Tag: Apple

Responding to a MacWeek article (itself responding to the latest round of “Apple Is Dead” stories), Don Larson really captures the source of Apple’s current problems and future potential:

Until the MacOS runs on alternative platforms, most people will perceive the Mac as a niche product and treat it that way in the marketplace. For almost twenty years the press has heralded the death of Apple in one form or another because of it’s non-traditional stance on computer products. Now with the rise of Open Systems, Linux, and a variety of products to exchange information, it’s time for Apple to stop being niche and move into the mainstream of this new era. Doing that will serve millions of new customers and avoid bad press for the most trivial speed-bumps of the stock market.

This speaks to the main underlying problem with Apple sales — too many sales of its products going to current Mac users upgrading or adding systems, with not enough penetration into the PC market. That shouldn’t be surprising. If I’ve got thousands of dollars in PC software, Apple’s going to have to come out with a damn good machine to get me to buy in, and so far Apple hasn’t produced that (in fact I doubt they can at a profitable price point).

What Apple could do, however, is port the OS so it can run on an Intel/AMD box, so I can run Windows or the Mac OS. There is a huge upside to this: although Apple pretty much ceded it the consumer OS market, Microsoft has done pretty much nothing to give consumers a reason to use Windows except for the fact that it is the market leader in the Intel/AMD domain. Rather than create a compelling OS that would have no problem competing with a ported Mac OS, Microsoft has cruised on its exclusive position and, if anything, the current Windows Millenium is actually worse than the original Windows 95 as far as ease-of-use (one thing I hate about Windows ME is that it defaults so all menus only show the options that are most often chosen a la the bug/feature that debuted with Office 2000).

Unfortunately, as long as Steve Jobs is pulling the strings, a port of the OS is never going to happen, and the current market analysis of Apple’s future prospects is probably justified.

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?

There is no way you could get me to buy a Macintosh today, but when I was a kid I saw that 1984 SuperBowl commercial and I had to have a Mac. The camera shop where I bought my Apple II finally got some in and that Mac was mine — until my parents saw the price tag.

Nothing has changed since then, with Apple’s latest machine, the Apple Cube, being more of the same. Charles Haddad writes in Business Week that he’s Rethinking the Cube.

I don’t usually keep up with new hardware introductions by Apple and this is exactly why. Okay, for $1,800 the sucker (er…consumer) gets a G4 450 mhz processor with a whopping 64 megabytes of RAM, an anemic 20 gig hard drive, no PCI slots, and port connectors on the bottom of the machine.

Even Apple’s alleged entry level consumer computer, the iMac, is overpriced. In March, for example, Apple released the iMac 350. For $1,000 you could get a 350mhz processor with a whopping 64 mb of memory and a 6 gig hard drive. Compared to what you could buy (or better yet build — which is simply not an option with Apple) on the Intel/AMD side of things, this is a ridiculous price for that featureset.

Source:

Rethinking the Cube. Charles Haddad, BusinessWeek, September 6, 2000.