Bregalad's Profile

While I agree it's better to cannibalize your own sales than to let a competitor do it, Apple doesn't necessarily have to offer a netbook. If netbooks are mostly stealing PC laptop sales and not hurting Apple much, then introducing a lower cost Mac would actually hurt more than doing nothing. Apple tends to go their own way so I don't expect to see a MacBook nano. Instead I expect to see better value and more obvious customer targeting using traditional Macs combined with increased capabilities in the handheld units.

I don't think Apple will introduce any budget Macs. Doing so would disrupt their current system of features and price points. Worst of all, a budget Mac would probably be adequate for customers who currently buy higher end models. Show someone that they don't need as much as they think they do and your chances of ever up-selling them again are slim. The better response for Apple is to improve the value of their existing lineup. There are simple things Apple could do without affecting their bottom line much. 1. Include more RAM. Since most PC manufacturers have stopped advertising processor speed (they just use processor model numbers) this has become the most obvious number for customers to compare. Macs, particularly at the low end, always look anemic in this area. Consumers are being told that 2 or 4GB of RAM is necessary these days so a machine with only 1 looks like a joke. 2. Include bigger hard drives. Hard drive capacity is now up there with RAM as a top comparison item and is another one where Apple routinely loses. 500 GB notebook drives are very inexpensive, I just bought one in an external case for just $99. 3. Include better graphics chips. This will be increasingly important after Snow Leopard ships. Programmers will be able to off-load many computations to the GPU meaning that a powerful GPU may become equally or even more important than a powerful CPU. Even today there are really only two types of customers, those who only need basic integrated graphics and those who see the GPU as an important component. There is no room for low end chips like the GT120 that Apple uses in the iMac and Mac Pro. Putting what is essentially a $50 card into a $2500 workstation is insulting. All three of those components are continuously dropping in price on the open market. Apple should be able to take advantage of those changes and add value to their Mac lineup without hurting their margins. 4. Lower upgrade prices on the Apple Store. Apple could own the RAM/HD upgrade market, but they've ceded it to third parties by charging way too much. Mac Pro hard drives are THREE TIMES the price of identical hard drives in my local PC store.

Well said UrbanBard, but I still think the potential upside for Apple is greater than the loss from widespread hackintoshing. I also believe it allows Apple to keep their highly focused product line. Apple doesn't make a mainstream desktop computer or a netbook. They must have good reasons for ignoring the second largest market segment and the fastest growing one because one doesn't usually turn one's back on hundreds of millions of potential customers unless you've determined that they'd be more trouble than they're worth. If someone can't afford a real Mac or is simply determined to have a netbook then it's better for Apple to have that person buy OS X and become a fan of the OS than it is for them to continue using and recommending Windows XP. Likewise if you're determined to have a tower so you upgrade your own components then Apple is better off getting $129 from you than having you continue to dual boot Linux and Windows. Unless and until Apple decides to expand their product line such a person is unlikely to buy a real Mac anyway, but having played with OS X on their PC they might start recommending Macs to friends or family members for whom the Apple product lineup is a better fit. Chasing individuals for breaking the EULA is way too expensive and only serves to scare away people who are curious about OS X.

Because a product is better spec'd it should undoubtedly cost more? That would be true if any time in the last few years Apple had lowered the price of their badly outdated desktops. As it is the "upgrades" they introduced yesterday were minimal, especially after 11 months (iMac), 14 months (Pro), 19 months (mini). In the same time frame all the Apple notebooks have been updated at least 3 times. If anything they should have lowered prices across the board to reflect how little improvement these machines represent when compared with the amount of change in the market around them. Unfortunately the country that triggered the global economic meltdown has seen its currency rise dramatically and the rest of us get to pay the price. Just as significant is the fact that I haven't noticed any PCs going up in price this past year. That means the price gap between PC and Mac just got substantially wider for all non-USA customers. I believe that will definitely lead to a lot more hackintoshes. I am bitterly disappointed that the new iMac is still just a dual core machine and still requires an hour of service technician time just to swap the hard drive. So I'm going to spend the C$2100 I was going to give Apple for a quad core iMac and buy two computers instead. My wife, who insists her next computer come with a warranty, will get a new Mac mini (C$729) and the remaining C$1370 will buy a killer hackintosh that will rival the C$2899 Mac Pro.

In the somewhat distant past Apple only made new product announcements a few times per year and almost always in conjunction with an event (Macworld SF, Boston, NY, Tokyo, WWDC, etc). That built huge expectations for these events because people knew that anything not introduced there wasn't going to show up for months. Today that's not true. Apple holds their own media events throughout the year to make announcements, but people (sometimes) have long memories and continue to think Macworld is going to be the place where the greatest products appear. Introducing the iPhone there was probably a mistake in retrospect because it made it look like Macworld was the only stage worthy of major announcements. Most of the expectations I read in the weeks leading up to Macworld were perfectly reasonable. The Mac mini has gone an astounding 17 months without an update and the other desktops are also due for a change. Any other hardware (iPhone, AppleTV, etc.) would have been way too much for one event. The iPhone nano was probably an intentional plant by Apple to find a leak because I don't think an iPhone with an even smaller display would be practical. When Apple moved to Intel based hardware most reasonable people assumed that Apple would update their hardware more frequently than they had in the past because Intel has always updated far more frequently than Motorola or IBM ever did. Boy were we wrong. In the 38 month lifespan of the G5 tower the lineup was completely changed three times. In the 29 month life of the Mac Pro the lineup has only been replaced once. The iMac is only a bit late for an update, but the PC desktop machines the iMac competes against switched to quad core processors two years ago. Apple still doesn't offer 4 cores under $2500. The Mac mini is an astonishing product. Only Apple can get full price for 3 year old components.

A year ago I did a little math to see if Apple could switch to being a software compnay. I used actual Apple financial reports to determine just how much profit they make on their hardware. I then took that number and divided it by the wholesale cost of OEM copies of Windows. Retail sales of Windows are insignificant compared with the OEM numbers. That little examination ignored huge factors like the fact that large portions of the wholesale price aren't profit for Apple, the fact that Dell and HP pay even less per copy, the enormous increase in development and testing needed to support every brand of PC hardware and prevent widespread piracy, and the really big factor: what Microsoft would do in retaliation. I was being extremely generous to the software side of the equation, but the results were still clear. Using those figures Apple would have to sell EIGHT TIMES as many OEM copies of OS X as they currently ship with their own hardware to make the same profit. Factor in all those ignored factors and the actual figure probably rises to somewhere between 10 an 15 times. If Apple were to switch to being a software company they would have to gain a 30-50% market share almost immediately just to maintain their current profitability. Nobody at Apple is that stupid.

Entourage is a fine application with lots of features and an interface that anyone with an Outlook Express or Windows background will find comfortably familiar. Entourage does have one serious flaw, however. The database file used to store all mailboxes and their contents has a frustrating habit of becoming corrupt for no apparent reason. I highly recommend rebuilding frequently (hold down option when double clicking the Entourage icon) and keeping multiple backup copies.