[Xyrrus]

Originally Posted by zaghahzag

boot camp

xy, you make some very good points. Again, i think we can go back and forth about margins and such. There are a lot different ways to look at it. In your case, you could afford the extra payout, but that's not always and option. And I think we can all agree that for low-level computer use, minis are great.

Boot camp *is* a major wild card and to continue poker metaphors we can all hope apple has an ace up its sleeve in that respect. The worry with Boot Camp is that selling a machine to compete with the mainstream desktop market exposes Apple to a very fierce market. The PC world is very price concious it seems. Cannibalization issues aside, are the 18-30 year old males that drive mid-cost tower sales (largly gaming boxes between the low-cost dimensions and the xeon workstations) willing to pay the extra money (probably anywhere between $2-500) for a machine designed by apple that runs Mac OS X. Especially when the operating system they care most about is running in an "unsupported" configuration.

I think its riskier business than a lot of people think it is. And Apple is doing pretty well financially right now, so if it ain't broke ...

-Xy

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by P

Conroe is only two cores, true, but the ROI on more cores is rather bad. Many apps aren't that well threaded. A Conroe with a 1066 MHZ FSB and 800 MHZ DDR II would usually not be starved for memory bandwidth, and it would have BETTER memory latency by about 45%. A Conroe minitowe is good enough for most Mac Pro users, so they'd buy it. A $350 POS is not good enough, but then that's not what you're proposing.

There's only one time I actually bit and got one of Apple's expensive towers. That was with the dual-processor G4s way back in the day. OS 9 didn't even use that second processor, but it was just too cool to give up, and I figured that OS X would eventually come around and enable that second processor for me. although it took a year before that actually happened. So I guess it works.

Alienware sells decently to a very specific group: gamers. The Mac gamer market isn't exactly large.

How do you think Apple got into this situation in the first place?

Yeah, those weren't crippled... The LC was a 16 MHz 68020 (still 16 bit external bus) with one non-standard LC PDS expansion slot, compared to the IIfx with a 40 MHz 68030, 6 standard Nubus slots. The LC PDS may have had some graphics boards, but they were very few - network boards were plenty, but that was it. Some of the later models had multiple special slots - one LC PDS, one Communications Slot, one video in, etc - to avoid the standard slots. In general Apple kept the standard slots - Nubus and PCI - out of the LC/Performa models until the 6400s. Yes, there were exceptions - the 6100, the original 600, maybe some more - but Apple kept expansion in its consumer models very limited. The HDs were replaceable - if you knew how to use a screwdriver - but then they are today as well. Extra bays were very uncommon (exceptions are the same as above, more or less).

But the point is, there was at least some sort of expansion in all those models. Nowadays it's literally nothing.

Oh, and while the hard drive may be replaceable on my old G5 iMac, good luck doing it on a recent one.

Only with the 6400 did Apple include industry standard PCI slots - to face the clones - but by then Apple was leaking money. Those machines DID steal business from the Powermacs, and Apple lost even more money. Apple did exactly what you are proposing they do now, and that caused exactly the cannibalization and deterioration of margins we talked about above!

The clones stole business from the Power Macs. The clones, which Apple made no money off of except for the OS licensing fee. Not the Performas.

I remember those days. It got to the point where no one except those who didn't know any better bought an Apple machine. The question for those who knew what they were doing was always Power Computing vs. UMAX.

Look at what a Macbooks costs. Look at what a comparable Wintel laptop costs - almost exactly the same. Apple getting discoutns from Intel? Maybe, but so is Dell. Apple's margins on those laptops are no higher than PC makers get on their laptops, and they don't have a complete OS development to support. iMac margins are probably decent, but not more than that.

Funny how this argument changes depending on whom I'm arguing with. In another recent thread (or maybe it was earlier in this one, I don't remember), someone was arguing that the iMac was the great big margin machine that would get killed off by the mini-tower. You claim it's the Mac Pro. Conclusion: no one really knows.

What machine fueled Apple's revival in the late 90s? The original iMac. Back then, the iMac was actually a bottom-of-the-line entry-level machine. In fact, the reason they sold like hotcakes was because of how cheap they were (and because of some nice marketing with the colors, etc.). No one had seen a Mac that cheap in recent memory, and it had a nice G3 in it too. Somehow that generated enough revenue to take Apple from a big debt to having billions of dollars in the bank.

If Apple could make a low-end tower and find some way to protect its high-end Mac Pro business from it, then it could make money on them. The G4s weren't really a threat to G5s, so Apple didn't lose sales of G5s for making them. They were sold to a different market - Apple had successfully segmented the market, in marketing speech.

Well, I remember that the uni I worked at bought G4s instead of G5s for its lab...

Dropping to two cores, removing two slots and an extra bay is not enough to do that segmentation again. If Apple should decide to do that, they will either have to keep the margins on those Conroes as high as the Mac Pros - not impossible, considering the price difference between Woodcrest and Conroe - or grow marketshare enough to compensate.

Either of which is possible.

Another thing you can do to differentiate them, at least psychologically, is make the mini-tower's case small - you can do it with the limited expansion options presented here. Make it look "cute" next to the "serious" Mac Pro. This has the nice side-effect of making the mini-tower a lot less bulky and easier to handle than the Mac Pro.

The analysis in Cupertino is apparently that a minitower isn't enough to grow marketshare by itself. It's probably right.

Do you know this? You keep stating this as fact - how do you know that Cupertino isn't planning a new machine to show us come January or next spring?

Oh, Apple isn't selling very many Mac Pros to consumers who'd rather like a minitower. They're selling them to businesses (in areas where the Mac is a major platform, like print media and webdesign and whatnot) who are buyying the minimum need to get the job done. Those are the sales that Apple would otherwise lose to the minitower. The iMac is sufficently different (usually) that they don't consider it, although that is changing.

They're also not selling machines to a lot of other businesses, because the minimum needed to get the job done is too expensive. Also, they remain strong in certain fields, but they're slowly losing share there, as businesses realize that it may not be ideal, but they can get by using Photoshop and InDesign on Windows, and the world won't spontaneously explode. That's a bad thing for Apple.

If you're sold on a Mac, you'll get a Mac even if you can't get a tower. If you want to try one out, you get a Mac mini. The reasons for getting a tower are getting less and less every year. It wasn't long ago that external HDs were expensive. Now, with USB 2.0, they're barely more expensive than internal ones, and a lot more convenient at times. eSATA will only accelerate that. Any PC includes almost everything on the motherboard - the days when everyone had to get network, sound etc on a seperate add-on board are long gone. Of course there are always new things coming - eSATA above - that you might want to add in the future, but that's a inconvenience (to have to use USB 2.0) not a dealbreaker (like having no sound).

Yet the Mac Pro is the big, important money-maker?

Apple isn't selling a traditional desktop because thery belive that there is no way that they will make money on it.

Do you know this? Where's your source?

I do. It was free, and I barely use it, but so what? You hardly get a PC because your Mac can't hold another HD.

Some people do (because it can't hold another HD, and because it has no expandable GPU or other PCI-E slots).

It's not the end of the world if a small number buys them, it's the end of the world if a lot of them buy them. The used Mac sales also aren't all bad for Apple.

Oh no... it's the end of the world! DUN DUN DUN!

I'm explaining the reasoning behind it. Hey, I'd love for Apple to have 20% market share and be able to support such a low-margin product.

I just showed a hypothetical machine that would have way higher margins than the iMac, according to the numbers of whichever one of you it was who came up with the $1050 thing.

The original iMac, a very low-margin product, saved Apple.

You hope. You don't KNOW that. It's a risk, and one Apple isn't taking - for now.

You don't KNOW lots of the things you state declaratively about what Apple's intentions are.

I think that it's pretty evident that this thing would sell a lot more units than the Mac Pro is selling.

