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Apple Dominates "Premium PC" Market
itwbennett writes "Macs made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up computer market in June. Not so long ago, $1,000 got you an entry-level machine. Today the average computer sells for $701, while the average Windows machine sells for only $515. Still, Macs only make up 8.7% of PC sales. But is that really such a bad position to be in? Consider an Apples to Apples, that is, Macs to iPhones comparison: the iPhone takes only a sliver of the phone market but a much larger share of the profits."
Windows 7 "Premium" Edition - $1000
Apple dominates the premium priced market, not the premium PC market.
but Mac has no real "economy" option. Part for part, as many mac fanboys will tell you, mac hardware is around the same price as PC. The difference is that you can buy stuff that is a few months old (still very good hardware, but not the latest and greatest) and save a lot of money.
I guess you could call that the "premium pc" market.
I equate it to designer sunglasses. People will spend $300 for this years sunglasses, passing over last years (now priced at $20). I think mac appeals to this market.. people who want the absolute latest and greatest regardless of how much actual added value they are getting.
BMW has about 5-8%* of the auto market, but they make a lot of money in that little niche. You don't have to dominate the world to be profitable.
And yes, this does go to show that Microsoft is right in the laptop hunters ad -- Macs *are* pricier. But to those that buy them, they get something of value for that extra $$$.
*I just made that up.
Go somewhere random
Wow, what a clever manipulation of statistics. Somehow people who spend less than $1,000 don't have "premium" computers? How does that even work? I mean, I blow $1,500 on hardware but no software and it's "premium", but if I'm a poor graphic designer and buy a PC for $700 instead and spend the rest on Adobe's atrocious licensing fees, that makes me "not premium"? This doesn't say anything about "premium" or "not premium" -- this DOES however say a lot about how much people are willing to blow on Apple products. Answering why they're doing this is left as an excercise for the reader.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I don't buy branded PCs. If I need one, usually for a Linux server, I build it. If I want a desktop computer I buy Apple. The hardware is better quality than most branded PCs and is highly similar between units so it can easily be tested and relied on. It also happens to look nicer and come with an OS that works a whole lot better. We use VMWare Fusion for those who need Windows or Linux desktops.
My Dell, which has a bigger screen and faster CPU than my MacBook, is mostly used by my wife and she is wanting to switch to a MacBook because it is so much easier to use and doesn't get to hot when used on your lap. My sister recently switched from PC to MacBook too.
A couple hundred dollars of cost upfront is a lot cheaper than TCO on a PC and in almost every way a Mac is better,
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Apple's appeal is that OSX is a generally better OS than Windows, particularly in the area of usability. That, not "marketing" or "aesthetics" is why people will pay more for the same hardware.
I find it amusing that people don't understand that the software itself has value.
The cake is a pie
NOT 91% of the market. 9 out of every 10 dollars spent on computers over $1000 are spent on Apple computers. Plus, is this really big news? In the first paragraph of the article it says that this is up from 88% in May.
These numbers only reference brick and mortar retail sales. 3 out of the last 4 machines I bought were purchased from the manufacturer's website, customized to my specs, and only one of those was under $1000. They wouldn't have been included in these sorts of 'selective statistics'
As for $1000+ machines, it doesn't cover servers/workstations either (which you wouldn't buy over the counter anyway).
What this says to me:
1) Apple has a decent retail store presence :)
2) Macs are frakkin' expensive
3) By selectively applying filters to your stats, you can say whatever you want. Ladies, I have the biggest dick you'll ever see (in this room/of all males within a five foot radius/for the next five minutes).
People that are willing to put $1,000 into their PC probably don't want the limited choices offered by OEMs. They are going to build it from parts.
Both at work and at home. I don't have to reinstall my OS at least once a year, run defrag on a monthly basis, worry about anti-virus updates every week, or spend hours trying to find and compile drivers for some piece of hardware as I always seem to with Linux even today. It just works. That's what I want, and I'll pay the price difference upfront. I got a good 4 years out of my old PowerBook. It needs a new power adaptor (fell on a ceramic tile floor and busted). but should still work and my QuadCore PowerMac G5 is still going strong and it's 4.5 years old. Most I've done to it is add an extra 500GB internal to store video files for video editing. (before external drives came down in price).
I now have a MacBook Pro provided by work. Does everything I want and can even boot into XP if I need too for testing (or to play an occasional old game from my PC collection).
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Either way, time will tell.
We've been hearing this line for almost a decade now, and time has told to a tune of nearly 6-fold gain in shareholder value since 2000, giving Apple today a larger market cap than Google, HP, and Dell. I keep waiting for this grand charade to end, but Apple keeps raking in $8 billion dollars a quarter.
They've succeeded by every rational metric of business.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
While Macs have a certain appeal to them that is aesthetic, their usability has not gone up in the enterprise, nor in the home market.
