Apple Should Get Out of Hardware? 730
SQLGuru writes to mention an analyst recommendation being reported on ZDNet. Despite a BusinessWeek article about Apple's record breaking hardware sales, the folks at Gartner think Apple should get out of the hardware business. Calling for the company to license its hardware to Dell, the analyst company says that gains in Apple's hardware sales are simply not sustainable. From the article: "Apple's margins for its Mac business, currently around 40 percent, are only sustainable because component makers such as Intel choose to prop up the business, Gartner claimed. Given that HP has forced Intel to offer it comparable pricing to Dell, Intel is unlikely to continue to subsidise Apple, the analyst argues. 'As a result of permanently changed market conditions, Intel has been forced to restructure and, in our opinion, cannot go on supporting Apple (or any other customer) indefinitely.'"
But the iPod (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But the iPod (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, from a business strategy perspective, Dell's company may be pursuing operational excellence, but Apple's value discipline is product leadership. If Apple tried to compete on cost, it would lose-- economies of scale alone would be against it, plus much more. Apple's value is that they have in the customer's eye a far superior product, one that people are willing to pay a premium on. You think that Apple could keep its already-slim market share if they became a commodity? Of course not, apple's strength has always been that they play their own game in their own little protected part of the market.
The accounting value of improving or preserving margins is far outweighed by the strategic value of their product differentiation and perceived customer value. If apple listened to gartner and lost that, they really would be dead.
Hey ZDNet... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Google Trends confirms it, Apple is Dying [google.com]!
I must apologize to Netcraft, but Netcraft is dying [google.com].
Re:Yeah but... (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't heard this one in a while. (Score:5, Insightful)
But controlling the hardware is good for Apple. When none of the PC manufacturers jumped onto USB, Apple did. The same with Firewire.
This is why hardware is good for Apple. Because they can innovate like that with the least amount of Red Tape.
Without hardware, they would not have had their successes no matter how awesome Mac OS X - iPod, iMac, their notebooks in general.
Hell, I think they should produce more hardware - like a Newton successor, preferably something small and that can slide into a PCMIA slot to do the syncing and charging.
Anybody who suggests Apple gets out of hardware is smoking something. And it's not the good stuff either.
Re:I haven't heard this one in a while. (Score:5, Interesting)
it's this kind of rewritting of history that pissess me off. Apple came to the USB game late. what they did different was that they dropped all legacy support at the same time. USB was intoduced [wikipedia.org] in January 1996. the iMac shipped [apple-history.com] (with ONLY USB ports) in August 1997.
Firewire (an apple created technology!) took even longer for apple to adopt! it was introduced [wikipedia.org] in 1995, and shipped built-in [apple-history.com] in 1999. Sony may have even beaten apple to that game!
You missed an apple adoption of technology that the rest of the industy has ignored - ExpressCard [wikipedia.org]. No apple computer ships with a PCMIA [sic] slot. The MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard/34 slot, so a PCMCIA sized PDA wouldn't fit anyway.
Re:I haven't heard this one in a while. (Score:5, Insightful)
it's this kind of rewritting of history that pissess me off. Apple came to the USB game late. what they did different was that they dropped all legacy support at the same time. USB was intoduced in January 1996. the iMac shipped (with ONLY USB ports) in August 1997.
What Apple did was drive USB into the mainstream. No, they weren't the first ones, but by dropping all the legacy support and going USB-only, they signaled a change, which has yet to be completed on the PC side (most PCs still come with COM and PARALLEL ports.. God help us all).
Firewire (an apple created technology!) took even longer for apple to adopt! it was introduced in 1995, and shipped built-in in 1999. Sony may have even beaten apple to that game!
Again, I think the real point is that Apple again drove this more into the mainstream.
The OP is partly correct in that USB and Firewire on PCs were not commonplace before Apple made them defaults on their hardware. Hell, there are still a lot of PS/2 keyboards and mice floating around TODAY. I wish that the PC manufacturers had the courage to finally drop old keyboard ports, COM ports and Parallel ports -- welcome to the 21st Century!
Because Apple controls both the hardware and software side of the equation, it can push these things through much quicker than the PC world. No, they didn't invent it -- but they brought into the mainstream (much like they did with MP3 players )
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
which has yet to be completed on the PC side (most PCs still come with COM and PARALLEL ports.. God help us all).
