Submitted by Two more articles on Apple’s Intel iMac today. “Disassembling the first fruit of the Apple-Intel alliance raises some interesting questions about the model’s profit margins.” Secondly, PCMag reviews the new iMac: “The differences are all under the hood. The 20-inch new iMac combines a dual-core Intel Core Duo processor with the Mac OS X experience. Casual Mac users, switchers from Microsoft Windows, and iPod aficionados will love the new iMac; however, professionals and people who use graphics apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro should hold off until the critical app is updated to work smoothly with the Intel processor. For these people, we recommend holding on to your current G5-powered Mac, at least for now.”
Is an $18,000 Camy a “cash machine”?
After all, the metal it was made of is only worth a few hundred dollars and the other raw components are pretty cheap as well. Toyota must be making $15,000+ per car sold!
Mine isn’t. 🙁
These estiamtes of what a computer costs are just guesses. What a joke.
The reviewer talks about losing OS 9 being bad because he can’t play marathon any more – this sounds like he couldn’t come up with a better reason and couldn’t be bothered to find out that it’s been OSed and there’s an x86 build already.
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/X86_software#AlephOne
Welll, in terms of upgrading my machine, I am waiting for memroe which apparently be a 64bit version of core duo; but it will be interesting to see how MacOS X 10.5 turns out given the change in architecture.
0898$ – iMac (according to isupply)
0120$ – OS X
0079$ – iLife
0029$ – Keyboard
0049$ – Mouse
————-
1175$
+ support + design + profit
————-
1299$
I would have to disagree on those figures.
You’ve got the estimated cost of building a machine mixed with retail product costs. If you are going to break down design and support costs in another equation it imples you are just considering parts, assembly and shipping/packaging.
$898 iMac (isupply’s best guess. who know what Apple is really paying….)
$2 OS X (as I recall there is no manual included)
$2 iLife (no manual here either, no publishing required)
$10 Keyboard
$8 Mouse
————
$921
+ support + design + profit
=$1299
So you’ve got $378/unit to make up for design of hardware and software, support, and profit.
Not too bad considering the over 1,000,000 coomputer volume Apple does every quarter. (Which will only get better in the future.)
You do realize that OS X and iLife have a development cost? How much? It’s hard to say, but consider that Dell reportedly pays Microsoft $30 for each copy of Windows XP Home. Given that Apple ships far fewer copies of OS X than Microsoft does of Windows, and the development cost of OS X is probably not much less than that of Windows, I wouldn’t be surprised of the actual cost of OS X to Apple, for each machine sold was $50 or more. That still leaves a margin of about 33%, a figure I’m not comfortable with. A comparable Dell XPS200 costs marginally more than the iMac 20″, even though it has slightly cheaper hardware (eg: x600se versus x1600xt). Is Dell making a 30+% margin on those machines?
“That still leaves a margin of about 33%, a figure I’m not comfortable with.”
Elementary economics, old boy. Smaller sales volumes require higher margins and so on.
I could also make rude comments about the relative quality of Dell and Apple products (despite all our moaning, I find Apple computers far more reliable on average – a tiny sample I know, but it covers 100% of my experience
)