Where do you get that idea from? My whole company switched to Macs and productivity is up as we spend so much less time on desktop maintenance. In the last few years most of my friends have switched to Macs and they all say they're easier to use. I know one high level executive who's arguing with his IT department to let him use his Mac and iPhone on the corporate network because he prefers their usability and productivity.
Developers: We can use your help.
The people defending today the "one menu to rule them all" philosophy with all the "mouse on the edge, easier, blah blah" will be overjoyed and forget about their advocacy if Steve some day decides to think with his head and change this irritating "feature"...
Overall I like Windows this days a lot more and only use my Mac when needed (testing, etc).
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
The Macs I've owned over the past few years (starting with a Powerbook for my wife) have been excellent. The hardware and construction are top-notch. The design (worth a little bit, anyway) is superior to pretty much everything produced in the Wintel arena.
Most important, though, the OS kicks ass.
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable. Combine the excellent hardware engineering, and the superior UI design of OS X, and you have a machine that is worth the extra money. (Which really isn't extra. As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.)
Me, I still gravitate to Linux. When my wife ran MS-Windows, though, I had to either lock her machine down and manage it myself, or let her manage it, but re-install the OS every six months. With OS X, she can manage the machine herself, and I don't have to lock it down or re-install all the time.
My sig still holds. MS-Windows (and the machines it typically runs on) is like Budweiser. Cheap, but not worth the price. Once you get used to the good stuff, it's hard to go back to the shit peddled as "The King of Computers."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It is probably more reasonable to talk about the $1.2 billion that they earn each quarter, rather than their revenues:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL
For instance, when Google has a good quarter, they make more than that, on 70% of the revenues:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=goog
And HP manages to only make a little more than Apple, on 340% of the revenues:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=hpq
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
As usual, this is a US-only thing.
In Europe, 1,000 EUR (1,422 USD) and more computers are commonplace, and Apple is not any more expensive than the other computer manufacturers (on the contrary, for laptops, they probably offer the best deals at the moment).
Yes, we are being exploited.
No, I won't compare Apple's market share to Mercedes' . But just think in absolute terms : even if Macs cost double more than an average PC, the difference is only a few hundredths of dollars, which is the extra price you pay to have a "luxury" item. Now think of cars : how many people spend thousands of dollars (or your favourite currency) to have a flashier car ?
I spend much more time in front of my computer than driving my car. Hence, I am ready to spend a little more to have a luxury computer...
"Apple most popular among those who like to overspend and don't know the value of the dollar."
Same guts marked up and built for aesthetics instead of being engineered to be solid. Never underestimate the "Oooh! Shiny!" demographic.
I take it that MSCE isn't getting the chicks the way you thought it would?
#DeleteChrome
I've been using different GUI front ends for programming and work for over 10 years now - and Apple laptops for the last 5 years of so.
Open office is now a fully acceptable spreadsheet and word processor. Gimp is fully functional for photos. Most other services are web based. VLC, media playing, etc are all working on Linux too. Issues that used to be common are now well supported in the open-source community with networking, video acceleration, disks, USB, drivers, etc.
Apple with it's BSD-based kernel and more open culture than Microsoft, could openly embrace the open source community, however, it seems to be working actively to prevent open access to a large number of their software-hardware combinations, and refuses to embrace and support the console-using, computer-hacking crowd (like me). It is understandable from a short-term financial standpoint, but long term, I think this is a mistake for Apple. I think taking the position at the genius bar of "if you open Terminal, we won't help you" alienates the most dedicated and supportive users in the marketplace. It is that community that could rocket Apple forward with more contributions and functionality - but now they continue to be pushed to support Linux instead.
It is disappointing to me that we live in a world where large companies like Apple still grow primarily based on marketing, selling and distributing physical things over digital products, or from monetizing the support and services (and maintaining a community) around increased productivity.
The difference in price between all these products is small compared to the value of ones times spent dealing with issue that arise. Regardless of how one values their own time - after any major screw ups taking many, many hours to fix - you have already surpassed any difference in price between the systems. Reliability, functionality, and real security (and how much time you have to spend later to get those) are the real value of owning a laptop for several years, not just the initial price.
But all in all, lack of Apple support for hacking means I'll be looking seriously at a Linux-based laptop (at 1/2 the price and more open standards) for my next laptop.
Where do you get that idea from? My whole company switched to Macs and productivity is up as we spend so much less time on desktop maintenance.
What desktop maintenance were you spending so much time on? Because if you were spending THAT much time on desktop maintenance you were doing it wrong.
In the last few years most of my friends have switched to Macs and they all say they're easier to use.
Yeah, a new PC out of the box from apple is setup better than same from an OEM. That's not Apple vs Microsoft. That's Apple vs HP and Sony. HP and Sony etc really need to pick up the ball to deliver a much better out of box experience.
