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Apple Should Get Out of Hardware?
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.'"
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
People have lost trust in quality of mainstream PC hardware and software, which is a big reason for growing Apple shipments in the first place. Nobody will trust a Mac from Dell. If Apple allows independent licensees at all, it should be a Japanese company line Sony or Panasonic. Even then there are many dangers. Licensees may not ship timely updates to hardware to run the latest releases of MacOSX. Look at how many PCs are still shipped with Intel integrated graphics which will suck on Vista. Does anyone really think the switch to Intel would have gone as quickly with 5 vendors who have their own investment in PPC macs? 3rd parties may not have support on the par with AppleCare and Genius Bar. By providing a complete package, Apple gives you one place which is going to be responsible for any problems you have with your purchase.
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.
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.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Currently own and love my Powerbook G4 15", have got a dual G4 1GHz. Got an iPod too. Am coding on the Mac in Python right now.
That said, my [HUGE] office's Dell Latitude D620 gets much respect from me. It's a nicely turned machine, far from crap. I could ask for more ports and better video hardware (the intel video chipset and particularly the intel software suck ass bigtime), but it's really a well-thought-out business laptop.
My wife's Dell Inspiron is clunky-looking, too big for what it is, poorly finished - maybe this is what the other poster was thinking about when he called Dells "crap".
My last 3 Dell experiences have been good ones. My wife's had two bad machines in a row (her Latitude C600 had serious problems).
I've had only one Mac I really disliked, and that was my 1994-vintage Power Macintosh 7100/66.
Apple has a good track-record of bringing innovation to the market, and thinking out ahead of where the rest of the market is. Dell is currently delivering workmanlike machines.
We lose a lot if Apple outsources their innovation to someone else...
really??? so you never touched a large number of dells then.
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 because you have a single laptop that worked fine, does not mean dell products are reliable.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I take it you don't own a Mac, nor have you priced one. I just did. At dell, a desktop with a 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM, 250 GB HD and an NVidia 7900 GS with 256 MB of RAM costs you $2214. An iMac with a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo and a NVidia 7600 GT (256 MB RAM) costs $2300. The kicker? The iMac comes with a 24-inch widescreen monitor. The dell comes with a 20 inch regular sized monitor. In essence, I trade a slightly slower video card for a much, much nicer screen. And some bells and whistles like bluetooth, wirelesss, etc.
Yes, it's essentially not upgradeable (the videocard is actually soldered in). But I built my PC before, and by the time I had to upgrade, it was a case of having to upgrade everything anyway. Since I use a NAS for storage, I have the same flexibility as with a PC - and the connectivity is actually a lot easier and less troublesome. As for tweaking.... yeah, I used to do that. Now I just don't want to spend hours on fiddling with Memory latencies to squeeze a couple more frames out of Doom. I just want something that works well, does what I want it to do, and does it for a good price. And the iMac is perfect in that sense.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
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!
You missed an apple adoption of technology that the rest of the industy has ignored - ExpressCard. 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.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are rumors floating around that Mac OS X 10.5 will run Windows apps natively.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
I think there are a lot of hold-outs from when Dell didn't suck. Dell used to make very good machines at reasonable prices. They weren't the cheapest (that was Gateway), but it wasn't the most expensive, either.
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 drywall dust, because apparently nobody had thought to remove it from the closet while they renovated the basement last year.
I replaced that Dell D300 with an Inspiron 8200. It wasn't very good. It was a flimsy, awkward thing, the screen had to be replaced after a year, and after the three-year warranty ran out, the DVD drive started to get sketchy. And that was a $2k machine too --- I shudder to think what the $1000 boxes are like.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No, the folks at Gartner say that their margins are sponsored by heavy Intel discounts. When those discounts will be gone - as they will most likely be in the near future, Gartner also dixit - then Apple hardware will bring little to no profit.
At least from that cold business point of view (which is what Gartner is all abou). If you look at the Apple brand, however, that's a whole different story. Apple lived a long time on it's underdog image (and still does, in spite of their absolute domination on the iPod... ahem... portable music player market). And their precious computer division is feeding that image. That's why they're keeping it, because even it's not good for the business of that division, is good for Apple as a whole.
Just as a brain teaser: if Apple would suddenly decide to open OS X for all those beige boxes, how many, do you think, would make the switch? Would that hurt their hardware division? Definitely. Apple computers would slowly dissapear, replaced by the HPs, Lenovos and Dells du jour. But that would be more than compensated by the software sales. So why don't they just do it?
Just
I actually completely disagree with this. And one reason. x86 compatibility. Until a year ago, I never would have considered owning a Macintosh. But, with an x86 processor inside, Boot Camp, Crossover, and other recent additions to the Mac arsenal, for the first time since 1989, I want a Mac! And it's _completely_ about the processor. It could be AMD as well, but the main point is that suddenly compatibility with my hundreds of PC games, applications and utilities becomes possible. Easily, without having to buy new versions or hope the developer might actually MAKE a new version.
One comment I haven't seen is.. one of the reasons, in my opinion, that Apple never reached market dominance in the beginning of the 90s is the lack of homebrew solutions. The people building their own machines, specifying the compoents they wanted, and knowing all about the architecture was the catalystfor companies like Gateway and Dell to succeed and in fact help Windows become the dominant OS. Quite simply, Apple refused to share the wealth. People attack Microsoft for being greedy, but in the process, they have made many other companies wealthy beyond belief.
Ford did not own Lamborghini.
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.
Being a user of both Windows and Macs, I'd say that I'd always get Apple's hardware. It might be a little more expensive than a build your own machine, but, it will last longer. The PowerMac 9500 I bought in 1996 I just recently retired. But the Windows machine I put together in 1997 got retired in 2000, then then next one was built, and retired in 2003, and the next one was built, and will be retired for a new iMac 20".