I am a UNIX admin and a Cisco network engineer. I configure my SUN, Linux and Cisco gear using the console. For that I need a COM port and guess what..... my fancy new macbook doesn't have a COM port so I had to go out and buy and USB COM port. So just because it is old doesn't mean it is useless. Personally it pissed me off when apple dropped everything bar USB as decent printers and worl
Re:I haven't heard this one in a while. (Score:5, Insightful)
what happend is that when Apple came out with the iMac.... ALL THOSE COMPANIES *IMEDIATLY* DEVELOPPED DRIVERS FOR THE MAC PLATFORM. If apple would have waited a year, those companies probably wouldn't have bothered.
the USB move was probably the smartest platform move apple made (untill the intel switch and bootcamp, specificly the time that move was made)
Windows95c == usb support (Score:3, Informative)
Windows95c, on the install disc. And you could get USB to work on Windows95a and Windows95b with a driver from Microsoft or the manufacturer.
That was a terrible move (Score:3, Insightful)
That was a terrible move: very anti-user. Apple would have been much better off phasing out non-USB ports only after the number of non-USB devices had dwindled a lot. What Appel did really screwed the user: making a machine without necessary standard-of-the-day ports in order to force the user to buy dongles or new peripherals because Apple thought that it was somehow immoral for users to use non-USB interface devices. (I've got a nice pare
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
apple gained a shitload of third-party perfiral support they would NOT have had if the PC world would have had annough time to standardise on USB. developing drivers for a platform that has 50% of the market for USB devices is different then a platform that has 5% (which is what would have happened a year later). ADB users got the short stick in the short term, but in the long term.. well.. apple seems to be doing pretty well these days, don't you think? almost every
Of course it matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I haven't heard this one in a while. (Score:4, Informative)
Uh no. USB2 is crap at handling throughput. I wish I could remember where I saw it, it was ars technica or hothardware or something, but some guys did a study where they hooked the same drive up to the same PC, but first through USB2 and then through FW400 and it turned out that on this machine which was a >2.0GHz P4 the USB was something like 20% slower, but that's not even the most important part; during data access to the USB2-connected drive CPU usage went as high as 14% while using FW400 it never crossed 2%. This is from the OS access to the device alone. And mind you, this was a drive with a peak throughput of something like 24MBps. FW400 has a theoretical max of 50MBps, while USB2 is supposed to be what, 60MBps? But in reality it is slower. USB2 is CRAP and anyone who uses it for storage when they have access even to FW400 (let alone -800) is losing out on performance. In addition, IEEE1394 supports peer to peer operation (IEEE1394b) and offers an 800Mbps speed if you want to pay for it, while USB2 doesn't even manage to come close to its supposed 480Mbps of throughput.
Re:I haven't heard this one in a while. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true that FW has an 800 version but it is pricey. You can now get external SATA connections that are far faster, cheaper and don't require translation boards to talk to disk drives.
Apple Get Out of Hardware? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems they tried that before and Apple was in such dire straits Jobs returned to salvage the company and close down the external Mac builders. Let's face it, Apple has survived because the dictatorial nature of product development at Apple means they can establish the trends and bail on those that don't do well, without worrying about maintaining a library of drivers even an orangitan couldn't keep up with (Ook) The PC/Windows path has Microsoft trying to keep an overweight operating system working on a staggering array of hardware combinations. Small wonder very few actually know what the heck is going on with things and most problems are countered with "did you try updating the drivers" or "Have you tried disconecting things until it works" or "You need to do a full re-install"
I wouldn't agree with having Dell make the machines, either. Their quality isn't a shade of what it once was. Dell made their name with competitively priced hardware which was built almost as solidy as IBMs. Now it's all cranked out in China and is as good as anything else cranked out in China, so there's no real advantage over competitors.
Moo (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Apple has a good name, with solid products like the Macbook, iPod, and OS X. I don't think Apple will have that mcuh of a problem. People don't run to Apple because of price, they run to them because they make decent, user-friendly hardware. Comparable devices are copies of them, and usually more expensive. If prices rise, Apple will go up a bit more, but will that actually drive people away?
the 1990s called... (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sure (Score:4, Informative)
* * *
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares of Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) rose 6 percent on Thursday, a day after it reported a sharp gain in quarterly profit alongside strong sales of its popular iPods and healthy shipments of its Macintosh computers.
Apple stock jumped $4.69 at $79.21 on Nasdaq, where it was the third biggest point gainer.
Apple's fourth-quarter results, released late Wednesday, prompted Banc of America to raise its price target to $84 from $79 a share, while maintaining a "buy" rating on the stock.
