Put the install disk back in the CD; when the installer starts select modify installation and remove the office assistants that you don't want; add the ones that you do. I actually don't mind Rocky (the dog).
In some cases the front end or controls may be on a Windows or Linux box as this provides a recognizable interface and easy applications to other applications. The actual device would be controlled by an embedded (or highly customized) OS. If the front end crashes, the device would have the smarts to do the reasonable thing. Windows, Linux (or even a Mac) makes a pretty good front end for setting controls and monitoring. All are overblown for embedded devices--especially realtime and life-sustaining ones.
The confusion is between gross and net margin. Their gross margins are very high on the hardware, but their high cost of sales eats most of this away. The allocated marketing (advertising) and sales cost per machine is huge as they spread their advertising over a relatively small base of machines. Dell which pushes many more machines has a much lower per-unit SGA burden than Apple (but of course starts with a lower gross margin). According to recent Business Week article, about 20% of the profit comes from interest on cash, and if they expensed stock options (to give a truer picture of the company's financial health) about another 50% of their profits would disappear.
Actually I've been surprised at how frequently the dell telephone support requires replacing a fairly significant piece of hardware. They have no hesitation in telling you to unscrew and replace disk drives, CD/DVDs, memory and fans. I'm sure they lose a few systems when someone forgets to unplug the machines and shorts it all out. But it probably still cheaper for them rather then sending out a tech. I've alway thought that they should include small screw drivers with laptops as they average Joe would be tempted to use a butter knife or something similar.
In our case we were already supporting 3 operating systems (OS9, Windows XP and Linux). Upgrading some of our machines to OSX would add an additional OS to support. Some of our Macs are too underpowered to run OSX. By turning those machines into servers runing YDL we can continue to get usable service out of them. My experience has been that YDL on older G3's has been extremely solid. As we are using YDL mostly for server applications, the advantages/disadvantages of the GUI don't matter. Trying to run the same services under OSX on these older machines would just swamp them. In addition to eliminating the OSX learning curve, there is the minor savings of $125 for the OS which seems to have a paid upgrade every year or so.
If you look at the bottom-line numbers Dell is much more profitable. Although their gross (above the line) margin is much less, their SG&A costs per unit (or per revenue dollar) are much, much less than Apple's. The gross margin costs do not include development, sales or marketing (and administration). The marketing cost per unit for Apple's iPod is huge... it's a fact of life of being a smaller vendor with much higher development costs. Dell's profit as a percent of sales is more than twice as high as Apple's. If you look at the stock prices over any period, it pretty much tell's the story.
Apple is number 1 in a tiny segment of the market. Sony was number 1 in the walkman business, where are they now? Almost no low-cost, high-volume manufacturing-centric company has entered the business yet.
Apple has never been a particularly efficient manufacturer or distributor and they have a very limited channel. Although the HP deal opens up a few more retailers, they still have a very limited distribution channel. I suspect that in 3 or 4 years some efficient, low-cost manufacturer will be knocking off "iPod" players and moving them through Wal-Mart, CVS, Costco and every other discounter. Perhaps they will not be quite as cool as a real "iPod", but at half the price and twice as convenient to buy they will quickly command a significant market share. Retailers like Wal-Mart and much more efficient at purchasing, distributing and selling than Apple. Although Apple claims to be a "music" leader, I suspect that just Wal-Marts music & video sales are larger than Apples total revenue. Wal-Mart certainly makes more profit in music sales than Apples total profit. Although Steve J. may have all the right connections in the music world, the Wal-Marts (and other discounters) still move the goods and have tremendous leverage over everything in the music business except the top egos.
For those of you who aren't too young to remember, when the first Walkmans and CD players came out, they were "way cool" and Sony could command hefty profits on them. Now CD players are in the check-out lane at your local grocery store for under $15. Not a hell of a lot of margin left in that item. I suspect that in 3 to 4 years iPods will be in the $150 and sold everywhere. All that Apple will have left is the generic name iPod. (Does anyone remember that walkman was a Sony product, and not any portable cassette player?)
The timex watch has been available for a couple of months at our local grocery store--Stop & Shop in the New England area. The watch is free with purchase, but it must be tied to a bank account for direct debit not to a credit card.
It's worth pointing out that Apple does not manufacture the iPod (it's contracted out to a efficient manufacturer). So there might be some economies of scale in increasing volumes... but not a lot. However, the HP deal does open up a new distribution channel (cheap PC stores/Staples/discounters) for the iPod. But if any of these firms sell the identical device for less than Apple then Apple loses the ability to drive all those buyers to the Apple stores. I can't image that the HP channel discounters are going to agree to sell at MSRP -- I think it's illegal for the manufacturer to set prices, which may lead to the interesting situation of iPods being sold for less if you don't buy them from Apple. Other than color, there needs to be something the distinguishes the Apple iPods from the HP ones (e.g., size, capacity, controls).
