jade said:
Not the one I configured, since MS Works 2004 was free, but WordPerfect was $10 more. Yes, it's only a measly ten bucks, but it's still not free.
Cost is important to a point. Paying a $200-300 premium for a Mac makes sense. Paying twice as much is much tougher to justify for money conscious consumers. Every dollar doesn't count, but when you are talking about hundreds of dollars you count your pennies.
Then "money conscious consmuers" aren't in the same market that Apple is, and they shouldn't be too worried about them. There are certain realities of marketing, supply, and manufacturing that need to be faced by the people who keep insisting that Apple is vastly overcharging.
I do not think Apple needs to compete in the ultra cheap space at all, but Apple does need to offer equivalent specs compared with other machines in the price class they compete in. If $1800 machines offer 512 PC3200 RAM, 128 VRAM, media card readers, 8 USB ports, 12x DVD burnersvand 160 gb hard drives, Apple needs to come close to approximating or meeting most of these specs. If Apple can not meet these requirements, well pricing needs to come down a bit. The most important specs are the easily comparable cross-platform. Ram, hard drives, video, ports, whatever.
On everything but the devices that require manufacturer support (video cards and optical drives, mainly), Apple does come close or exceed the rest of the market. Their one inexplciable weakness is RAM, though the way that I've seen them caution people about it makes me wonder if the motherboards don't have some incompatibiility issues with some of the manufacturers. I just went and took a look around, and a casual scan of the only OEM who ought to be compared to Apple doesn't offer anything more than 8x DVD-R, certainly not 8 USB ports, nor a baseline of 512MB or 160GB HDs, and even their HDs aren't standardized on SATA.
How many times must I explain that Apple can't bring their pricing down much without shooting themselves in the foot. Dell, Compaq/HP, Sony, and others all have massive product lines and huge warchests that derive from other sales or sheer volume. Apple
cannot do the same things that they do. It just can't be done, without completely risking the company or just outright killing it.
different customer have different hot buttons. I wholeheartedly agree that ilife is best-in-class, but people make it out that the PC equivalents are awful pieces of software. You can get the same things done with almost as much ease with the bundled software on mid-to-higher end pcs. End of story.
We might as well agree to disagree on this one, because I don't believe for a second that any PC bundled software is even close. Perhaps it's changed in the four months since I last had to try it, but I doubt it.
Does Apple need to match HP pricing dollar for dollar? or Dell's pricing (the savings come from superior inventory management...Apple could take lessons here) or Sony? (well sony's PC division is a money losing vanity project).
At this point, almost every OEM besides Dell is a "money losing vanity project." Why compare to them?
Looking across the board in PC-land you find very compareable machines at half the price.
Because other people are selling either at a loss, or at cost. Apple can't do that.
If Apple was 25% more the complaints would cease (well to a point)
No, because the DHMs of the world aren't happy with anything Apple does, no matter how good it is or how reasonable the argument made by the people who support them. If the machine isn't exactly what he wants, then it's obviously just crap that's being pushed by someone at Apple who wants to drive marketshare down and piss off this mystical "Consumer" he keeps pointing at as if it were a signle, definable group.
I saw on a message board somewhere: don't you think it is pretty sad that a basic $400 PC has more expandability than a $1500 imac.
No, I don't, because the iMac philosophy has never been one of expandability. It's a different market, and one that fills different tastes and needs than bargain PCs. The original CRT iMac wasn't expandable (outside of the never-exploited Mezzanine slot), the G4 iMac isn't expandable, and I severely doubt that will change. They're consumer grade machines, intended to do most things a home user will want without needing any external add-ons.
Cheap PCs are meant to appeal to people who don't know about computers.
Does apple have to compete in every space and beat all specs by 200%.... of course not...but we are still looking at 1ghz machines at 1999 prices when PCs are approaching 4ghz and the price has cut in half. Obviously Apple's profit margins are insane if Dell, Emachines (yup these guys are successful as well even though they sell the cheapest machines....they buld their machines when ordered so do not need to have markdowns or closeouts to clear out inventory) and Acer can make a profit.
Repeat after me: PC manufacturers have access to cheap, off the shelf parts that are done in huge runs and then warehoused, to be sold to whoever makes the best offer to buy them. Apple has a handful of manufacturers doing smaller runs specifically for them, and so they do not have the same access to cheap parts that would let them bring proces down. This applies to anything that isn't a slot-and-forget part, like RAM and hard drives. Since economies of scale most certainly do apply, you end up with older machines that cost more and more as new technology comes in and the production of the parts trails off.
There is no parellel between the two, and repeating your claims doesn't make them any more true. If I were a PC OEM, I could just cut a deal with whoever made the cheapest boards that suited my needs, quite possibly even buying someting right off the shelf and slotting it in. Apple can't do this, and has to make a lot of their parts through special deals and their own research.
This is a golden opportunity for Apple to increase sales and marketshare...most of the stars are alligned, but the current hardware lineup is holding Apple back. By decreasing profit margins slightly Apples sales could increase dramatically.
Slightly? You're pointing at $900 computers that
cost that much for the parts alone. That's selling at a loss, not lowering margins. Why don't you understand this?
Apple uses "superior parts" The same stuff that goes in the mid-range PCs (which are the ones that we use to compare)
Apple uses direct ATI and Nvidia cards, not Sapphire, Rosewill, Gainward, EVGA, or any of the other license holders. The optical drives are 'the same' in that the same manufacturers supply them, but Apple has traditionally chosen high-end providers, not the cheapest ones on the market.
video cards...well these are 99% the smae as well. Simple hardware modification to put ADC and add the extra space for the extra Apple instructions.
I take it that you're not at all involved in hardware production, then, since I know people who do circuit design, and the things that you're talking about aren't just simple modifications. Apple doesn't use DirectX, nor Windows drivers, and so there have to be special concessions made on hardware and software both.
The cheap machines...yup they use crappy parts.... but the name brand systems use most of the smae stuff...so this superior parts super sized pricing arguement doesn't justify the price difference as much as you like to argue.
It's a tiny part of the markup, not my primary argument. The largest portion of the argument is economies of scales, which you seem to have a slightly better grasp of than DHM.
All the R&D in the world won't matter....And it looks to be coming more and more like a reality all the time.
Catch-22. How is Apple to lower costs if the developers won't take a chance, and how are the developers to take a chance without the marketshare?
