After Apple’s stock tanked on a warning to investors that profits were down, ArsTechnica’s Hannibal surveyed various media explanations, summing up my view of the Cube a bit bluntly,
My favorite had to be the reports of cracks in the G4 cube, and how that might’ve slowed sales. I dunno about cracks in the plastic, but my suspicions about the the sales problems surrounding the cube are that they’re crack-related alright–as in, what kind of crack was Apple smoking when they priced that thing the way they did and then expected people to buy it in droves?
The real problem hurting sales seems to be the same long-term problem Apple has faced over the past 10 years or so, though — it’s only selling new computers to people who already own Macintosh hardware. Unless it can make significant entry into the market among PC owners or non-computer owners, the company is going to have a very troubled future.
One of the problems I see Apple having is that it doesn’t seem to be able to satisfy consumers and power users at a reasonable price. How do they think they can tout their audio/video capabilities, for example, and then not ship a Mac with a CD-RW, which has become pretty much standard an all but the lowest end Wintel machines?