It's getting a little bit predictable, but Apple has reported yet another stellar set of quarterly financial results. The company has sold more Macs and iPhones than the same quarter last year, but sales of the iPod were down compared to the same quarter last year. Profits and gross-margins were also up.
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Member since:2009-08-22
The commentators here who moan about Apple's prices or the lack of opportunity to tinker with Apple hardware specifications or write off Apple's success as being the result of a "cult" are just missing the point. These most recent financial results from Apple show that tens of millions of people look at what Apple is offering, look at the price and say "YES PLEASE!"
Of course Apple could sell more units if it dropped its price but Jobs and the company decided long ago that chasing the wintel crowd downmarket was a poor strategy and looking at the results who is to argue with them. Apple drops its prices when it can produce what it considers to be quality kit with the mark up it has broadly set for the company. It won't produce cheap crap simply to chase market share and has a premium reputation amongst consumers as a result.
If the decisions of millions of consumers to part with their hard won cash in order to buy what Apple is offering is dismissed as a cult then all I can say is that every other tech company would love to be able to start their own cult but so far none appear to have managed to do so. Shrugging off Apple's success with a sneer or a laugh (like Balmers did with the iPhone) just makes it even easier for Apple to stay ahead of its competitors.
Member since:2005-07-20
For a "power user" Apple may not be cost effective. However, the user experience is miles beyond the Windows laptop experience. Miles.
I am definitely a power user. Yet, I love my Mac Powerbook. I did convince work to buy it so it isn't my own money.
Everything just works in a way a Sony Vaio doesn't.
And if you've ever observed or been asked to help a regular person who knows nothing about computers, you can see the "PC Experience" is a nightmare. They don't have any idea what is safe to click on in a web browser. They don't know what applications to install to read a PDF file (I know a woman who paid for the full Adobe PDF authoring suite so she could read PDFs because of some lousy popup window). They have no idea what to do when all the great "software" installed on the computer turns out to be 30-day demos. They never install critical software updates because they have no idea those are any different from the web browser popups they've been told to not click on or the ad-ware popups that come pre-installed on the system.
An Apple is so much easier.
Member since:
2006-01-28
Their "kit" IS VASTLY overpriced which is why I stopped drinking the koolaid several years ago.
I did this because Apple had made it impossible to strip down their "kit" to the barest essentials which could then be replaced by reasonably priced off-the-shelf components rather than Apple's 4-5 times markup on the same equipment. (Actually it's probably more like 8-10 time markup given that there's no retail markup, plus ther volume pricing discounts from the OEMs OTOH my off-the-shelf stuff was better anyways as it was, generally, retail and tended to come with 3-5y standard warranties v. Apple's, at the time IIRC, 1y warranty. OEM/non-retail stuff tends to come with 90d-1y warranties, 90d being more common.)
Their notebooks are looking especially bad to me for their pricing given their anemic discrete GPUs v. everyone else at lower price levels with significantly better discrete GPUs + (typically) "better" CPUs. RAM installations and screens tend to be about equal, and casing/build quality does vary but the better generic "PC" vendors are close enough to Apple that it just simply doesn't matter for what Apple is lacking, and that's alot right now.
OSX just simply isn't worth it to me to overpay for Apple "kit", as much as I like OSX. I'd rather take the $$$ saved and spend it on some additional peripherals that I likely would've had to put off or drop altogether had I purchased an Apple product.
About the only time any longer for a "deal" on Apple products is when they do product refreshes, but they are so slow at that and there have been so many recent chipset/CPU changes that it's not really been a deal since they switched to generic x86 hw, along with all the overpriced peripherals that you're stuck with for desktops. I still like the Apple desktop cases though, or at least since the powermac G4s with the nice hinged design which was uncommon in generic cases at the time.
Basically about the only time Apple is a good deal is if you are clueless and also intend to purchase the extended Apple Care warranty(2y extra IIRC), however you are still stuck upgrading OSX every year or so and in the Apple world older versions of OSX tended to be left behind very quickly. There's also the problem of, if you are a gamer, games for Macs still come out well AFTER the Windows release and tend to carry the burden of a premium price(been there done that while I was chugging the koolaid like no tomorrow...)