Another analyst, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, said in a note to clients that the results showed Apple's "formula is working" as the popularity of its iPods is translating into a "resurgence in the Mac platform."
"We believe in six months the halo effect will expand beyond a simple iPod-to-Mac correlation into a four-way relationship with iPod, Mac, iPhone, and iTV benefiting from each other's success," said Munster. "If this plays out, Apple's growth rate should accelerate in 2007."
Apple is widely expected by analysts to introduce a new gadget dubbed the iPhone, which will combine mobile phone features with the iPod.
The company said in September it will ship a device, code-named iTV, in the first quarter of 2007 to let consumers stream movies, music, photos, podcasts and television shows from the Web to their home entertainment systems.
In its earnings statement, Apple said it sold 8.73 million iPods, up 35 percent from a year ago, and 1.61 million Mac computers, a 30 percent increase.
Cupertino, California-based Apple said net income rose to $546 million, or 62 cents per share, from $430 million, or 50 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue climbed 32 percent to $4.84 billion.
Prior to Thursday's surge, shares of Apple had risen about 5 percent this year, compared with an increase of over 4 percent in the Morgan Stanley High-Tech Index , of which Apple is a constituent.
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The 40% margins are based on what? Because I would think that were Apple to get 20% of the market (over 3x what it is today), the individual costs of the OS are effectively 1/3 per machine in cost, comparatively. And the larger they get, the more sway they might have.
And let's not forget -- Apple on Intel is a form of advertising for Intel. Apple is very, very good at getting in the press, so Intel might be willing to take a smaller margin in exchange.
Yeah Yeah Yeah... heard it before (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not Dell and perhaps not anyone (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't mean Apple should design and build everything in house. iPod design is already done by several outside companies and I believe Powerbook is designed by Sony. It's just that they should approve what is actually shipped and how its supported to guarantee the quality.
That's absurd. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had some decently-made PCs out of the 10 or 12 I've owned, but nothing like the quality of my Macs. I switched for home use a couple of years ago with a PowerBook. I added a MacMini last spring and a quad MacPro recently, and they are absolutely some of the nicest machines I've ever seen since I started as a tech in '79.
Apple would be completely stupid to give up that control and differentiation from everyone else.
Apple makes the finest consumer equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
My recommendation (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing but crap comes out of Gartner, how they are still in business is beyond me.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
He's never right, yet he still has a job.
Re:My recommendation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And the jackass of the week award goes to... (Score:3, Informative)
Morons (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee with increasing volumes large margins are not sustainable because Apple won't get as good of deals from Intel? Yeah that makes sense.. err wait no it doesn't! As volume goes up, Apple will get better deals from component manufacturers, in general, not worse. Maybe Intel will not cut them as nice of deals, but with increasing volumes, Apple does not need to maintain margins. Most of their costs are fixed. OS development, marketing, industrial design, etc. make up most of their costs, but remain fixed no matter how many units they ship. If they ship twice as many, they can cut their margins in half without being affected.
Either the Gartner people are looking to the very short term or they're out of their minds. The only way to free yourself from the influence of a monopoly is to maintain a complete vertical chain of components, including the one they have monopolized, but separate from their market. Apple doesn't sell their OS to Dell for two reasons. One, it would seriously cut into their hardware sales as people went to what they perceive as cheaper machines and were unable to compete with Dell's market outlets. Two, MS will kill Dell if they tried shipping OS X pre-installed. As soon as Dell had to re-negotiate their OEM licenses for Windows, MS would offer them the choice of being the largest supplier of computers in the US, with the cheapest rate for Windows, or being the most expensive supplier of PCs in the US. Assuming Gartner is 100% correct and Dell took all of that market, they'd still only be selling 13% of the machines in the US and they'd lose almost all of their existing 32% of the PC market selling Windows machines. Oh Dell would love that bargaining chip, but it just might kill Apple.
No, now is not the time for such a move. Everyone who has tried to compete in that market has been killed by MS's lock-ins, even though several had superior offerings at the time. Apple needs to maintain their segregation until either the courts actually stop MS's antitrust actions or until they or Linux has grabbed a bigger chunk of the pie.
is this the same gartner that said... (Score:5, Informative)
Trusting Gartner's eval is a bit like listening to the white house or congress speak about Iraq; You just know that they have their own agenda and worse, the ones behind it, have zip experience or education.
Intel 'subsidizing' Apple profits? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dell strikes a sweet deal with Intel after opening up it's systems to the AMD line...