Other than some serious ego-stoking, I don't see what's in this for either Apple (undercutting their high-margins) or HP ("our product development is so bad, we had to go license something from Apple"). The only benefit of the deal is that the products can be call HiPPod (for hip pods or hippopotamus).
Back before the "new" HP, the HP products were innovative and well made-- now they're pretty much junk. It's rare that I consider buying HP gear--especially for higher priced networking or business products.
It's sad what has happened to a once great company (in 5 or 10 years, they'll be mentioned along with Digital, Honeywell and Prime).
As a primarily business user, I'm unimpressed with the Apple announcements. ECC memory on a server is hardly a breakthru technology, and a bunch of consumer apps isn't what my business needs.
A $50 cheaper portable music player (with only 3 to 4 times the storage of a $50 MP3-compatible CD player).
Sorry, I guess the most exciting thing in the whole annoucement was MS releasing a new version of Office. Wow! Wow! I have to agree with an earlier post that the talk didn't make me want to reach for my (personal or business) wallet. k
Part of the issue with electronics interfering with avionics is whether the data will be completely wrong or just slightly in error. If the data is completely wrong then the pilot can take over and use alternative instruments, land at another airport or ask for guidance from the ground. The real danger comes if the data is subtly wrong and the pilot believes it. It's much harder to build a device that creates subtle errors in the data. AFAIK the systems in planes are redundant, and some, like magnet compasses, are electronic-free.
Perhaps the decline in music purchases has something to do with other competition for discretionary spending. Although there have always been other entertainment options, many of the music purchasers may now be spending their leisure dollars on video games, software, movies, downloadable tunes for their cell phones or even hardware to play them on. The record industry has to realize that consumers have a fixed amount to spend on entertainment and needs to compete for those dollars. In the past, music buyers didn't have as many other options for their entertainment spending. I suspect if you looked at the total spending on entertainment it has gone up, but music is just taking a smaller share of the that spending.
The Mac and XBox share the same marketing philosophy of having an integrated hardware/software platform (although they are very different machines.) More and more, the Mac users will only have the choice of "approved" (and in many cases, Apple-only) software. With a small market share it's hard for developers to invest the resources in creating Mac products, especially if there is the threat that Apple may offer a similar "factory approved/installed" option. (The same has happened to a number of MS developers who created nifty utilities only to find that they were later incorporated into the OS.)
Is any Mac user morning the death of Casady & Greene and the shaky state of macintouch.com?
Haven't seen one for years, but I still remember the good solid thunk of the model 026 keypunch machine. With the tactile and audible feedback the machine gave you really knew something was happening. Is anyone still making keypunch machines?
The real issue is that you need a dual CPU on the Mac to be comparable to the single CPU on the PC (for some applications/uses). When comparing prices, look for machines that can do equivalent amount of "useful" work (whatever is relevant in your business/pleasure). I think that you'll find for most users (business, home, academic) that the PCs prices out at 20 to 30% cheaper (after adding software, monitor, other stuff). Of course, for some applications the Macs will be cheaper and for others perhaps an XBOX or homebrew is appropriate. Remember, many other companies quote prices that include monitors (apple doesn't, except for the built-in e/iMacs.) Also, if you need it, Office is much pricier on a Mac than as a included item from a PC manufacturer. (Also, I don't think there is a boxed cheap version of home/academic Office for the Mac.) Don't forget to add a couple of bucks for an adaptor if you don't want to be a pricy (but gorgeous) Apple monitor.
The real issue is that you need a dual CPU on the Mac to be comparable to the single CPU on the PC. When comparing prices, look for machines that can do equivalent amount of "useful" work (whatever is relevant in your business/pleasure). I think that you'll find for most users (business, home, academic) that the PCs price out at 20 to 30% cheaper (after adding software). Of course, for some applications the Macs will be cheaper and for others perhaps an XBOX or homebrew is appropriate. Remember, many other companies quote prices that include monitors (apple doesn't, except for the built-in e/iMacs.) Also, if you need it, Office is much prier on a Mac than as a included item from a PC manufacturer. (Also, I don't think there is a boxed cheap version of home/academic Office for the Mac.) Don't forget to add a couple of bucks for an adaptor if you don't want to be a pricy (but gorgeous) Apple monitor.
1 million songs at $0.99 is about $1 millions/week. Assuming that the demand stays constant--which is unlikely as there was probably pent-up demand, as well as let's give it a try users in the first week--the total revenue for the year will be about $52 million. Although this sounds like an astounding success, it is less than 0.2 percent of Dell's revenue (FY03 revenue $35.4 billion), and less than 0.02% of Walmart's revenue ($218 billion). And it will only account for 1% of Apple's revenue.
