New Mac Clone Maker 'Quo' To Open Retail Store

bughunter writes "Cnet is reporting that Mac clone maker Quo Computer plans to open its first retail location, selling Mac clones, on June 1st. To start, Quo will offer three desktop systems: the Life Q, Pro Q, and Max Q. While details of the components are not yet available, founder Rashantha De Silva said they are looking at Apple's system configurations for guidance. Pricing has also not been finalized on the desktop machines, but the company is looking to start pricing at less than $900. While Quo is starting off with the desktop machines, De Silva said it is looking at offering an Apple TV-like media server and a smaller computer similar to the Mac Mini. He acknowledges that Quo will likely face opposition from Apple, much like Psystar. 'They probably will (sue us),' De Silva said. 'There are others doing this, but we have a different attitude. There are thousands of people in the "Hackintosh" market, but many of them are creating bad products. I don't think anyone wins in that environment.'"

Comments

Re:Why?

[Darkness404]

Um, in case Apple has confused you, a Mac is made of commodity hardware. Other then perhaps EFI, nothing about the computer is a Mac, a Mac is simply a configuration of a PC installed with OS X by default.

Sure, OS X was designed with only one or two configurations for a Mac but with third party drivers its possible to extend it to almost any modern configuration in existence. There is nothing special about a Mac.

Re:Why?

[ya really]

But they do make their own motherboards, they make their own cooling solutions, they often meticulously design power supplies to be quiet, they will often times design the battery. They design the cases to be sturdy, have excellent heat conduction and they are quiet.

Actually, Intel builds their motherboards for for Apple http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,39244663,00.htm

Re:Why?

[maxume]

Except Microsoft makes about $0.75 of income on every $1 of OS sales that they do. See the client segment here:

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fr_dis.html

Apple doesn't break out their revenues and income by product segment, so a direct comparison is difficult; also, they don't publish a fancy Annual report, just a 10-Q for the SEC, which is available here (and probably lots of other places), so no linking to the pertinent section:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=107357&p=irol-sec

It is probably reasonably fair to compare Microsoft's above operating income for client sales to Apple's overall operating margin of about 20%:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL

The big difference is that Microsoft is selling OEM's licenses to Windows, with essentially no production costs (just development costs) and Apple has to buy all the parts for those computers from somebody, with costs that comprise a substantial portion of the eventual revenue that they bring in.

It's possible that computer hardware sales are more lucrative than other Apple products, but I doubt that it is a factor of 2 or whatever. So Microsoft could halve the revenue they are bringing in for OS sales and still probably be making more income on those revenues than Apple makes.

I think the biggest reason Apple doesn't want to license OS X for sale is that they would lose control over the experience ("It just works" is a big marketing point for them). Next in line is that they have significant hardware operations that would face lower margin competitors, likely eroding their revenues.