Do you really buy a minitower instead of an iMac to upgrade it with APPLE stuff? Sure, the displays are a joke, but one a lot of people are making - look at Sony's flatscreen TVs. I doubt Apple would sell very many HDs if you could get the same thing from the guy next door at half the price. Customers aren't that stupid. Most of the Cinema displays are sold together with new Macs, because it's convenient.

A lot of people don't know any better. Apple monitors have always been expensive, but that doesn't mean I haven't consistently seen them on headless Macs all the time, going all the way back to the LC days.

You think that the $1600 tower was that much lower margin than the mid-range Powermac? Look at the price curve on those Woodcrests - the parts cost more at the top-of-the-line. No, I think the iMac cannibalized it, because not everyone is thinking like you.

Nah, the price always goes up right when Apple introduces some new technology to make them more desirable. The first time was with the G5 when it went up to $1999. The towers now had a non-suck processor, which people had been waiting for for a long time, so my guess is that Apple figured people would pay more for it. Now with the Mac Pro it jumps another $124 for the long-awaited Intel switch. The problem is that the price never seems to go back down after they hike it...

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Simon

Nice try - once again, personal stabs instead of reasoning. Actually P and I are not attacking at all. We're trying to explain why Apple has done what they are doing. And instead of taking it for what it is some people decide to attack us for this "moronic strategy" - you included. Understanding a strategy and agreeing with it are two different things.

If you think Steve's strategy sucks, convince him of your plan. As I said, I'd love to buy a HEM. Problem is, Apple is doing better than ever so you're probably on rather thin ice.

That post I replied to contained absolutely no content that wasn't a personal attack. Here it is again:

Originally Posted by Simon

That wasn't your only mistake. You wrongly quoted me instead of P above.

CharlesS, instead of being snotty and condescending to others who happen to disagree with you, you would rather carefully read what is posted and think before you hit the reply button and start your next attack.

You yourself are BTW the best example why Apple is right on with their strategy. You write pages and pages about how the HEM is necessary, how the iMac is insufficient for so many and yet you yourself bought an iMac. Why didn't you get a Dell? Apple got more profit from you than they would have with a HEM. Apple played you. And they won. I'd say that's a fine example of why they know what they're doing.

Yeah, that had no personal stabs in it. Aside from being completely incorrect, there wasn't even a freaking sentence in that whole post that wasn't written in the second person.

Oh, and for the "moronic strategy" bit - putting quote marks around something is something you generally do when you're quoting someone - i.e. relating something that someone actually said. Nowhere did I use the word "moronic" in this thread, and you can verify that by using the "Search this thread" feature.

Originally Posted by Simon

It's good you mention this again.

The only time Apple followed the "CharlesS plan" is with the 6400/6500 models. They sold them under the pressure of the clone manufacturers. It's a well known fact that in that era, not only did Apple lose market share and money, they almost went out of business.

Now Apple is selling inexpensive minis, sexy iMacs and big iron Mac Pros and they're raking in boatloads of cash. CharlesS, what was it that they're doing so wrong again?

No personal stabs here!

1. There's been some expandability in the lineup for less than the current prices all the way from the LC up until the discontinuation of the Power Mac G4.

2. I think it's pretty universally accepted that it was the clones that stole Apple's business during the clone era, not the Performa 6400.

3. What are they doing wrong? Well, they're doing something wrong, because they've still got like a 3% market share, and it's not growing much (not at all in the desktop market, in fact - sales are dropping there). The iMac bubble that saved Apple the first time around is long gone by now, and the iPod bubble won't last forever either. The Mac needs to get the point where it can keep itself afloat on its own without needing help from something else.

[Xyrrus]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

What machine fueled Apple's revival in the late 90s? The original iMac. Back then, the iMac was actually a bottom-of-the-line entry-level machine. In fact, the reason they sold like hotcakes was because of how cheap they were (and because of some nice marketing with the colors, etc.). No one had seen a Mac that cheap in recent memory, and it had a nice G3 in it too. Somehow that generated enough revenue to take Apple from a big debt to having billions of dollars in the bank.

Adjusted for inflation, the original $1299 imac would cost over $1500. Today's base iMac is $999. I would argue the current iMac is on par with the original in terms of technology offered (USB was cutting edge when the iMac '98 came out, the CRT was actually a rather high-quality model). Even then the iMac was not priced like a low-end PC would have been priced. And iirc people complained about the video card offerings then, too

-Xy

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Xyrrus

Adjusted for inflation, the original $1299 imac would cost over $1500. Today's base iMac is $999. I would argue the current iMac is on par with the original in terms of technology offered (USB was cutting edge when the iMac '98 came out, the CRT was actually a rather high-quality model). Even then the iMac was not priced like a low-end PC would have been priced. And iirc people complained about the video card offerings then, too

-Xy

Even disregarding inflation, computer prices have been steadily declining. What was low-end back in 1998 is not low-end anymore. That doesn't change the fact that in 1998, the iMac was incredibly cheap for a Mac. Of course, there were some bottom-of-the-barrel things that were cheaper, but for the most part the iMac was a very inexpensive machine, and that is why it sold so well.

[Xyrrus]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Nah, the price always goes up right when Apple introduces some new technology to make them more desirable. The first time was with the G5 when it went up to $1999. The towers now had a non-suck processor, which people had been waiting for for a long time, so my guess is that Apple figured people would pay more for it. Now with the Mac Pro it jumps another $124 for the long-awaited Intel switch. The problem is that the price never seems to go back down after they hike it...

The 1.8 G5 bottomed out at $1499 when it hit rev.b. The rev.a G5 dropped to $1799. The prices *do* drop after the initial technology costs. This happened with the iMacs when they went LCD. The price got hiked up to where the original iMacs where, then when LCD technology started dropping in price the iMacs fell down to $1000. Again, the Powerbooks are introduced high and then prices fall. The $124 intel-tax on the mac pro is in line with the same increases in the Mini and iBook. On a machine featuring 2 $500 processors that's not too shabby.

The Xeon boxes will fall in price. Probably they'll range from a 2x dual core 2.0 @ $1799 to a 2x quad core at $3199 by macworld. Now, as to how far the Pro has to drop to be competitive with the average gaming machine is another discussion altogether.

-Xy

[CharlesS]

I concede that you're right about the G5 dropping a few times, but it always seemed to spring back up to previous levels (the G5 right before the Mac Pro's introduction was still at $1999, IIRC). Long-term, the price stayed at that high level.

I'd really be surprised to see the Mac Pro's price drop considering how decked out it is, but even if it did happen, it'd still be a power-hungry monster in a huge case. Something a little more elegant would suit a lot of people's needs better.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

What are they doing wrong? Well, they're doing something wrong, because they've still got like a 3% market share, and it's not growing much (not at all in the desktop market, in fact - sales are dropping there). The iMac bubble that saved Apple the first time around is long gone by now, and the iPod bubble won't last forever either. The Mac needs to get the point where it can keep itself afloat on its own without needing help from something else.

You do realize that that sounds completely detached from reality when actually

• Apple is doing better than ever (earnings and stock value)
• Apple has more cash in the bank than ever before
• Apple's computer sale share is growing faster than most competing PC manufacturer's
• Apple is winning customers from other OSes over to the Mac

Look, obviously you are unhappy with what Apple has to offer. And for some reason you extrapolate from your own needs to those of the general public. You want to make others believe that Apple is failing because they don't cater to people like yourself. Here's the real deal: Reality proves you wrong. Obviously Apple is doing quite fine the way they are. If they were about to go out of business, you'd have some credibility, but as it is, you are trying to tell one of the few large computer companies that is actually making more profits and enlarging its market share that it's got it all wrong.

Reality indicates Steve's got it about right. Your apocalyptic distortion of reality doesn't make up for your lack of arguments. Your own needs are not those of a large group of buyers. And Apple just chose not to sell to that market. Obviously they're doing more than fine that way. Listening to your anger, I'd suggest getting a PC which seems to cater to your needs much better. And actually, if you really want Apple to change its strategy that will get you a lot further than posting on a board.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Even disregarding inflation, computer prices have been steadily declining.