Has anyone done a comparison to PC browsers? It would be nice to see how it stacks up against IE on a equal cost PC. Learning a new browser is just one more barrier to switching from the PC. Not only do I have to learn a new OS, but everything I learned about my browser stops working too. A "think different" browser is just another barrier to switching...especially one that is released a "let the users debug it" beta.
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Put the install disk back in the CD; when the installer starts select modify installation and remove the office assistants that you don't want; add the ones that you do. I actually don't mind Rocky (the dog).
In some cases the front end or controls may be on a Windows or Linux box as this provides a recognizable interface and easy applications to other applications. The actual device would be controlled by an embedded (or highly customized) OS. If the front end crashes, the device would have the smarts to do the reasonable thing. Windows, Linux (or even a Mac) makes a pretty good front end for setting controls and monitoring. All are overblown for embedded devices--especially realtime and life-sustaining ones.
The confusion is between gross and net margin. Their gross margins are very high on the hardware, but their high cost of sales eats most of this away. The allocated marketing (advertising) and sales cost per machine is huge as they spread their advertising over a relatively small base of machines. Dell which pushes many more machines has a much lower per-unit SGA burden than Apple (but of course starts with a lower gross margin). According to recent Business Week article, about 20% of the profit comes from interest on cash, and if they expensed stock options (to give a truer picture of the company's financial health) about another 50% of their profits would disappear.
Actually I've been surprised at how frequently the dell telephone support requires replacing a fairly significant piece of hardware. They have no hesitation in telling you to unscrew and replace disk drives, CD/DVDs, memory and fans. I'm sure they lose a few systems when someone forgets to unplug the machines and shorts it all out. But it probably still cheaper for them rather then sending out a tech. I've alway thought that they should include small screw drivers with laptops as they average Joe would be tempted to use a butter knife or something similar.
In our case we were already supporting 3 operating systems (OS9, Windows XP and Linux). Upgrading some of our machines to OSX would add an additional OS to support. Some of our Macs are too underpowered to run OSX. By turning those machines into servers runing YDL we can continue to get usable service out of them. My experience has been that YDL on older G3's has been extremely solid. As we are using YDL mostly for server applications, the advantages/disadvantages of the GUI don't matter. Trying to run the same services under OSX on these older machines would just swamp them. In addition to eliminating the OSX learning curve, there is the minor savings of $125 for the OS which seems to have a paid upgrade every year or so.
If you look at the bottom-line numbers Dell is much more profitable. Although their gross (above the line) margin is much less, their SG&A costs per unit (or per revenue dollar) are much, much less than Apple's. The gross margin costs do not include development, sales or marketing (and administration). The marketing cost per unit for Apple's iPod is huge ... it's a fact of life of being a smaller vendor with much higher development costs. Dell's profit as a percent of sales is more than twice as high as Apple's. If you look at the stock prices over any period, it pretty much tell's the story.
Is slashdot just becoming a MSNBC news highligher? This is the second story today reporting on an MSNBC report. Why not just read MSNBC?
Apple is number 1 in a tiny segment of the market. Sony was number 1 in the walkman business, where are they now? Almost no low-cost, high-volume manufacturing-centric company has entered the business yet.
Apple has never been a particularly efficient manufacturer or distributor and they have a very limited channel. Although the HP deal opens up a few more retailers, they still have a very limited distribution channel. I suspect that in 3 or 4 years some efficient, low-cost manufacturer will be knocking off "iPod" players and moving them through Wal-Mart, CVS, Costco and every other discounter. Perhaps they will not be quite as cool as a real "iPod", but at half the price and twice as convenient to buy they will quickly command a significant market share. Retailers like Wal-Mart and much more efficient at purchasing, distributing and selling than Apple. Although Apple claims to be a "music" leader, I suspect that just Wal-Marts music & video sales are larger than Apples total revenue. Wal-Mart certainly makes more profit in music sales than Apples total profit. Although Steve J. may have all the right connections in the music world, the Wal-Marts (and other discounters) still move the goods and have tremendous leverage over everything in the music business except the top egos.
For those of you who aren't too young to remember, when the first Walkmans and CD players came out, they were "way cool" and Sony could command hefty profits on them. Now CD players are in the check-out lane at your local grocery store for under $15. Not a hell of a lot of margin left in that item. I suspect that in 3 to 4 years iPods will be in the $150 and sold everywhere. All that Apple will have left is the generic name iPod. (Does anyone remember that walkman was a Sony product, and not any portable cassette player?)
The timex watch has been available for a couple of months at our local grocery store--Stop & Shop in the New England area. The watch is free with purchase, but it must be tied to a bank account for direct debit not to a credit card.