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.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
And, in fact, they do.
http://developer.apple.com/labs/index.html
---k--
</stupid>
Fixed that for you. Lots of programs stopped working between 10.3 and 10.4, which annoyed at least me a bit. Apple forced people who upgraded the OS to upgrade their programs as well. I presume there was a cost/risk analysis somewhere, and Apple's said "yes" while Microsoft's said "no".
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
You just proved the GP's point.
...then... It could be AMD as well
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". Period. IBM was trying to do the same, but made a poor attempt at it and ended up being the designer of an open system. It turned into the "wild west" of computing. Now we're growing out of that "wild west" phase and we're looking for something more refined. Something that "just works". Something that is designed as a "whole widget". And Apple still makes them. It's not that Apple was wrong to do what they did, it's just that it wasn't time to do it yet.
If that was the case, comapnies would be buying boat loads of Inspirons instead of lattitudes. Dimentions instead of Optiplex's. The reason comapny;s buy opti's and latti's are the fact its a enterprise supportable platform. If you have a D series Latti, then you just have to stock D series gear. One of our captains had his D600 replaced with a D620, didnt have to change the docking stations he had, his floppy, or any of the accessories. You dont get that with platforms like Inspiron, or Macbooks. I'm not a fanboy or mac-bashing (i think the new macbooks are damn sexy), but apple isnt an enterprise platform. There's no managment frame work that come close to openmanage or hp's insight. the fact you can have SMS push out a bios or firmware update to a few hundred desktops is why you have corperations buying them by the pallet.
I think that most customer surveys are flawed and you have no chance to figure out what's going on inside a customer's head without a focus group or similar, where you can find out why they gave particular answers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Apple does this all the time. It does make for a vibrant 3rd developer market, with opportunities to charge for updates at more points of failure, and the new technologies and frameworks you adopt with each OS revision typically provide enough incentive for people to put down their hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, this also makes OSX unacceptable for corporate use, as in-house solutions are much more difficult to support if APIs keep getting deprecated or significantly modified. Also, you tend to have to recompile with the latest version of XCode as major OS revisions are released, or your apps will have stability problems, meaning that you can't just keep using the same binaries for long periods of time. There are advantages (3rd party developer sales, enticing new features on a regular basis) and disadvantages (app stability and compatibility, increased effort for developers, lost corporate sales). In the consumer market where Apple thrives, they can get away with this tradeoff and offer their users more drastic progress. It costs them the corporate market, however, so that must be ceded to Microsoft, who will ensure backwards compatibility to developers who use their APIs, in exchange for less fundamental innovation and end user features.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Linux is also geared to API stability to the extreme, and offers great value to corporate users. Since all the code to Linux is open, you can ensure that an API will be there in a usable form if you need it. As Linux takes away Microsoft's bread and butter, MS will react violently, trying to make big interface changes to compete with Apple in the consumer market, while keeping their corporate customers appeased with backwards-compatibility, and locked in with licensing agreements. This is a trap for them, though, as corporate customers don't care for fancy visual doodads or subscribing to ever-updating software. They want to run their productivity and database software on a stable platform, and that's it. They will keep their Win2k, XP and Office2k3 licenses until Linux and OpenOffice is able to be swapped in seamlessly (which is pretty much the case now), and get off of MS licensing for good. Since MS will be fighting to hold on to the remaining corporate diehards, they will be reluctant to make the big sweeping changes Apple has been able to, and so won't be able to compete in the consumer space as well. The combination of Apple's rise in the consumer space and Linux's rise in the corporate space will really start to put the hurt on Microsoft in the years to come. They're really caught between a rock and a hard place, and they're squeezing together at an increasing rate. Their attempts to lock down the screws with Windows Genuine Advantage are just going to accelerate this shift.
If Microsoft is to succeed, they will have to become a middleware vendor for other operating systems. If they focus on their vast library of APIs, and work on making them universally available, they would have great leverage, with all the software that depends on these APIs, to secure a large part of the future computer market. This would attract more developers to their platform, and make their platform more crucial to computing in general.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Even if thats true ( which i doubt ), so what? Why do you have to *gain* each quarter to stay in a market? What if you are making a ton of money off the sales you are doing now and just keep it at that level? I would say you are still making the same amount of money.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In the 15 years i've been in IT, I have consistently been a white-box/Dell/HP/EMC guy. The current network I admin uses Dell servers and the 3 year old Dell workstations are on their way out. Guess what we are buying to replace the aging workstations? You guessed it - Macs.
The ability to standardize on one platform for both Mac OS and Windows is great. The hardware is nicely designed, and seems to hold up better than Dell or HP.
Still, Dell makes a nice server, and the re-branded EMC stuff is also nice....but who knows...the next Xserves may run Windows....you never know.
Apple's control over its hardware ensures quality. The miracle called Boot Camp will only increase Apple's market share. I hope an MBA doesn't screw that up.
-ted
I'm somewhat disapointed with apple's present hardware offerings. I wish they kept the PPC platform esp since PA semi made the laptop chip they needed and it's better then intel's core ie is 64bit has an onboard PCI-e controller and two DDR2 memory controllers and uses only 5 to 13 watts. Tell me does yohna or even conroe come close to this http://www.pasemi.com/processors/1682M.html Other gripes no PCMCIA on the macbooks and to get a usable graphics card you must buy the macbook pro. Though since they have OSX on X86 I'd like to see it offered for normal PCs esp since I seen acer and sony laptops that have better battery life and offer a 3d card for a lot less money.
You'd also think businesses would prefer getting both hardware and software from a single source so it can be supported fully, instead of the constant blame-passing you get if you run third party software on a given piece of hardware.
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