Just like Apple's. You can get a Mac cheaper than hardly ever before. I could get about two Mac Pros for what I paid for my first Mac 128k. The fact that they dropped a cheap low-end PM does not change anything about that.

If it has to be cheaper than the MP, you can either get an iMac or if you need the MP's expandability, wait till rev B comes out and get a reduced rev A MP. That won't be any more expensive than the previous low-end PM. It's all there.

[P]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

(gamers not buying Macs)
How do you think Apple got into this situation in the first place?

Of course, games and gamers is one of the markets Apple has neglected. You can't focus your attention everywhere

But the point is, there was at least some sort of expansion in all those models. Nowadays it's literally nothing.

There is some expansion opportunities today - USB & Firewire. Not too long ago, there was a newer Comm Slot - the slot for the Airport card. An iMac of today isn't really any less expandable than an LC or Performa of old, excluding the 6400s and 6500s. The difference is that you can't replace the GPU, but then you couldn't replace the CPU of those old machines.

Oh, and while the hard drive may be replaceable on my old G5 iMac, good luck doing it on a recent one.

I haven't tried, no. I have an older G5 iMac, where everything is nicely laid out. I have replaced it in a slotloader iMac though. That wasn't trivial either, but then replacing the HD in old LCs and even a IIcx once was no walk in the park - and far from the simplicity of any PC (or Mac Pro) tower.

The clones stole business from the Power Macs. The clones, which Apple made no money off of except for the OS licensing fee. Not the Performas.

Both did. Apple had more than 50% of the Mac market all throughout that period.

(BTW, most clones, including all the PowerComputing ones, used motherboard designs licensed from Apple, so Apple made some money on them. The Motorola machines were the exception - they had their own motherboards.)

I remember those days. It got to the point where no one except those who didn't know any better bought an Apple machine. The question for those who knew what they were doing was always Power Computing vs. UMAX.

A common feature of the universe is that most consumers don't know. Sad, perhaps, but the way of the world. The clones didn't have nearly the marketshare to match their (Mac user) mindshare.

None of this changes the point of the current discussion, though. Apple needs significant sales of high-end towers to support its OS development, and needs to make certain sacrifices in market share to support that.

Funny how this argument changes depending on whom I'm arguing with. In another recent thread (or maybe it was earlier in this one, I don't remember), someone was arguing that the iMac was the great big margin machine that would get killed off by the mini-tower. You claim it's the Mac Pro. Conclusion: no one really knows.

Knows? No. We do have some intelligent guesses, though. The margin on the iMacs is pretty nice as well - iSuppli did a teardown and got a margin of 300 something $ off it, but that was without manufacturing costs. iMacs likely have higher manufacturing costs than other computers because of their complicated design. Still doesn't matter - if the Mac Pro had lower margins than the iMac, Apple would push the price upwards to decrease cannibalization of the Mac Pro on the iMac and simultaneously increase its margins.

What machine fueled Apple's revival in the late 90s? The original iMac. Back then, the iMac was actually a bottom-of-the-line entry-level machine. In fact, the reason they sold like hotcakes was because of how cheap they were (and because of some nice marketing with the colors, etc.). No one had seen a Mac that cheap in recent memory, and it had a nice G3 in it too. Somehow that generated enough revenue to take Apple from a big debt to having billions of dollars in the bank.

Somehow that generated enough attention that people stopped writing Apple off. They began buying Powermacs as well, again. Besides, the iMac was the least expandable Mac since the original one - this is more of an argument for the Mac mini.

The original iMac wasn't even cheap, at $1299, it was just cheap compared to what Apple usually made back then.

Well, I remember that the uni I worked at bought G4s instead of G5s for its lab...

Good for them. See no reason why they didn't buy iMacs though - that's probably what Apple wanted them to buy.

Another thing you can do to differentiate them, at least psychologically, is make the mini-tower's case small - you can do it with the limited expansion options presented here. Make it look "cute" next to the "serious" Mac Pro. This has the nice side-effect of making the mini-tower a lot less bulky and easier to handle than the Mac Pro.

And making it smaller will protect the Mac Pro how? A small machine is a positive thing. Rather make it the size of refrigerator...

The analysis in Cupertino is apparently that a minitower isn't enough to grow marketshare by itself. It's probably right.

Do you know this? You keep stating this as fact - how do you know that Cupertino isn't planning a new machine to show us come January or next spring?

Apparently. As in they haven't launched one yet. If they launch one tomorrow, that means that the analysis has changed, and they are now going after marketshare.

They're also not selling machines to a lot of other businesses, because the minimum needed to get the job done is too expensive. Also, they remain strong in certain fields, but they're slowly losing share there, as businesses realize that it may not be ideal, but they can get by using Photoshop and InDesign on Windows, and the world won't spontaneously explode. That's a bad thing for Apple.

Most businesses never used Macs. They went from IBM mainframes to IBM PC with DOS and then to Windows. A lot of businesses switched over when it looked like Apple was going out of business in the nineties. Few use it today because of the lack of enterprise tools. Lack of expansion in the iMac is not a dealbreaker - far from it.

If Apple is truly losing significant numbers in its core markets, then that's problematic. I'm not quite so sure that that's true though.

Yet the Mac Pro is the big, important money-maker?

One of them, yes.

Do you know this? Where's your source?

Any analysis of Apple's financials, really. Of course the iPod is important to the overall income now, but you can't live on the iPod forever.

Some people do (because it can't hold another HD, and because it has no expandable GPU or other PCI-E slots).

They get a PC to hold an extra HD? With 250 gig external drives under $100? If they do to get better GPUs to game on, OK - they get a better OS to game on too, frankly - but not for other sorts of expansion

I just showed a hypothetical machine that would have way higher margins than the iMac, according to the numbers of whichever one of you it was who came up with the $1050 thing.

Yep. But the margins are likely still way lower than those of the Mac Pro.

The original iMac, a very low-margin product, saved Apple.

But not by making Apple lots of money. That influx of cash came from MS and from selling the printer division. iMac saved Apple by being a high-profile product that got people's attention and which prevented further loss of market share.

You don't KNOW lots of the things you state declaratively about what Apple's intentions are.

Of course not. I'm making educated guesses based on past behaviour.

I think that it's pretty evident that this thing would sell a lot more units than the Mac Pro is selling.

Doesn't matter, unless the margin on it is high enough to get Apple the same amount of profit from it as it today gets from the Mac Pro - and it's unlikley to be, because putting th emargin that high woudl make it too expensive to compete with the iMac for all put a very small number of people.

A lot of people don't know any better. Apple monitors have always been expensive, but that doesn't mean I haven't consistently seen them on headless Macs all the time, going all the way back to the LC days.

But they weren't (significantly) more expensive than other monitors back then, and there was the question of the quality of those cheapo monitors. The situation today, with all monitors based on the same panels from a small number of manufacturers, is somewhat different. It's hard to make a profit in that market.

Nah, the price always goes up right when Apple introduces some new technology to make them more desirable. The first time was with the G5 when it went up to $1999. The towers now had a non-suck processor, which people had been waiting for for a long time, so my guess is that Apple figured people would pay more for it. Now with the Mac Pro it jumps another $124 for the long-awaited Intel switch. The problem is that the price never seems to go back down after they hike it...

Sure the price goes down. There was a G5s down at the $1600 mark one year after introduction. I think it will drop again, but perhaps not as far as $1600.

[P]

Originally Posted by Simon

Just like Apple's. You can get a Mac cheaper than hardly ever before. I could get about two Mac Pros for what I paid for my first Mac 128k. The fact that they dropped a cheap low-end PM does not change anything about that.

If it has to be cheaper than the MP, you can either get an iMac or if you need the MP's expandability, wait till rev B comes out and get a reduced rev A MP. That won't be any more expensive than the previous low-end PM. It's all there.

Or get a used G5 - or wait for the revision, and then get a used Mac Pro.