HP muscles in and says it will go to AMD (I assume) unless it gets the same deal as Dell.
Dell and HP are in a deathgrip to maintain market share for the corporate and household WinTel platform, and are being nipped at by Lenovo, BestBuy, Walmart, etc, for market share, house branding, and margins
Apple, which has the luxury of owning premium software that can run on multiple platforms, let alone on an x86 platform, and is probably already paying slightly more (due to volumes) than Dell or HP, Apple is the EVIL one here, and should be punished by Intel asking for a higher per unit cost for components, because Apple is more profitable?
I see this as ludicrous as Goodyear asking for Honda to pay [even] more for the same tire as GM and Ford, because Honda can afford to pay it... x86 is a freakin' commodity, like pork bellies, and batteries (SONY, pay attention!!!). It's an important commodity, but fundamentally, a chip is a chip, and it's just that.
Intel is not subsidizing Apple... Intel is subsidizing the big boy PC maker market in order to stave off AMD and maintain market their share. This article infers that Intel will soon ask Apple to help subsidize this partnership, and apple will be in no position to fight back....
I hope Apple says either "AMD called yesterday and built a proto system on the PLUON chip... It ran OSX without mods... doesn't need another Universal Binary... just plug and play" or "You know, you should come over sometime... the boys in the labs, They built a sweet OS X system that uses a CELL chip from IBM.... Obtw, here's our order for 6million Core 2 Duo and Quad CPUs... volume pricing hasn't changed... correct?"
Let's Compare Dell vs. Apple Financials (Score:5, Informative)
(in millions, except per-share)
Q2, FY'07 Q2, FY'06 Change
Revenue $14,094 $13,428 5%
Operating Income $605 $1,173 (48%)
Net Income $502 $1,020 (51%)
Earnings/Share $0.22 $0.41 (46% )
Now let's look at Apple from their most recent announced results (in their case it's Q4 FY06 vs. Q4 FY05): [apple.com]
Q4 FY06 Q4 FY05
Revenue $4.84b $3.68B
Net Income $546m $430M
Earnings/Share: $.62 $.50
(Slashdot keeps taking out the spaces, which is why this looks funky.) So, even though Dell has a little more than 3x Apple's gross sales, Apple is the more profitable company. Dell's profits dropped by 51% between Q2FY06 and Q2FY07, while Apple's profits reached new records. Moreover, Apple's profitability and market share are both increasing, while Dell's is decreasing.
And Apple would want to outsource manufacturing to a much less profitable and quality-conscious company why?
Crow T. Trollbot
Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
The day I trust an analyst is the day I trust a politician.
Here's a hint for Gartner (Score:3, Funny)
Nonsense business advice (Score:3, Insightful)
In addressing the premise of the recommendation from this particular Gartner analyst, one has to wonder why a company would get out of a highly profitable area of their business while it is still highly profitable. The day may come when selling computers is not a good financial thing for Apple to do, but until that time I am pretty confident Apple will continue doing it.
Of course, many of us also question the prediction for other reasons. First, Apple is not just in the computer hardware business. They sell an overall user experience. The unique design of the hardware and the software are components in that overall experience - each is not easily separable from the other. Second, Apple's current strategy has been extremely effective. They continue to increase market share in each segment they operate in. The line between the iPod and the Mac computer line is continuing to blur without risking the individual segments.
It continues to amaze me that any analyst would be unable to comprehend that Apple's business model is not Dell's. Having not read the analysts actual report (too lazy to download it), I hope that he is only referring to the supply chain and manufacturing efficiencies that Dell is supposed to enjoy over other companies. However, I suspect that Apple is getting as efficient as Dell in these areas. If you look at their component inventory on-hand (at about 4-6 days), they seem to be quite good in their supply chain management. The earlier point that their margins may decrease seems a more salient point than to suggest that Apple would be any less capable of being able to profit from the computer business.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
they already have (Score:3, Insightful)
Clue (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Clue (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Clue (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think people are predicting that Apple are going to overtake Dell anytime soon but they're growing and profitable. Even if Apple were to license to Dell (or HP) their hardware is unique and desirable. The latest sales figures prove that Apple don't need Dell. What's most surprising is that almost 2/3rds of Apple's computer sales come from only 3 models of laptop. Maybe that's the reason that Gartner are missing as to why Apple have such a high margin and not anything to do with Intel discounts. Top of the line laptops typically have higher margins than beige boxes discounted in their thousands.
