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Apple Confirms G5 Based iMac to Ship in September
evn writes "Apple Insider and Yahoo News are carrying stories about Apple's 3rd quarter report including confirmation of a G5 iMac during Apple's webcast conference call to discuss the filing: 'IBM's manufacturing problems have also impacted our next generation iMac. We normally don't talk about unannounced products but we feel you need to know about the current situation. The new iMac is based on the G5 processor. We could not secure the necessary supply of G5 processors to launch our new iMac on schedule: and as we indicated a few weeks ago, we now plan to announce and ship it in september.' Apple made $61 million dollars profit on $2.01 billion dollars in Q3/04 and had the highest CPU shipments in three and a half years."
I'd say for a pretty damn long time according to this line: Apple remains a debt-free company with $4.96 billion in cash.
Look what Apple comes out with on its resources. What does that say of other companies' R&D?
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
$61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
What R&D exactly? Did it cost them $70M to make a bunch of cheap parts overseas, throw them in a black case, and slap DELL on it?
> That's a miniscule amount when you look at the profits of just
> about any other tech company. $61million in profits can
> barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
>
> Any thoughts on how long apple can keep up results this
> mediocre?
Well with nearly $5billion cash on hand, and making profits... that means they'll be down to $zero in...
no, you tell me. you do the math. $5billion plus a positive number, repeatedly, and tell me when you get to zero.
Typically they don't pre-announce so that the new upcoming product doesn't stunt sales of the current product. But in this case, they stopped selling the old one, so you might as well fire up the Hype Engine early.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Just for reference, what were the profit numbers for Gateway, say in the last two or three years? Hint, look below the X axis of the chart...
$61 million is what Apple had left AFTER costs, which include all the R&D that they do. Whether it's 6 million or 600 million doesn't tell you how big the R&D budget was.
Frankly put, Apple ran out of G4 iMacs. Either sales were better than expected, IBM was worse than expected, or both. They STILL have G4 Power Macs, having just quit making them, so they didn't want to cannibalize sales on the Power Mac G5 release. Now they want to get people excited so they keep their pants on and don't go get a Dell or even settle for an eMac before September. Besides, it's nice to let your stockholders know what's up when you have hit a mishap -- remind them that the dark cloud of no iMacs has a 64-bit silicon lining.
I was one of those PC biggots who has been kicking around getting a Mac for the past 6 months. Speaking with Mac savy friends, they recommended against getting any Mac product in its first generation.
According to the rumor rags, IBM just got a low power version of the G5 going 3-4 weeks ago. So, assuming that Apple can crank out a power book by years end, would you want to get a first generation product?
I thought about this, and figure it will be at least 12-18 months before there is a chance of a Powerbook that I would want to purchase.
I bit the bullet, and hit the Apple store. Picked up a 15" 1.5GHz powerbook, 5400RPM hard disk, 1GB RAM, 128MB video RAM.
Completely happy with it. Have not turned my PC back on since I copied my data files from it.
Moral to the story: If you want the computer, and have the cash, buy the thing. You will probably purchase a new machine in 18 months anyway.
Consider the prices of the current iMacs and iBooks for a moment - The low-end iBook matches the low-end iMac in everything but hard drive space, and its $200 cheaper. You can bump that drive up to a 60gb (the iMac's is 80) for $75, and you'll still have $125 more than if you bought the iMac.
I'm not willing to *pay* $125 to be tied to a desk, are you? Maybe a few people would be willing to pay the extra for the larger, but same resolution, LCD. Personally I think the portability and $125 are worth the 3" though.
I think this probably had quite bit of influence on Apple's decision to discontinue the G4 iMacs so long before their replacements are available - the iBooks undercutting the iMacs like that couldn't have been good for sales.
In particular, I see two major trends.
The first is the rise of small developers creating very polished new apps that leverage OS X. Omni Group, Stone Design, Panic, Freshly Squeezed, Ambrosia, et. al. fit in this catogory. Many of the apps created by these companies have no real qualitative counterpart in the Windows world. These companies are thriving even though the overall size of the Mac software market is obviously far smaller than the Windows market.
The second is the exposure of many Open Source/*NIX developers to OS X. I've encountered many UNIX geeks who are doing development work on their PowerBooks. The fact that so much of what used to be stand-alone application development has now been replaced by server-side Web apps means that developers can work on OS X, deploy on Linux, and everyone gets to use the resulting Web app. Add to that the portability of *NIX apps to OS X and in many ways OS X now has a much greater stable of code for server and database development than Windows does.
I'm also not really sure how "flat" sales translates into destruction. Flat sales is still sales year after year. As long as application developers can make money on Mac development, they will do so. You don't have to become the next Macromedia in order to thrive as a software development company. If the size of the market were shrinking in absolute terms, I'd agree that Mac software publishers are in trouble.
My point about marketshare figures is that the same "the sky is falling" rationale has been used literally ever since the Mac was first rolled out. In my opinion even though the Mac's marketshare (based on sales, not on machines in use) is at around 3%, now is really about the best time to be a Mac user in the 18 years I've been one. There are a lot of great apps, the hardware is excellent, the company is in great financial health, UNIX geeks are no longer snorting at the Mac, Windows users are starting to realize that the Mac is moving forward while Microsoft continues to have missteps with ongoing Windows development, and the Mac more easily fits in with Windows and UNIX environments than ever before.
I solidly agree with you about the lack of an iMac being a Bad Thing. In fact, I nearly got my virtual ass shot off in a Mac forum a while back for pointing out that Apple had screwed up plain and simple. The G5 problems are the sorts of things that happen in the computer industry, but that doesn't excuse Apple. The iMac is a critical product for them, and the positive response Windows users have had to the iPod means that Apple should have a flexible, well-priced consumer desktop ready for people who are interested in trying a Mac.
I'm definitely with you on not wanting the Mac to turn into a Be/Amiga type of platform. But I stuck with the Mac through the really tough mid to late 1990s, and I really do think that Apple is a much smarter, much more focused, much more capable company than it was then, and the Macintosh platform is in much better shape now.
One last note, then I'll leave you alone. ;-) Apple's comparative cost/performance strength has always been on their high end machines, and I don't think that will change any time soon. For consumer products, people expect to pay a premium for a better overall computing experience. Some customers will pay this premium, while most will not. But competing with Dell on the price of low end boxes is a losing proposition for Apple. They can never win in a commoditized market, particularly against a competitor whose entire business model was built around reducing production and distribution costs, rather than on creating better technology.
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