I completely agree with the post just before this one, by the way.

[P]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

I'd really be surprised to see the Mac Pro's price drop considering how decked out it is, but even if it did happen, it'd still be a power-hungry monster in a huge case. Something a little more elegant would suit a lot of people's needs better.

A $1600 tower is definately doable today, with current Xeon prices. I don't think it will drop that far, but $1800 shoudl be possible for Rev B - if there is a market for it.

[CharlesS]

I'm getting tired of writing essay-length posts in here, especially considering that it's a beautiful day outside and I've still got a ton of things I need to get done by next week. But I can't let this one go:

Originally Posted by Simon

Look, obviously you are unhappy with what Apple has to offer. And for some reason you extrapolate from your own needs to those of the general public. You want to make others believe that Apple is failing because they don't cater to people like yourself. Here's the real deal: Reality proves you wrong. Obviously Apple is doing quite fine the way they are. If they were about to go out of business, you'd have some credibility, but as it is, you are trying to tell one of the few large computer companies that is actually making more profits and enlarging its market share that it's got it all wrong.

Reality indicates Steve's got it about right. Your apocalyptic distortion of reality doesn't make up for your lack of arguments. Your own needs are not those of a large group of buyers. And Apple just chose not to sell to that market. Obviously they're doing more than fine that way. Listening to your anger, I'd suggest getting a PC which seems to cater to your needs much better. And actually, if you really want Apple to change its strategy that will get you a lot further than posting on a board.

How many goddamn times do I need to say this? I'm in the $@#%ing laptop market, not desktop. The laptop market is mostly fine right now (except for the black MacBook which is kind of a rip-off). So this has absolutely nothing to do with my needs at all. What would I need to do to get that point across to you? Should I just keep saying it over and over? Should I post it in a 78-point font size? Should I make you write it 100 times on the chalkboard?

This comes from talking to countless people who have either not bought a Mac, who have switched from the Mac, and from even watching school systems replace their Macs with Dells. I hear the point made all the time, and at some point I realized that it's actually a valid one. And I felt the pain of the Classic layer's disappearance in the Intel Macs breaking software that people I know need to use but which will never get updated for OS X, and I realized that Apple is going to need to build market share somewhat to stem the tide of software developers abandoning the Mac, and to ensure the Mac is able to sustain itself when the iPod bubble wears off - as P said, they can't live off the iPod forever. And in order to do that, Apple is going to release a machine that customers want and boost the market share, plain and simple. Otherwise, we could end up returning to the "Beleaguered Apple" days, and I don't think anyone wants that.

Heck, maybe it's you who is only paying attention to your own needs. Maybe just because you don't need such a machine, you assume that no one does, because you seem to think your own needs are those of the entire body of buyers. Like that? Or no? Whatever - your argument above is nothing but a personal attack based on information you already know is not true given that I've explained it 2 or 3 times already, so I can only assume that you're just trolling in an attempt to piss me off.

God, I just spent 20 minutes typing that. All right, I'm going outside.

[P]

OK, so you don't want a tower - it's just your friends. Doesn't really invalidate the point. Your friends are not the world either. The consumers who actually need or want a tower is a smaller group than you seem to think. Building a minitower isn't going to attract very many people - some, sure, but not many. That's really what this discussion comes down to - the relative sizes of the groups "will buy an xMac instead of a Mac Pro if they could" and "will buy an xMac instead of a Dell if they could". I think the first one is way bigger. You disagree.

Killing Classic sucks, but that's beside the point here.

[Simon]

CharlesS, it doesn't really matter if it's you or your friends. Your friends are irrelevant. This board is irrelevant. Sales numbers and profit is relevant. And those are both going up.

Fact is Apple is doing fine yet you're claiming they're doomed. That makes your whole argument kinda baseless.

And regarding Classic: and completely irrelevant in this discussion.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by P

OK, so you don't want a tower - it's just your friends. Doesn't really invalidate the point. Your friends are not the world either.

Boy, you really don't give up trying to make this personal, do you? No, it's not my friends. It's pretty much every PC user I've talked to in the last 8 years who either complained about the Mac or felt a need to tell me why they don't like the Mac. Some technical people, some not-so-technical people, some store reps advising not to get a Mac, some articles in popular computer magazines saying "Make sure any computer you get has at least one open PCI slot", one entire school district that switched to Dells, etc. Very few of these people would I call friends. A lot of them drive me bats, to be honest. But in general, there have been several obstacles to PC users switching:

1. Software compatibility.

2. Gaming.

3. Not able to run Windows.

4. Lack of expandability.

The thing is, with the Intel Macs and recent developments, the first three have been taken care of by the Intel Macs and Parallels / Darwine / Boot Camp. If Apple just takes care of the last one, they can set the market on fire.

You can claim that most users don't care about these things, but you'd be forgetting something - if a user doesn't know anything about these points, what are they generally going to do before buying a computer? They will ask the advice of someone they know who "knows computers." And that person is generally going to try dissuade them from buying a non-expandable machine if it's a desktop (with laptops, it's more expected). Whether you want to admit it or not, introducing a mini-tower would dramatically increase sales.

Look I found an article that says pretty much the same thing I've been saying. It's a bit old, but this isn't a new problem.

Marketing the Mac: The Limited Upgrade Problem

The example machine he gives is unrealistic, but his points are good.

Originally Posted by Simon

CharlesS, it doesn't really matter if it's you or your friends. Your friends are irrelevant. This board is irrelevant. Sales numbers and profit is relevant. And those are both going up.

Fact is Apple is doing fine yet you're claiming they're doomed. That makes your whole argument kinda baseless.

And regarding Classic: and completely irrelevant in this discussion.

How old are you? I'm guessing about 14? This post doesn't really deserve a response at all, so you're getting the bare minimum. That is: It's not my friends, Apple's sales are up but desktop sales are down, and I never said Apple is doomed. I'm sure they'll survive - Steve is a clever guy - but it would be nice to have the Mac's marketshare at a point where it would be secure without relying on Steve pulling rabbits like the iPod out of his hat.

[Simon]

Great stab again there CharlesS, actually I'm three times the age you wrote, but that's not really the issue here, is it? Why is it that every time you lack any real argument you resort back to a little insult or personal attack? That, if anything, is the immature part of this discussion.

You still haven't presented a case yet. The only thing you have are 'some people you talk to' that would buy Macs if yadda yadda. Lots of hearsay and of course nothing we could validate. Anyway, Apple does not need to convince everybody. There are many people who are better off not using a Mac (I work on several PCs every day - I know when you're better off with a PC believe me) and Apple has understood that. The point is that they are serving their markets very well nowadays. This whole talk about how they're losing sales and that they are only living off the iPod is baloney when you consider that their market share is going up, they're winning people over from the PC and their sales are increasing.

This discussion has been running in circles for pages now. I suggest you either deliver some hard facts or at least something a bit better than "I know these people that..." or you stop grasping for straws and just admit that Apple is doing perfectly fine while neglecting the HEM market.

[zaghahzag]

maybe we can all agree to disagree on the economics and just agree that we'd like to have a cheaper-less powerful, non-imac, non-mini option.

just a thought.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by zaghahzag

maybe we can all agree to disagree on the economics and just agree that we'd like to have a cheaper-less powerful, non-imac, non-mini option.

Fine with me.

Re: 'would like to have', you actually already do. Just buy the last generation PM or get a rev A MP when rev B comes out. It will be roughly the same price as the low-end PMs used to be and it will offer all the expandability you've asked for.

[Hash]

Since neither Simon no P could not present any evidence of Apple mythical market research supporting claims that HEMs would jeopardise sales of otherwise profitable Mac Pros and make Apple less profitable, I decided its time for some data. I went to Apple library site and downloaded data summaries for first quarters of 2001-2006 which also contain data for previous quarter data and collected all sales by product groups into one large Excel table, with units shipped and revenue for each item Apple sold. I wanted to know Simon and P's claims of Apple's wisdom in current desktop strategy really makes it that profitable and Apple strategy is correct.

