the point. It does work.
However, you can see from the history that the technical basis of the differentiation is decreasing every year. I have no idea what will happen with Leopard, but I do think its going to be fascinating. At least as fascinating as the last time this issue presented itself to them, which was with the move to Intel. Then they dealt with it brilliantly in their own terms, at least for a few years. We watch with interest what they will do to deal with the Leopard problem.
I have a real question about whether the strategy is the right one, though there are enormous risks in changing it. But that's not really the interest at the moment. The interest at the moment is just watching the story work itself out to a conclusion. Its a bit like a classic but risky military campaign. Can they really bring it off, you keep asking. We should see this year.
Member since:
2005-07-12
*LOL* (Another round of Alcibiades' crusade against Apple ..)
But the only difference between Apple hardware and anyone elses hardware (looks apart) now is the bios or EFI.
I don't believe so. "PC people" tend to neglect differences in HW far too much, only looking at raw specs (I call that the "spec sheet syndrome").
However, HW is not something uniform. There are things like quality, support of HW in the OS, HW engineering and design (which goes way beyond "looks" and includes things like integration, functinality, ease of use, security, ..), additional features, HW support, etc.
E. g. two LCD displays may have the same resolution (the raw specs), but one might be unusable in sunlight while the other is not. One might have more defective pixels than the other, one might have useful HW features while the other has not, etc..
If the only difference between Apple hardware and anyone elses hardware (looks apart) now is the bios or EFI I wonder how e. g. Sony differentiates their VAIOs from other PC laptops since VAIOs are not even different when it comes to BIOS and OS (yet Sony somehow manages to sell them)..
Edited 2007-03-22 02:57