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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."
Apple pre-announcing a product, that is. Combine that with the Garfield movie, and I think we're only one very short step away from Armageddon... (but then, with such things as the Garfield movie, Armageddon can only be an improvement.)
What Jobs didn't announce was that they had started a new initative called "iSoul" where for a small "fee" you can have a G5 imac.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Its amazing how shallow their profit margins are, even with the common perception that "Apple is price-gouging" and whatnot. But hey, kudos on the $2bn gross revenue!
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Cooling issues are at the heart. For those who did not catch it, Apple unloaded on IBM today during the Q3 conference call for delays. IBM promises to have its wafer problems fixed by Q1.
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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.
I just can't figure out what's causing Apple to be so damn candid about this shortage. In the past when things like were suspected (cough) G5 (cough) there wasn't a peep out of Cupertino.
What's causing this newfound openness?
$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.
I wonder if Microsoft is regretting the choice of IBM to supply chips for the next XBox*?
;-)
Or maybe it's some machevellian plot whereby MS is paying IBM big $$ to stockpile chips for them, hence reducing Apple's supply?
Or am I totally off track and neXtBox chips are fabbed at a different plant?
*NB: There's no way I'm calling it XBox2, because MS are never going to have an *2 competing with a *3 (e.g. PS3).
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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.
I hope (fingers crossed) This. I doubt it though, Apple seems tied to including a monitor with thier consumer line :P
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For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $61 million, or $.16 per diluted share. These results compare to a net profit of $19 million, or $.05 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Revenue for the quarter was $2.014 billion, up 30 percent from the year-ago quarter. Apple has done very well setting themselves up in several markets. First off, apple has the iPod, which brings in revenue, as well as iTunes, another device to bring in money. But Mac's best move was to jump into education, and art. Apple markets its products aggressively to schools, and from my experience with high school computer labs, as well as colleges in my area, most are Mac based. Apple has pushed "laptop schools" and has been the driving power behind them. Many universities are clustering powermacs to create low cost super computers.
The second market is art. When it comes to digital photography, the number one computer I hear reccomended is the iMac. Digital Photography is not a huge market but it is a growing one, combine that with Mac's iLife suite, iMovie and final cut pro.
iTunes, the iPod, marketing to education and towards the arts are in my opinion, a solid footing that despite "low earnings" will keep Mac around for some time.
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"I was with you until you mentioned "eunuch"... :-)"
Wasn't OSX based on eunuchs?
"Derp de derp."
If you're really in such a hurry, you could lift a finger to try to speed things up.
I just went to www.apple.com/store and clicked through the configurator for the 3 featured G5 configs. No changes, just Select->Continue->Continue from the store main page to get to the shopping cart where there's a ship time estimate.
The dual 1.8GHz: 3-5 business days.
The dual 2GHz: 3-5 business days.
The dual 2.5GHz: 4-6 weeks.
Changing the configuration delays things a bit, but not much. I took the dual-2.0GHz G5 and maxed out the RAM, HD, and video card options, and now it says 7-10 business days.
It looks to me like only the dual 2.5GHz G5 is in short supply (not surprising since it's probably the one that IBM is having the hardest time making the CPU for, though that's just my speculation). The other models aren't. Cancel your order for a dual 2.5 and get a 1.8 or 2.0 dual G5 instead, and tweak the config to your heart's content. Or, if you really really need that 2.5, wait. If you're in a tearing hurry, you could probably walk into an Apple retail store and walk out with one the same day.
Alternatively, you could buy your G5 from MacWarehouse or Outpost.com. Some of them will add RAM and stuff for you; others might not. Outpost.com says they can ship the dual 1.8 and dual 2.0 same-day. CDW says they have dual-1.6 G5's also available same day. This is right on their search results page. I didn't even pick up the phone to find this out. I searched for "G5" on Outpost.com, and MacWarehouse had a link to the closeout 1.6GHz model on their home page.
Using C|Net shopper to find the best price on a dual 2.0GHz G5 shows a list of merchants in which every single one claims to have this model in stock now.
This took me about 10 minutes of surfing to find out. Maybe you should spend a few minutes yourself since it's your computer order?
"Its amazing how shallow their profit margins are, even with the common perception that "Apple is price-gouging" and whatnot."
I wonder if it's more a situation where Apple took a lot of one-time charges against a good fiscal period. Minimize taxes while simultaneously "expensing while the expensing's good".
Re: the common perception of "price gouging" (not yours of course), today yet again my Gateway wintel box crapped out. 4th time in 3.5 years. Hardware failure. The Dell next to it crapped out a few months earlier. 3rd time in 1.5 years. Meanwhile my 1999 PowerMac G4 and 1995 PowerMac 7600 have chugged along without a hitch to this day.
Those rock-bottom priced consumer PCs are no bargain at all. Good components cost $$$, and on average you get what you pay for.
And yes, I realize there are quality Intel/AMD boxes out there. They also cost a good bit more than your average Dell consumer bargain box.
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
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.
R&D costs are, well, costs. Profit is what you're left with after you've paid your costs. Like R&D.
According to AAPL's SEC filings, it spends about $120 million every 3 months on R&D (or about 480 million dollars per year).
Dell spent LESS than that, at $464 million for R&D, even though their turnover is 6 times Apple's, and their profit is $3 billion. Relative to Dell, Apple spends wild amounts of money on R&D.
Of course, all that pales in comparison with IBM's $5 billion R&D budget, but then, IBM is also in the business of researching things that Apple uses in its products, like the G5 processor for example (hard to miss that one, really..)
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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.
Wireless Monitor.
It will have bluetooth built in so it will sync with wireless mouse and keyboard, but the monitor will not be wired to the box. Monitor will also have a built in trackpad.
User input will be sent (via airport-like dingus) to the box, and video will be sent back to monitor in the same manner.
You'll be able to take the monitor (via built in handle) to your couch and surf wirelessly.
Monitor sets into the base station (box) to get charged and become a sharp looking desktop machine.
Monitor might be able to travel and connect to other macs wirelessly (eg: log into an wifi-equipped laptop).
Ok, that's my dream. Make it happen.
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What I also found really interesting was the fact they shipped 13000 Xserves (a quarterly record), in a time when they were dealing with IBM's 90 nm teething pains.
A good 40% of those Xserves were destined for clusters too.
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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