Straight to conclusions: after some data processing, I found that both Simon and P are deeply wrong about Apple desktop, sales and profits in general. Let me first give some hard data and conclusions, some of which well known and just again justified by data:


1. The main factor why Apple is profitable now and has increasing sales, has NOTHING to do with Apple desktop computers. The bulk of increased revenue over years come from iPods. On the contrary, current desktops' state is a state of crisis.

2. State of Apple's desktop sales is extremely worrisome. In Q12001, Apple sold 542 thousand units of desktop (combined group of iMacs, Cube and Powermacs) bringing in total of 741 million US dollars. Guess what: in 5 years,

2001Q4 2002Q1 2002q4 2003q1 2003Q4 2004Q1 2004Q4 2005Q1 2005Q4 2006Q1 2006Q2 2006Q3
542 445 494 456 474 433 385 623 602 667 614 529 (thous units)

741 570 718 648 698 649 556 1001 787 912 833 705
(revenue in million USD)


until 2004, desktop sales of Apple have been decreasing at alarming rate and fell to 385 thousand units in Q4 of 2004. Since then, they improved but in 2006Q3 they totalled 529 thousand units or DOWN from 2001 level and revenue did not increase much from 2001 year level. Taking into account inflation, one can claim that desktop revenue actually decreased.

If you say that Apple is doing just GREAT in desktops with current strategy, you can see that you are DEEP in sh#t. Its urgent that Apple review and change its strategy in desktops or you can forget about any increase in market share. Even move to Intel still did not bring substantial increase in desktop sales or revenue. Yet, move to G5 and Intel presumably required a lot of R&D. Therefore, one cannot claim that current desktop strategy resulted in revenue increase or number of units shipped over 5 years nor that MacPro are so profitable that any decrease in their sales would decrease Apple profits. They ALREADY have fallen so much without any HEMs. Actually minis save desktop sales units number.

The sad state of desktop sales even forced Apple to no longer report desktops by groups from 2005 by groups but combine all iMacs, minis and so on into one desktop group. Sales of PowerMacs were falling over 4 years until 2005 when their number no longer reported

248 212 176 158 221 206 156 167 (thousand units)

and when last reported as a individual item, desktop flagship models in 2005 sold more than 30% LESS compared with 2001Q1. I think its one of best arguments for revision of current Apple strategy in desktops. Apple desktops just do not sell. No wonder minis were introduced. iMac sales increased, but whether they did contribute much to revenue will be shown below

294 233 318 298 253 227 229 456 602 667 614 529 (thousand units - from 2005 these TOTAL number of desktops, not just iMacs and even then increase is not impressive at all)

If anything, iMacs and mini supported Apple desktop sales and compensated for falling desktop sales.


2. Mobiles (powerbook, macbooks and macbooks pro, ibooks) fared better in number of shipped units:

300 301 240 287 313 396 451 423 603 587 498 798
(thous. units).

One can see how cheap Macbooks increased sales in 2006.

Conclusion: its PRICE/performance ratio, stupid! (with some level of quality, and design of course, but Apple always had good design).

3. iPods made Apple profitable and increased its sales, nothing else; even mobiles (and of course desktop) revenue of Apple has been very stale last 5 years. Only bright spot is Macbook driving mobiles revenue up in summer 2006. But everything else is very bad, taking into account especially very dynamic development of computer sales last 5 years.

[IMG] [/IMG]

Notice that all increase in Apple revenue can be attributed to ipod revenue.

Sad state of desktop sales can be seen here

[IMG] [/IMG]

[Hash]

one can only wonder, if Apple followed its own strategy in Macbooks and introduced towerMacs (HEMs) maybe that could result in same jump in revenue and number of desktop units sold as in notebooks in summer 2006 with Macbooks shipping. Apple really needs to do that or its current desktop division is (especially if you dont count minis and imacs) is in big trouble. Apple customers DO need a cheaper desktop and its clear that neither mini, nor imacs cannot deliver a substantial increase in sales or revenue (the white line is actually heading down - number of desktops inclduing imacs, mini and Mac Pro)

[Simon]

Just for the record, those are sales figures, not market research.

And now, where is the big trouble supposed to be? I see desktop sales roughly constant between 500M and 1B and CPU sales revenue increasing. And obviously these numbers don't include the MP so you'll see staggering desktop sales in the last quarter due to people waiting for the MP release. So why is Apple in big trouble again?

[Hash]

Yeah, ignorance is bliss. While world shipments of computers increased so much after 2001, someone here is satisfied with constant sales (even falling) and cannot see that all his bullsh#t about how profitable mac desktops made Apple is well, bullsh#t. There is no any threat from HEM introduction to Mac desktop line - it is already in deep sh#t from 2001. And if you want to understand, these are number of units shipped and revenue - you can overlap overall market dynamics and get market picture.

now you can see
1. Apple market share is falling and desktop sales tankering (relatively - even if they are stable from 2001, worldwide market for computers increased by lot and Apple lost its share of growth)

2. Apple desktop strategy did not bring it billions of revenue. iPods did.

Therefore, both your claims above about how well Apple is doing in desktops and how it made it profitable are refuted.

[Simon]

I never said desktop sales are responsible for Apple's large revenue. And for the record, I'm not trying to claim anything here. I was trying to explain what could be the reasoning behind Apple's strategy to a few people here who obviously prefer to rant and vent off steam rather than having a rational discussion.

Obviously you too, seem to resort to insults when you lack arguments. Is that really necessary?

Where is the desktop "tankering" btw, couldn't see it anywhere. Bottom line their desktop sales are stable, their portable sales are rising. What is so bad about that?

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Simon

Great stab again there CharlesS, actually I'm three times the age you wrote, but that's not really the issue here, is it? Why is it that every time you lack any real argument you resort back to a little insult or personal attack? That, if anything, is the immature part of this discussion.

Considering that your last three or four posts have been almost completely content-free other than personal attacks "You're irrelevant, your friends are irrelevant" (my "friends" are the entire PC market) "You just want apple to serve YOUR needs" (not true) "You're claiming Apple's doomed" (I'm not) "Why don't you just buy a Dell" (why don't you just go shove it up your posterior), you really shouldn't talk. You know what they say about people in glass houses.

You still haven't presented a case yet. The only thing you have are 'some people you talk to' that would buy Macs if yadda yadda. Lots of hearsay and of course nothing we could validate.

The fact that expandable towers make up 90% of the desktop market apparently means nothing to you. That's an irrefutable fact - you use some fuzzy "logic" to claim that that's just because that's all the choice they have. Well, I don't see you backing that up with any hard data. Do you even have any idea how a free market works? The PC market has plenty of all-in-one machines - if those were really what users wanted so badly, they'd buy them, and the demand would be up, and then PC makers would make more of them, and then they would be the majority of the desktop market. And if you ask any PC user that knows anything about what they're doing, you'll get the same response I always get about Macs - they're not expandable. Don't believe me? Go into any electronics store and ask the reps there whether you should buy an iMac instead of a PC and see what they say. Go onto a PC message board and see what they say. Ask any reasonably proficient PC guy in your neighborhood what he thinks. The thing is, these are the guys that non-technical users go to for advice about what computer to get.

Anyway, Apple does not need to convince everybody. There are many people who are better off not using a Mac (I work on several PCs every day - I know when you're better off with a PC believe me) and Apple has understood that. The point is that they are serving their markets very well nowadays. This whole talk about how they're losing sales and that they are only living off the iPod is baloney when you consider that their market share is going up, they're winning people over from the PC and their sales are increasing.

It went up by like 0.3 of a percentage point last quarter. Whoop de do. And all that increase came from the notebook line, which in fact only came out to a net increase because the notebooks increased more than the desktops decreased, which they did (and which you can now see for yourself, thanks to Hash's excellent graphs).