They need to dump the shovelware, trialware, and utter crap, and invest in good quality productivity options.
I know one high level executive who's arguing with his IT department to let him use his Mac and iPhone on the corporate network because he prefers their usability and productivity.
And I know one high level executive who switched back to PC after he got tired of having to remote access or virtualize 4/5ths of the stuff he wanted to do because there was no mac equivalent, and it drove him nuts. He'd have his mail running on his Mac, then launch VMware to run the accounting software, pull up a report, and then have to jump through hoops to paste it into his email... because outlook supports OLE and when he pastes the spreadsheet bit in, he can edit it... but not on his mac, where it comes through as an image... so now he gets to copy it from the vm accounting to excel on the mac, tweak it some more, and paste it again to mail...
And now he gets to run Mac OS software update, AND windows update. Productivity dropped into the toilet. Not to mention the burden on IT as they have to handle everything they do with him as separate case.
He curses at it all day, but its what he wanted.
when surely the bigger question here is who was dumb enough to believe that fucking stupid and clearly made up statistic in the first place? I will eat my PCs if anyone can prove that Apple get anywhere even close to 91% of all PC sales over $1000. Remember folks, approximately 87.93% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Nick
But there's an app for that!
Don't forget: For a while, PPC *was* better than Intel. And for new users (i.e. anyone who hadn't grown up with using mice), 1 button was less confusing than two. But you know what? Things changed. Intel got off their ass and made great chips (while Moto/IBM sat on their ass with PPC) and the number of people who knew how to use a mouse became a majority of their market.
I've seen this comparison a number already here.
Here comes a car analogy.
For me, a premium car has nice interior materials and a good balance of comfort, performance, build quality and a few intangibles.
If I just want pure perfomance, I could get a Mustang or a Civic and slam it out for much less than say, an M3 or an IS.ï
My gaming computer is the equivalent of that Mustang or Civic. I use it run games with everything turned up to 11 but for everyday computing, I vastly prefer my Mac.
I am an IT director for a small private school (public districts send us kids). We have adequate resources at our disposal, but I wouldn't call us a "rich" school.
We have finally replaced every Dell desktop with a Mac as of this year. We are still solidly Windows in the server room, but every other machine in our two locations is a Mac.
Yes, they were a bit more expensive than what we could have bought from Dell or HP, but the usefulness of Mac OS on robustly built hardware is worth the expense.
Out of 100 or so iMacs and 200 or so MacBooks, we've had about 15 keyboard failures (the keys were popped/ripped off), 2 cracked laptop screens, and 2 hard drive failures - this has been over 3 years.
Students are extremely hard on the machines, yet they keep right on working. Contrast this to the Dells we used to have. Keyboards and mice were constantly being replaced, USB ports and power switches routinely failed, many LCD screens were thrown away due to panel or backlight failure....etc.
Now here's the clincher - only two Macs in three years had to be re-imaged due to "software" issues. Our windows machines were being regularly reimaged due to numerous software problems.
Our switch to Macs has been a resounding success. I can't imagine that we are the only company in the world to realize the benefits of the Mac platform.
-ted
Targeting some of the richest and yet least security-aware computer users could be a very profitable niche indeed.
Again, you are missing the point. The criteria of this "study" was NOT the feature set. The "premium" tag was about the price, not features.
GP might understand your argument better if you used a Monster cable analogy.
ie "Monster gold cables made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up cable market in June"
Parent clearly states MacBooks and iMacs. The closest he comes to saying "pro" is when he says "pro"blem and "benefit."
This is why you always buy from the business line of machines. Dell and Lenovo drop the crapware on their Latitude/Vostro/Precision and ThinkPad lines. No trialware, no AV, nothing added on. This is all a moot point however as the first thing any decent IT dept will do wipe the machine and put the company SOE on there, even if it's only a very basic SOE. This is probably one of the many things the GP was doing wrong, yes he may have fixed it by going mac but I or any other sysadmin worth a damn could have provided the same solution it for A$200 per machine instead of A$1000 per machine.
Dell Latitudes may cost more then the Dell Inspirons or XPS but they are higher quality and still cheaper then the nearest Macbook. Vostro is there for the SMB/SME who wants to save money as they use low end components. In addition to this if I buy 10 of any business laptop from Dell or Lenovo I get a discount off the total order, obviously the more I order at once the more I save. Dell will even give me a few hundred straight off the top of a single Latitude. I don't see Apple providing the same deal. We lease all our machines so they have a turnover of 2-3 years (I use 2yr leases as we require high end hardware) so any supposed longevity* provided by mac's is also a moot point.
* We have two Macbook 13" for the coloured crayon department, both are 18 months old. Both have discolouration due to heat and one is developing cracks in the plastic, the other has been mothballed due to an unspecified HW problem that the Apple service centre cant find.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.