Re:Clue (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Clue (Score:5, Interesting)
And, in fact, they do.
http://developer.apple.com/labs/index.html [apple.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Clue (Score:5, Interesting)
The iMac is wonderful machine. Elegant, quiet, fast. Ok, sure, you can't open it up and add in a card. But who does? I can add a firewire/usb2 audio interface, or hard drives.
I dunno. Looking though the last Dell catalog I got, I didn't see anything I'd buy. And the prices aren't all that much greater than Apple's stuff.
Re:Clue (Score:4, Informative)
A decent high-end Windows machine (since you're comparing it to a high-end Mac) built in 1997 probably had a Pentium II and an AGP slot, which could have run Windows 98, Windows NT 4, or Windows 2000 until "just recently," but you retired it in 2000.
A decent PC built in 2000 that's in the same price range as a Power Mac or iMac 20" would have had a Pentium III, AGP, and support for 1GB+ of memory. That would still be usable today with Windows XP. But you retired it in 2003 and continued using a PowerPC 601 with no AGP and OS 9 until "just recently?"If you like long-lasting computers, you seem to have made poor choices of PC hardware, especially if you think a PowerPC 604 120-200Mhz still "usable."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Now wait a sec, didn't Apple go down this road once before? We as consumers did indeed get cheap apple boxes that were in fact better than Apples hardware (at least performance-wise) but then Apple pulled the plug on licensing cause' they were losing hardware sales, duh! Am I missing something?
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they care about user experience. Big corporations want Windows, multiple sourcing, and suppliers who know how to sell and support in large volumes. That's the user experience they care about, not the brushed metal themes, the fancy packaging and the grammatically superior dialogs. That's why they buy Dell and not Apple.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that huge corps also base their software on Windows, and that doesn't make that inherently better either. Huge corporations go with the flow - nothing to upset the cart, because that can get you fired. If you're old enough, you'll remember the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" slogan. *That* is why Windows and Dell are prevalent.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Out of 250, C640 laptops I had a 25% failure rate. upgraded to D600 and D610 and had a 35% failure rate and a 60% battery failure rate. This failure rate continued through the 2 years the laptops are in service.
Dell servers, big ones, like their top of the line 8 processor Xeon behemoth before they decided that they cant do 8 way server motherboards reliable and got out of them. Died on a regular basis.. Perc cards from dell dying, etc....
just b
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Informative)
That's just rubbish. Dell sold 37.3 million PCs last year, while Apple broke a record by selling 1.61 million Macs last quarter. Dell sells far more computers than Apple does.
Re:For the record... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Informative)
One early use of the term "personal computer" appeared in a November 3, 1962 New York Times article reporting John W. Mauchly's vision of future computing as detailed at a recent meeting of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers. Mauchly stated, "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer."
The term is much older than Apple. What Apple did is popularize it. It became synonymous with IBM compatibles because of the name of the original IBM PC (PC for short).
Re:For the record... (Score:4, Informative)
Let me put it another way that might be more enlightening: The growth in Dell's volume (ie, the difference between the number of machines they sold this year and the number last year) is greater than Apple's entire volume for the corresponding time period*. Apple is a distant fifth worldwide behind Dell, HP, Acer, and Lenovo.
* Note, this has been true for the last few years, but this quarter may not be due to Dell's recent problems.
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Interesting)
Strongly disagree. If you compare prices on similar Apple and Dell systems, you will usually find that the prices are higher on the Apple side, but only 10-20%, and that in the high end the margin disappears and your most powerful systems cost about the same either way. Of course, a clone is always cheaper, regardless of what market you're talking about, and to me that's the bottom line and the reason I don't buy Apple. Actually, there is another reason, which is that Apple does their best to bury their mistakes to help the iFanboys forget that they ever made them. I got rid of it long ago, but I had a First Generation B&W G3 that had the UDMA data corruption problem. Apple's official recommendation was to buy FWB toolkit to reduce the drive down to PIO mode which is slower and makes the IDE chip consume TONS more CPU, which IDE is bad about already; or to buy an IDE ATA card and move your drive to that. A clear Apple fuckup, which they even admitted, and they STILL didn't offer a logic board replacement to the Rev.2, where they didn't make the same mistake. This is a chip used in TONS of other hardware including UltraSparc systems (like the Ultra 1 and 2) so it's not the chip, it's Apple's inability to implement the chip.