This discussion has been running in circles for pages now. I suggest you either deliver some hard facts or at least something a bit better than "I know these people that..." or you stop grasping for straws and just admit that Apple is doing perfectly fine while neglecting the HEM market.

Now that Hash has provided the numbers and completely, utterly, proven you wrong, I'd like to see what your "hard facts" are. So far, you've brought nothing to the table except for "because I said so." This is Apple's reasoning, because you said so. This is what Steve Jobs thinks, because you said so. The Mac Pros are what are keeping Apple in the black - because you said so. Sales are peachy fine (they're not), because you said so. A mini-tower will completely kill off the Mac Pro despite being aimed at a completely different market segment - because you said so.

Oh, and the thing that caused Apple so much financial trouble was not the clones but the Performa 6400! Which with its whopping $2400 price tag was just such a cheap computer! Hell, that was more than the Mac Pro is. Boy, this is certainly something you can call the "CharlesS Plan" (another personal attack, btw) now, isn't it? Given that most people would have trouble justifying paying even that much for a computer, you're wondering why they wouldn't spend even more? Given that PCs were a small fraction of this price, they looked pretty damn attractive around this time. Unless, of course, a customer was smart enough to know about the clones. Then what could they get? Well, PowerComputing offered a PowerBase 180 for... $1500. $1600 if you wanted a tower format instead of a desktop. Let's go with that one. Okay, so what do you get for your $1600? Well, you get the same 180 MHz PPC 603e processor. You get an ATI Mach 64 video card with 2 MB dedicated VRAM vs. the 6400, which had some sort of integrated graphics which used 1 MB of the system RAM. You got the same 16 MB of RAM. You got built-in Ethernet on the Power - not on the Performa. You got 3 PCI slots vs. 2 in the Performa, and 2 open 5.25" bays as opposed to one in the Performa. You got 3 RAM slots as opposed to 2 in the Performa. Surely the Performa must have some advantages? Well, it had a built-in 28.8k modem, 400 MB more hard drive, an 8x CD-ROM instead of a 4x. You also got a built-in subwoofer and a video out port. Oh, and it looked nicer. Worth $800, especially considering the things you lose vs. the Power? Now consider that most of the few advantages of the Performa could be custom-configured onto the Power with the thing still being cheaper. And of course, the Power's processor could be bumped to 240 MHz while still being cheaper.

Oh, and UMAX had a machine for $1350 that was slightly less capable than the Performa and in a desktop form factor, but was over $1000 cheaper. If you waited a few months later, you'd be able to get a UMAX for $900. Hehe, scratch the Performa 6400.

Now let's look at the Power Mac line. Apple got thrashed pretty hard by the clones here too, and the thing about the pro line is that although I might buy your argument that the Performa customers might not have known about the clones, the pro users knew what they were doing. And here are the choices they saw:

Well, let's see. What was the price of the Power Mac in September 2006 (I'm going to go with September 2006 rather than August, in order to factor in the new Power Macs released then, to be generous to Apple)? Well, you could get a 7600 for $3000, but that was a desktop form factor. What if you want a tower? Cheapest one: Power Mac 8500/180. $4500. For $400 more: the 9500/200. $4900. So yeah, if you wanted to jump up from the Performa and retain a tower form factor, it's a $2100 difference. Okay, that's bad, especially since Power Computing was offering mid-range towers at prices cheaper than the 7600. What other problems did we have here? Well, a PowerTower Pro 200 cost $4500, and it had better specs than the $4900 9600. I won't go into details, but here are a few: 1 MB L2 cache instead of 512 KB, 8 MB VRAM instead of 2 MB (upgradable only to 4 MB), SCSI-II instead of SCSI, 16x CD instead of 8x, and a whopping 7 drive bays instead of 1. But that wasn't the big deal - for $5000 you could get a PowerTower Pro 225, which everyone knew about due to the fact that this was the machine that finally outpaced Intel in megahertz. Make no mistake, the PTP 225 was the machine that everyone was lusting over, with the 9600 being sort of "meh". Of course, UMAX had the also-awesome SuperMac S900/200 and S900/225 $4000 and $4500 respectively, which also handily thrashed the 9600 in price/performance. And of course if you waited a few months until November, you could get a UMAX S900/200 dual processor for $4500, the same price as the 8600. So small wonder why no one bought Power Macs...

All those specs came from everymac.com and MacTracker, by the way. A few more things to note:

- If the Performa 6400 really did kill off Power Mac sales, then it (and the cheaper towers from Power Computing) should have also killed off sales of the PowerTower Pro and SuperMac machines. This was not the case, as there were a lot of PowerTowers and SuperMacs around - obviously there's a market for performance, even back when you had to pay $4000-$5000 to get it.

- OS 8 and 9 were very unstable in those days and crashed a lot, pissing a lot of users off. Apple kept promising Copland, and kept delaying it - sort of like Vista today. A lot of people left the platform due to this alone.

- You say that the clones only took about 50% of the market away from Apple - of course you don't provide any sources to that, so I can't see your numbers directly. So, even taking those for granted, my first reaction is the obvious one, that cutting down Apple's hardware sales by half is pretty damn drastic and that ya, that's gonna hurt hardware revenue! The second thing is that you didn't say whether the 50% that Apple held onto included the laptop sales or not - as we all remember, Apple never licensed the laptops, so if you wanted a Mac laptop, your one choice was an Apple. Therefore, if Apple's remaining 50% included the laptops, then that would mean that the desktop line really got butchered by the clones. Which frankly wouldn't surprise me at all since the clones were consistently better and cheaper.

- Of course, the pundits kept saying Apple was going out of business, which didn't exactly inspire consumer confidence.

So with all that stuff going on, and all these different factors coming together to cause problems for Apple, you seriously think you can point to the Performa 6400 as the cause of Apple's troubles during that period, and then claim that the "CharlesS Plan" (no plan of mine would involve a mini-tower's price starting at $2400) would put Apple in the same position as in the clone era?! The 6400 was more likely an attempt at damage control than anything else. It's absurd.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Simon

I never said desktop sales are responsible for Apple's large revenue. And for the record, I'm not trying to claim anything here. I was trying to explain what could be the reasoning behind Apple's strategy to a few people here who obviously prefer to rant and vent off steam rather than having a rational discussion.

Yes, you've already made the point many times that you don't really agree with anything you're saying, that you feel the need to "explain" what you perceive as Apple's strategy over and over and over like you think we're all morons and don't understand what you're saying, hence the need to keep repeating yourself. It's a personal insult in and of itself. Ever thought that maybe we get it, we just don't agree?

Obviously you too, seem to resort to insults when you lack arguments. Is that really necessary?

He's provided the only hard data in the last few pages of the thread. Let's see your "market research." Hell, let's see an "argument" from you as your posts lately sure don't seem to contain much of note.

Where is the desktop "tankering" btw, couldn't see it anywhere. Bottom line their desktop sales are stable, their portable sales are rising. What is so bad about that?

Did you look at those Power Mac numbers? You're the one (or maybe it was P, but it's been the basis of both your points) who said that if Mac Pro sales drop in favor of a cheaper model, it's "the end of the world." Well, like I said, Power Mac / Mac Pro sales have been dropping for years, and now Hash's numbers (the specific Power Mac ones) have proven it. Yeah, the sales for all desktops are higher in 2005 than they were in 2004, although they continue to go downward from there. What happened in 2005? The introduction of the Mac mini. So it looks like the trend is downward, except that the mini bumps it up a bit so it ends up at a sort-of similar level to where it started. In other words, the desktop line has been steadily dropping, if not for the mini. Or, you could say that the Power Mac / Mac Pro is losing sales... to the Mac mini. DUN DUN DUN! So maybe if we had a reasonably priced mid-tower grabbing some of those sales that the mini is getting (let's face it, it shouldn't be that hard of an upsell - the mini isn't really that great), well, let's just say that I'm pretty sure the mini has a lower margin than the midtower would have.

