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Next-Gen Apples To Include 1394b, USB 2.0
seletz writes: "According to this article on The Register, Apple will ship its next-generation PowerMacs with USB 2.0 and double FireWire.
USB 2.0 boosts data transfer up to 480Mbps, FireWire 1394b goes up to 3.2Gbps." It may seem a minor point, but the more and faster connections are built in, the less frequently the upgrade gremlins have to strike. 3.2Gbps!
I tend to go to a lot of Apple seminars and follow the Mac world pretty well and I would be exceptionally surprised if Apple was laying off employees at this stage. They are really working hard to get OS 10.1 out the door on time and make sure it's really polished. I have certainly seen no indication that they are slowing down at all. I would say if there are any lay offs they'd be in marketing/management positions rather than the research and development areas.
I can't understand is how Apple can stay in business when their computers cost a hell of a lot more than the Intel based PCs?
There have been a large number of studies which suggest that the total cost of ownership of owning a Mac is significantly less than owning a Windows based PC. Admitedly, people and business' don't tend to notice these things, and go for the immediate lower price. Apple stay in business by actually making a profit on their systems rather than trying to continuously undercut the competition - note how many PC manufacturers are going out of business.
The number of units you ship is far less important than whether or not you make enough profit to cover your development, production, management and other costs. Apple's pricing does this, Gateway Australia's pricing didn't (hence they've gone out of business). Apple has made a profit for something like 11 out of the last 12 quarters which is better than most PC manufacturers.
Apple also has a very dedicated (fanatic) installed user base which helps a lot. Mostly though they have innovation. They put firewire and USB in their computers, they popularise wireless networking and "Apple ignited the desktop publishing revolution" (to take their marketing speel).
was pricing laptops a couple weeks ago, and for the money it would have cost me to buy a moderately loaded iMac, I could have gotten a Thinkpad for roughly half the cost, comparably equipped.
This surprises me, though it obviously depends largely on what you want from your laptop. I went out pricing laptops about 6 months ago (long time in IT I know) and found that Apple's laptops were far and away better value than the PCs. Not that they were cheaper, but they were clearly sturdier, more feature packed and most significantly had better screens and battery life. The cheap PC laptop world makes a lot of sacrifices in functionality. Either they have ridiculously small screens or poor quality screens and two or three hour battery life was normal. Then you tended to give up a CDROM to make the laptop smaller and many PC laptops (nowhere near as many these days though) don't have ethernet as standard. Then there's the lact of dual head ability (most do video mirroring) or a lack of video output options (note that the iBook does not do dual head either, which is why I type this on a Titanium PowerBook). Now, for some people these trade offs are worth the cost savings - for some people they aren't even trade offs, but just remove unwanted features. For many people (including me) these features are invaluable.
The final big advantage that I find with Apple is the OS. Mac OS X is a joy to use (I look forward to the reported responsiveness improvements of 10.1 naturally), there are rough edges and it is not perfect but the combination of UNIX and a solid, simple, clean, user friendly GUI is an absolute God send. I can happily use vim to hack away my perl scripts, test them with apache and postgresql and follow the design document which was written in Word. The lack of responsiveness that is currently in OS X is more than made up for by the fact that I don't have to reboot between Linux and MacOS anymore (for the record I don't remember the last time I booted into OS 9).
The morale: sometimes paying more in the short term is worthwhile in the long run, but it all depends on what you want to do.
"It may seem a minor point, but the more and faster connections are built in, the less frequently the upgrade gremlins have to strike."
Yet another reason the industry hates Apple. They build their computers to last, even moreso than other manufacturers.