But this isn't the part that's most upsetting - the thing that gets me is that when Apple folded their old knowledge base into the new library, they included documents both older and newer than the one I'm talking about, but that one didn't make it in. It is clearly a deliberate omission on Apple's part to try to cover up both the fact that they fucked up a computer, and that they were unresponsive to customers who purchased it. This is of course simply a further illustration of the fact that it's a very bad idea to purchase any first-generation Apple hardware, laptop desktop or otherwise, but it also explains why. Apple's customer support is legendarily bad when they think they can get away with it.
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Informative)
If you compare prices on similar Apple and Dell systems, you will usually find that the prices are higher on the Apple side, but only 10-20%, and that in the high end the margin disappears and your most powerful systems cost about the same either way.
Actually, you're out of date. Last year Apple systems were priced at approximately 14% higher than equivalent PCs, not Dells in general. This year, they are actually cheaper by about 5% to equivalent machines. You'll note, I don't say Dells, I say equivalent machines. That is because people conducting real market research soon discover it is hard to find an equivalent machine from Dell.
Apple's customer support is legendarily bad when they think they can get away with it.
Yeah, um, unlike all the other companies out there? Take a look at Consumer Reports for the last 5 years. Apple is one of the best for support, not the worst. You actually have to compare them to what else is out there. Sure, Apple support can really suck an egg, which makes it about twice as good as Dell's customer support that sucks two eggs.
Re:For the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
FF Market Share will drop over the next year.
Actually it is based upon multiple methods of information gathering, including spot checking and anonymous tests.
Wait a second, you take a jab at Consumer Reports' methodology and then you make an assertion like this based upon your views of what you read in a particular forum? Is that supposed to be a joke?
You make a lot of generalizations and assumptions, but the truth is the best data to date indicates Apple's support is better than average and you have no data to refute that claim. If you objectively look at the information, the best guess is the Apple's support is better.
Have you ever considered that a lot of UNIX types know exactly what they are doing, but simply have different priorities than you do? Open source, free software is a feature of software, but considering only one feature rather than the whole package is absurd. I use OS X, Windows, Linux, and OpenBSD every day. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. I'd love to have a primary workstation that was completely open source. I'm just not willing to give up all the features of OS X or all the available library of software for Windows to do it. The sad truth is, for a lot of tasks, their is no good Linux solution. For a lot of tasks, Linux itself, regardless of the applications, is inferior. I don't have the time or money to get the features I want added to Linux and it is falling further behind on the desktop, not catching up. When Linux has functional system services I can use and a two step upgrade path to a new machine, via a firewire cable, let me know. Until then, Linus will be on servers and Linux and Windows will both be running in VMs under OS X on the desktop.
Re:For the record... (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't had any issues with a properly-configured Linux desktop setup;
I'm not talking about "problems" as in bugs. I'm not talking about UI effects. I'm talking about missing features. I got a new laptop from work a few weeks back. I rebooted my old laptop into firewire mode, plugged in a cable and turned on the new laptop. It asked me if I wanted to install from the old one and I clicked "yes." Then I walked down to the coffee shop, grabbed a bite and a drink. That was it. All my configurations, settings, files, programs, security certs, user accounts, and everything else was sucked across the firewire cable. With a straight Linux machine it takes me days of configuration to get all those configurations back on new hardware.
The other feature I mentioned is system services. One spellchecker that works in all programs and shares a dictionary I customize. One grammar checker that works in all programs, regardless of if the developers of vi or Adobe InDesign or SubEthaEdit even knew such a feature was available. The same goes for scripts, language translation, online dictionary/thesaurus lookups, automatic bibliography citations, and hundreds more. Because OS X has provided a way for applications to share functionality with one another or from a plug-in I no longer have to copy and paste from my IM application into MS Word to check spelling or grammar. I can translate text from one language to another in any program. It saves me hours every week and I catch spelling errors in my posts and chats and IRC conversations and e-mail and Web mail and everything else, that I would have missed before.
Those are the two examples I listed, but they are not the only ways Linux is behind as a workstation. The thing is, I don't expect Linux to catch up anytime soon because all the people who really care about these things, have moved to OS X on the desktop. I use Linux on the server and I use it on the desktop for testing compatibility and for a few programs that I like better in KDE than in a generic X11 on OS X. But it just does not compare in general.
Until you try different systems for your everyday computer you just don't know what is missing from one or another. Don't mistake not having "problems" for Linux not being inferior in many ways.