Another thing to note is that the notebooks spiked as soon as they got Intel chips - the iMac and mini, not so much. Why didn't the Intel switch help them?

[Simon]

OK, I don't know how many times I've stated this already, I'll repeat it one last time: I am not saying their strategy is the only right one and I'm not saying they will never build a HEM, I was merely offering an explanation for why they have chosen the strategy they have. Instead of taking that for what it is (if you disagree, fine, so be it, it was just an attempt at an explanation), you attack me (and others for that matter) and feel the need to insult us for explaining why Apple might not want to make a HEM. It got even uglier when we reminded you of the fact that Apple is doing better than ever and that that as well may be a reason that Apple doesn't feel the urge to take a unnecessary risk.

You can disagree with Apple all you want. You can claim the reasons presented here are all BS and actually it's just a big Steve conspiracy, etc. I really don't care anymore. What I do care about is why this whole discussion had to become so hostile and personal - just because people disagree with what you say does not mean you can switch from argument to insult. Meanwhile the entire discussion has not advanced one bit in the last five pages. And therefore, thank you, I am done here.

[chatam]

Let's just stop with quarrels and rows, they just prove that the issue under discussion it's well worth a fight, but they're leading nowhere.
My idea is that since several years Apple appeared as it was willing to diversify its products, and the financial results are evidence enough that the choice was the right one.
But, as I mentioned in a previous post, hinting that Apple has become a toys and gadgets factory, and very lucrative ones as well, it is hard to keep both the shareholders and the customers fully satisfied. A Mac midi would be the joy of many, but others couldn't care less, and although such a model could become a best seller it is possible that just resources are not enough, for the time being at least, to explore that segment, while so many other lines are in need of attention and efforts.
I for one would be very happy to buy a mid size - mid price tower, for the good reasons everybody knows, but the lack of such a model is just an unavoidable fact, for now, and because of nobody's fault.
Maybe somebody in Cupertino in reading this or one of the several different threads on this point, and he's either looking forward to the fat earnings ahead, if the machine is already slated for production, or considering whether the demand is strong enough to introduce it.

[P]

Before I forget: Hash, image rules say 480 pixels wide. Could you please make those images linked and not inline?

I never said that Apple's desktop sales are doing great - I said that Apple is. iMac sales dropped slowly but surely once the expensive G4 iMac replaced the inexpensive G3 iMac. The eMac was a stopgap solution to rectify that, but the uptick in desktop sales didn't happen until the G5 iMac was released. Mac mini only helped this (Apple's financial year does not match the calendar year - Q1 FY05 actually begins on October 1st, 2004, so the Mac mini, which was released on January 11th, came after that spike). It is a known fact that the upper iMac models are cannibalizing Powermac sales slightly - even more so now, before the release of the Mac Pro - and that IS cause for concern. Apple's iMac margins are probably healthy, though.

Sales have been trending down recently during the Intel transition - I thought they had dropped more, to be honest. They should pick up slightly now, and even more when CS3 is released. In general, desktop sales have been flat. That's actually slightly better than the market in general, because desktop sales have been slipping. It's far from a crisis - it WAS bordering on a crisis in 2003-04, but that was because there were no new G4s coming, so noone was upgrading. Right now, Apple has a steady profit coming in from the desktop line, and it doesn't want to lose it.

All of this is completely irrelevant to the question at hand though. You are claiming that releasing a HEM or xMac or whatever will significantly increase the total Apple sales to the point where the finances work out despite losing some Mac Pro sales. I say that it won't. Past sales data doesn't say anything one way or another.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by P

All of this is completely irrelevant to the question at hand though. You are claiming that releasing a HEM or xMac or whatever will significantly increase the total Apple sales to the point where the finances work out despite losing some Mac Pro sales. I say that it won't. Past sales data doesn't say anything one way or another.

Great, you say it won't. I say it will. Frankly, if headless computers were so unprofitable, they wouldn't make up just about all of the desktop market. But whatever. We can keep yelling "Will not! Will too!" forever, but I'm getting tired of it.

[P]

The tower is the most common design for a desktop for several reasons:

• Easier to cool hot processors - remember that the Pentium 4 used over 100W in some cases
• Easier to add new features without modifying the motherboard - just stick an extra PCI board in there. Just because there are 4 slots in a box doesn't mean 4 EMPTY slots
• Lots of room for legacy ports on the rear. Since PC makers still insist on including parallell and serial ports, they need that space
• Lots of room for extra optical bays - and floppy bays
• The 11th commandment - "That's the way we've always done it"
• Standard box and motherboard for whiteboard builders and DIY

In general, I think many PC makers don't design other cases because they lack the expertise. It's hard to make an iMac-style case - plus you also need a certain amount of buying leverage to get a good deal on the LCD panels to include in the case. A whitebox maker can't do that.

[CharlesS]

The only problem with that is that PC manufacturers do make AIO machines like the iPod. Only problem is, they don't sell nearly as much as the towers do, because of one bullet point you forgot to mention:

• Customers have come to expect some expansion ability in a desktop

Seriously, try talking to a desktop PC user sometime. When they spout an easily refutable myth like "Macs can't use a two-button mouse" or "Macs can't connect to the Internet" or some tripe like that, it's easy to set them straight. But when they complain about the lack of expansion, all you can do is apologize for the platform with something to the effect of "Who needs it," which is never very convincing. Especially if they actually know a thing or two about Apple, and they can throw that USB 2.0 / iPod thing in your face...

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Great, you say it won't. I say it will. Frankly, if headless computers were so unprofitable, they wouldn't make up just about all of the desktop market. But whatever. We can keep yelling "Will not! Will too!" forever, but I'm getting tired of it.

My take is...

Will it cannibalize some of the Mac pro sales? YES

That being said, there are people like myself that simply aren't buying anything with the hope that something changes.

I consider myself a quasi-normal computer user and am feeling a little boxed regarding options. I need a little more expandability than the mini offers but don't have 2.5K to throw around (P.S. I own a 20" Cinema)

[CharlesS]

Another thing - have you ever looked at Dell's ads? There's always a big emphasis on "build the one that's right for you!" etc. And they've been hugely successful.

They wouldn't advertise this if it didn't work.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by P

They should pick up slightly now, and even more when CS3 is released. In general, desktop sales have been flat.

I'm now waiting for a number of things.
- Universal CS3
- Universal Office
- Leopard
- iTV

The headless iMac would be the clincher.

[CharlesS]

Interesting article:

BetaNews | Intel iMac Costs Apple $899 to Build

Apparently, Apple's profit margin for the rev. A Intel iMac was 44%. Not too shabby...

A mini-tower that was essentially an iMac minus an expensive screen, with a less-expensive case design and a few extra slots for a similar price to the iMac would have even higher margins.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Apparently, Apple's profit margin for the rev. A Intel iMac was 44%. Not too shabby...

The article is talking about raw components. That 44% can be gobbled up rather quickly in R&D, advertising, shipping, warranty, etc. etc.

It also doesn't include a keyboard or mouse.

I'm fine with them making money... as long as they are in the ballpark, I'm happy. Not like the old days of their systems being 2X more expensive.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by mitchell_pgh

The article is talking about raw components. That 44% can be gobbled up rather quickly in R&D, advertising, shipping, warranty, etc. etc.

It also doesn't include a keyboard or mouse.

Right, but those R&D costs should be quite a bit less than with the highly engineered iMac. Apple doesn't seem to be advertising specific models these days with the "Get a Mac" campaign, so that seems kind of moot (well, you'd have to get a web designer to make the web site for the mini-tower. OK). Shipping and warranty I'll grant. If the keyboard and mouse are really a big expense for Apple (which may or may not be the case - I have no idea how much they cost to make), well, we've got Steve Jobs at the helm. He introduced the concept of BYODKM with the mini, and actually managed to make it look like a feature rather than having it look like charging $3 extra just to get rice with your curry at an Indian restaurant (yes, the one in my town actually does that).