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In fact, I'm not sure that linux can ever reach that type of integration or functionality by the very nature of OSS. Not that it's a bad thing, but lack of integration will always relegate linux to server room or the
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Personally, I'm happy with any computer built since the Difference Engine (Hey, I'm old. Ada Lovelace was hot).
But I also know that the rest of the world ain't like me and you. T
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Re:For the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple-haters really need to find some new material.
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I've got a Dell D300 that'll be seeing its ninth birthday next january. In that time, it got a solid five years of use as a workstation, and another three and a half as a server for my parents. I shut it down over the summer, simply because they didn't need it anymore. I opened it to find it full of
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I agree! I had to waste a whole five minutes taking off a tiny panel on the bottom and sliding the RAM in!
Vista? Hardly (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows is rapidly becoming a victim of it's own success. Making substantial changes to the code is difficult because they have to maintain compatibility with all the crap that's already out there. Apple has been able to go back to the drawing board and start with something t
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Re:Apple is a bit different (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apple's offerings are NOT more expensive than comparably equipped, say, Dells. The issue is that they do not have a low end el cheapo to compete with Dell's $500 junk.
They do NOT sell OS X at a premium, they sell it at a very competitive price, compared to Windows. Get the story straight. But, no they will never dump the hardware side; that's their bread and butter.
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Re:I can hear the Apple Fanboi's screaming now (Score:5, Insightful)
The major components like CPU, memory, and HD are the same but it is a simplification to say that it's all the same hardware. Especially when it comes to laptops. Except for BIY PCs, PCs are not all that interchangeable when you buy from the major manufacturers. You cannot replace a Dell MB with a HP MB and expect it to work perfectly. If you've done actually pricing between a Dell and an Apple feature for feature, the Apple is cheaper. Dell's target customer are those willing to pay the lowest price, period. Apple is not interested in that customer so their design is different than Dell's.
Some would argure one of the reason that OS X works so well it that it does not have to support the plethora of hardware that XP or Linux supports. Apple controls their own destiny when they control their own hardware. Again, Apple isn't looking to court the BIY customer.
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They basically only do it for ram and Hard drive problems, anything else and you still have to send the machine in, plus you wasted extra time in dealing with getting a support person out there.
How do I know this. My mother recently bought her first new computer(she was getting hand me downs from myself and my sister). Oddly enough the HP laptop had a backlight problem she spent the better part of 8 weeks trying to get HP to admit it. Finally they did and the machine
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Re:I can hear the Apple Fanboi's screaming now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I can hear the Apple Fanboi's screaming now (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all about how much your time is worth to you. $2k really is a lot of money, and I understand that it's too much for some. But like almost anything, quality costs more, and if you can afford better quality, you will spend less time maintaining it, or learning its quirks etc.
I used to be a mac hater years ago. Then I used one. learned that instead of feeling smug because i knew how smart you had to be to really get useful things done on a computer, I could just put that energy into just getting things done period. For most of us, it's not about the computer, it's about design, chemistry, architecture, whatever.
Apple doesn't make computers (Score:5, Insightful)
They design them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't ALL Apple products built under contract by factories in Asia?
What could they possibly gain by turning their manufacturing over to Dell?
This is not a slam at Apple. I own macs and ipods and I think they design great products. I just don't think there's an "Apple" factory out there churning out the gizmos. Why would they turn to Dell -- a company with a horrible, horrible track record for quality and reliability -- to make their products, when their current business arrangements seem to be working just fine?
$10B in the bank, no debt, 12 profitable quarters in a row, growing marketshare...this needs fixing how, exactly?
The Gartner guys must have mixed vodka with their Red Bull again.
Re:Apple doesn't make computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it does... (Score:3, Informative)
Apple retains one manufacturing plant in Laguna, CA and another in Cork, Ireland. Both have seen their workforces shrink in recent years.
I believe it may also have a company-owned (that is, not contracted) plant in Malaysia that makes mice.
Re:Smaller builders are helpful (Score:4, Insightful)
Dell making apple computers would be a bit like repurposing the old Ford Taurus plant to make Ferrari's.
Is Jaguar close enough for your analogy?
Re:Smaller builders are helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, the processor has become a commodity. The "experience" and end-to-end design that Apple sells is not a commodity. Who has lost their completitive advantage? It sure isn't Apple, and they know that.
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it's _completely_ about the processor
So it's not the processor. AMD processors aren't Intel processors. It is not the processor.
suddenly compatibility with my hundreds of PC games, applications and utilities becomes possible
AHA! So now we get to the real reason. Functionality. You have software you want to run. Apple makes (very nice) hardware that will run it.
And your final comments there are pretty accurate. Apple makes "the whole widget".
Re:Smaller builders are helpful (Score:5, Insightful)
---- Apple computers make up a tiny market share.
Apple's market share is growing, and guess what: that growth had to come from somewhere. Apple is taking share away from the other players in the market. It's also interesting to note that while Apple is #4 is market share right now (behind Gateway, but not for long), their profits for this quarter were $584 million. Gateway (.3% ahead of Apple right now in sales share) lost about $80 million last quarter, and Dell (#1) had profits of about $510 million for its last quarter. In other words, Dell and Gateway had to sell something like six times as many computers as Apple to make $160 million less than Apple did over the last quarter.
---- Dell and HP will continue to grow.
That's debatable. Dell and HP sell a lot of $300 computers at either a razor-thin profit as an actual loss-leader. A company that buys 1500 cheap desktop units for the workers will also buy a couple hundred high-end laptops for the executives.. and the laptops probably bring Dell more actual profit than the whole consignment of desktops. Thing is, Apple's growing market share is coming from the $1500-5000 price range, where Dell and HP make their real money.
Apple will be absolutely delighted to see Dell and HP ship 80% of the computers sold in the market, as long as that 80% comes from the sub-$1k, $2-profit-per-unit loss-leader segment. Meanwhile, Apple will sit happily on the 20% of unit sales that generate 25% profit on a $1500-5000 sale per machine.
---- How many small incremental features can be added to the iPod before people look the other way? Rivals are offering similar devices with more features at a lower price.
And consumers voting with their wallets don't give a shit. Those lower-priced units with similar features also offer a lousy user experience, which is just certain to get better now that Microsoft has jumped firmly astride the fence with its dual Zune-to-be-coming and Plays-for-Sure-Unless-It-Doesn't initiatives. The numbers for the past several years show that Apple holds about 75% of the global market and everyone else competes for the remaining 25%. Any competitors who want to take market share away from Apple have to do better than 'similar features (but lousy usability) at a slightly lower price'. They have to offer something that's significantly better. And since the competition is currently stuck in "which one sucks least?" territory, that isn't likely to happen any time soon.
---- Apple is sunk without a strategic alliance and a different strategy.
Apple is making money hand over fist in a market where everyone else is fighting to survive. And if you want a strategic alliance, wait 'til the cross-pollination between Apple's R&D and Intel's R&D starts to kick in. Apple is willing to push new technology into the market, where the Wintel manufacturers wait to adopt (or release) technology until a trend is established (look how long it took to get rid of parallel ports). Intel has spent years developing concept platforms that none of the Wintel OEMs have been willing to take to market. Apple wants an edge on technology, Intel wants a vendor to showcase its new tech. And now the two are working together.
Ford never owned Lamborghini (Score:3, Interesting)
It was Chrysler, who was responsible for the creation of the Diablo(Lee Iococca said the door sills on the Countach were too wide). You are correct that Chrysler raided some of the technology(ex. brakes on the Viper), however Chrysler sold off their interest in Lamborghini due to difficult financial circumstances(which lead to the Daimler "merger").
Lamborghini is currently owned by VW.
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Who has rejected what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me? I look around at fellow IT developers and quite a few of them have accepted OS X.
Furthermore Apple has done a great job growing really useful framrworks in the OS like Core Image and Core Data. There are an ever expanding group of developers for OSX who have seen what a pretty good development environment (XCode) and a well thought set of frameworks can do for productivity.
I know the Apple fans out there will fight me to their death, but the facts don't match up with you. Apple is slowly making the transition...
I won't fight you, I don't need to - for the obvious progression is to use Windows for legacy apps and switch everything else to the Mac. Bootcamp is Apple's 3270 emulator - it lets you keep using some old applications while moving forward.
Or really parallels is, Bootcamp is a slightly less convinent form of the same thing.
If you think Apple is anywhere close to giving up OS X just as it is exploding in popularity and usefulness then you might have something.
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Eventually apple will announce the costs of maintaining OSX doesn't meet the interest of the public, and they will start going to head to head with Dell selling windows desktops.
Funny, I'd be more inclined to think the opposite. It seems more likely to me that, as Vista crashes and burns and IT departments reject it for it's insane piracy-protection measures, Dell and other PC vendors will look at Apple's success and wonder if they should start offering their own optimized versions of open-sourced softwa
Re:Are you Kidding? (Score:4, Insightful)