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Another thing - have you ever looked at Dell's ads? There's always a big emphasis on "build the one that's right for you!" etc. And they've been hugely successful.

They wouldn't advertise this if it didn't work.

Apple's also very successful. They take the opposite tack.

It's clear to me that there are different business models operating here.

[P]

"Build the one that's right for you!" is about CTO. I'm all in favor of customizing when building the machine, so the iMac 24" using MXM was the best news in that announcement.

[CharlesS]

Yeah, but the level of customization you can do is limited. For example, can you add FireWire 800 to the 20" iMac? Can you add eSATA to anything? Can you add a second hard drive?

[zaghahzag]

Hash thanks for the numbers. I think that if there is anything obvious about them its that an HEM might pilfer a lot sales from people who end up with minis. yes, they might be able to spend more than 1k on a computer,but they have a monitor and they dont want a mac pro.

it seems only logical that apple would offer a reasonable step up from its lowest end model. try to convert those to happy opportunity sales or whatever people call it.

its also amazing and shocking how low the powermac sales numbers are. WOW!

[P]

Economics is a funny subject. It would cost Apple more to add the option of adding eSATA or Firewire 800 than to make them standard - my guess is that they're coming next revision. To be fair, the only reason you want them is future-proofing - eSATA isn't that big yet, and Firewire 800 never will be.

An extra HD is nice, if there is space in the box. With the 24"er, there ought to be - but in general, it's more practical for most people to have one big HD than several smaller.

[CharlesS]

Yeah, but then if your drive #1 dies, all your data is gone.

With two drives, you can use one of them as a backup drive. Otherwise, you've gotta get an external. Either way, you need two drives.

[P]

Backup is a forgotten area in personal computing. What is needed isn't so much an extra HD as a comlete end-to-end solution, from the OS on down. Time Machine is the software part of that - I wouldn't be surprised if Leopard comes with some sort of hardware bundle to support it. How about one of those complete HD bays from the Mac Pro to be installed in the iMac? That's one thing Apple could sell with a decent margin.

In general, I feel that the way forward is not multiple HDs but nifty filesystems with snapshots. Excluding those IBM 75GXPs that they recalled, I have not had a single HD completely fail on me in 15 years - and I've worked with quite few. I have had data loss from other problems, and I keep my backups reasonably current, but total HD failure is not the reason I make them.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by P

In general, I feel that the way forward is not multiple HDs but nifty filesystems with snapshots. Excluding those IBM 75GXPs that they recalled, I have not had a single HD completely fail on me in 15 years - and I've worked with quite few. I have had data loss from other problems, and I keep my backups reasonably current, but total HD failure is not the reason I make them.

Uh, I have had hard disks fail in my machines. Several times in fact. Sometimes I had to reformat, sometimes I had to replace the whole drive. I've also helped a number of other people with dead hard drives replace theirs. I've also worked in a computer lab with many machines in it and I can tell you, HD failure is a fact of life. All hard disks will eventually fail. If you have been lucky so far, then that's great. But if you think that means that hard disks cannot fail, you're sadly mistaken. Snapshots seem pretty pointless to me - it's basically a Band-Aid that Microsoft came up with to patch over the fact that the Windows Registry is so easy to get messed up. All the snapshots in the world won't help you when (not if!) your HD goes kaput. Yes, you have to keep a backup, and yes, one of the reasons is total HD failure.

[Xyrrus]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Uh, I have had hard disks fail in my machines. Several times in fact. Sometimes I had to reformat, sometimes I had to replace the whole drive. I've also helped a number of other people with dead hard drives replace theirs. I've also worked in a computer lab with many machines in it and I can tell you, HD failure is a fact of life. All hard disks will eventually fail. If you have been lucky so far, then that's great. But if you think that means that hard disks cannot fail, you're sadly mistaken. Snapshots seem pretty pointless to me - it's basically a Band-Aid that Microsoft came up with to patch over the fact that the Windows Registry is so easy to get messed up. All the snapshots in the world won't help you when (not if!) your HD goes kaput. Yes, you have to keep a backup, and yes, one of the reasons is total HD failure.

I've lost enought drives to agree on this, but I don't think redundancy sells desktop computers. If Apple put a second drive in the iMacs and ran them in a raid1 more people would probably complain that they're only getting "half the advertised storage." Also external drives are often a better solution for backups anyways as they can be secured or taken off site. People who are pretty serious about backups are going to opt for that.

There is, to me, a pretty clear distinction between time machine and full backups. Time machine addresses accidental messups, deletions and whatnot - people are familiar with this. Accidentally deleting a file is something probably everyone has dealt with. Crashed HDDs are not. I think when somebody's HDD drives they think "the computer broke" and it just happens.

Its really sad that people don't take backups seriously especially now that people use computers for so much more than just "business stuff". On the plus side, not too long ago the big three automakers felt that "safety didn't sell cars." Now airbags are standard and companies tout 4-star safety ratings. Maybe the same thing will happen with computers.

-Xy

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Xyrrus

I've lost enought drives to agree on this, but I don't think redundancy sells desktop computers. If Apple put a second drive in the iMacs and ran them in a raid1 more people would probably complain that they're only getting "half the advertised storage."

Well, that's avoidable by advertising it properly. And of course, if it came preconfigured with the second hard drive being used for Time Machine, there wouldn't be anything preventing someone from just turning that off and using the second drive as extra storage if they were so adamant about that.

Also external drives are often a better solution for backups anyways as they can be secured or taken off site. People who are pretty serious about backups are going to opt for that.

I dunno, if you take an external HD off-site, then it's not useful for the automatic backups anymore. What I like to do with off-site backups is to burn a set of CD-Rs or DVD-Rs with the stuff you want to backup, and then give it to a relative or put it in a safe-deposit box or something. Then the off-site backup stays off-site, permanently.

There is, to me, a pretty clear distinction between time machine and full backups. Time machine addresses accidental messups, deletions and whatnot - people are familiar with this. Accidentally deleting a file is something probably everyone has dealt with. Crashed HDDs are not. I think when somebody's HDD drives they think "the computer broke" and it just happens.

If it really does backup all the files on the drive like it looks like it does, then all the files would be there to restore after a primary HD failure.

They may think "the computer broke" when their hard drive dies, but then they will invariably bring the computer either to the shop or to a friend who knows computers, where they will get a correct description of what actually happened (unless their friend is an idiot). At any rate, the person they go to for help will find the backup drive, and help the relieved user recover his/her data to whatever replacement drive they put in.

Seems like not so bad an idea to me.

[zaghahzag]

i think time machine will let you set a backup to an internet site (or other network storage). then the data is not going to go up in a fire.

For some people the amount of data might not even be that much (documents and such)..

[P]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Uh, I have had hard disks fail in my machines. Several times in fact. Sometimes I had to reformat, sometimes I had to replace the whole drive. I've also helped a number of other people with dead hard drives replace theirs. I've also worked in a computer lab with many machines in it and I can tell you, HD failure is a fact of life. All hard disks will eventually fail. If you have been lucky so far, then that's great. But if you think that means that hard disks cannot fail, you're sadly mistaken. Snapshots seem pretty pointless to me - it's basically a Band-Aid that Microsoft came up with to patch over the fact that the Windows Registry is so easy to get messed up. All the snapshots in the world won't help you when (not if!) your HD goes kaput. Yes, you have to keep a backup, and yes, one of the reasons is total HD failure.

All those times you got the HD back by reformatting, that was really a software issue. With a clever enough filesystem, you wouldn't have had that problem. THAT has happened many many times - even on my current iMac G5, actually. When the HD fails so completely that you have to throw it out, that's a hardware failure. Correction to my original post: I've had that happen several times in servers, but those were RAID 5s with online spares and the whole shebang - that was expected. The constant use and the elevated heat makes the risk much higher. Add SMART warnings (you do use those, right?) and the risk of a single HD in a consumer machine failing before you have a chance to back it up becomes very small.