It's worth pointing out that Apple does not manufacture the iPod (it's contracted out to a efficient manufacturer). So there might be some economies of scale in increasing volumes... but not a lot. However, the HP deal does open up a new distribution channel (cheap PC stores/Staples/discounters) for the iPod. But if any of these firms sell the identical device for less than Apple then Apple loses the ability to drive all those buyers to the Apple stores. I can't image that the HP channel discounters are going to agree to sell at MSRP -- I think it's illegal for the manufacturer to set prices, which may lead to the interesting situation of iPods being sold for less if you don't buy them from Apple. Other than color, there needs to be something the distinguishes the Apple iPods from the HP ones (e.g., size, capacity, controls).
Other than some serious ego-stoking, I don't see what's in this for either Apple (undercutting their high-margins) or HP ("our product development is so bad, we had to go license something from Apple"). The only benefit of the deal is that the products can be call HiPPod (for hip pods or hippopotamus).
Back before the "new" HP, the HP products were innovative and well made-- now they're pretty much junk. It's rare that I consider buying HP gear--especially for higher priced networking or business products.
It's sad what has happened to a once great company (in 5 or 10 years, they'll be mentioned along with Digital, Honeywell and Prime).
As a primarily business user, I'm unimpressed with the Apple announcements. ECC memory on a server is hardly a breakthru technology, and a bunch of consumer apps isn't what my business needs.
A $50 cheaper portable music player (with only 3 to 4 times the storage of a $50 MP3-compatible CD player).
Sorry, I guess the most exciting thing in the whole annoucement was MS releasing a new version of Office. Wow! Wow! I have to agree with an earlier post that the talk didn't make me want to reach for my (personal or business) wallet.
k
Actually they can only take the manufacturing costs as a tax deduction. However they can claim the full retail price in their PR and other materials.
Just a thought... alternatively, it could trash the market for Macs if hackers modify the new Xbox to run OSX.
Part of the issue with electronics interfering with avionics is whether the data will be completely wrong or just slightly in error. If the data is completely wrong then the pilot can take over and use alternative instruments, land at another airport or ask for guidance from the ground. The real danger comes if the data is subtly wrong and the pilot believes it. It's much harder to build a device that creates subtle errors in the data. AFAIK the systems in planes are redundant, and some, like magnet compasses, are electronic-free.
Perhaps the decline in music purchases has something to do with other competition for discretionary spending. Although there have always been other entertainment options, many of the music purchasers may now be spending their leisure dollars on video games, software, movies, downloadable tunes for their cell phones or even hardware to play them on. The record industry has to realize that consumers have a fixed amount to spend on entertainment and needs to compete for those dollars. In the past, music buyers didn't have as many other options for their entertainment spending. I suspect if you looked at the total spending on entertainment it has gone up, but music is just taking a smaller share of the that spending.
The Mac and XBox share the same marketing philosophy of having an integrated hardware/software platform (although they are very different machines.) More and more, the Mac users will only have the choice of "approved" (and in many cases, Apple-only) software. With a small market share it's hard for developers to invest the resources in creating Mac products, especially if there is the threat that Apple may offer a similar "factory approved/installed" option. (The same has happened to a number of MS developers who created nifty utilities only to find that they were later incorporated into the OS.)
Is any Mac user morning the death of Casady & Greene and the shaky state of macintouch.com?
Haven't seen one for years, but I still remember the good solid thunk of the model 026 keypunch machine. With the tactile and audible feedback the machine gave you really knew something was happening. Is anyone still making keypunch machines?
If this was Apple they give it a dot rev and charge $129 for it.
The real issue is that you need a dual CPU on the Mac to be comparable to the single CPU on the PC (for some applications/uses). When comparing prices, look for machines that can do equivalent amount of "useful" work (whatever is relevant in your business/pleasure). I think that you'll find for most users (business, home, academic) that the PCs prices out at 20 to 30% cheaper (after adding software, monitor, other stuff). Of course, for some applications the Macs will be cheaper and for others perhaps an XBOX or homebrew is appropriate. Remember, many other companies quote prices that include monitors (apple doesn't, except for the built-in e/iMacs.) Also, if you need it, Office is much pricier on a Mac than as a included item from a PC manufacturer. (Also, I don't think there is a boxed cheap version of home/academic Office for the Mac.) Don't forget to add a couple of bucks for an adaptor if you don't want to be a pricy (but gorgeous) Apple monitor.
The real issue is that you need a dual CPU on the Mac to be comparable to the single CPU on the PC. When comparing prices, look for machines that can do equivalent amount of "useful" work (whatever is relevant in your business/pleasure). I think that you'll find for most users (business, home, academic) that the PCs price out at 20 to 30% cheaper (after adding software). Of course, for some applications the Macs will be cheaper and for others perhaps an XBOX or homebrew is appropriate. Remember, many other companies quote prices that include monitors (apple doesn't, except for the built-in e/iMacs.) Also, if you need it, Office is much prier on a Mac than as a included item from a PC manufacturer. (Also, I don't think there is a boxed cheap version of home/academic Office for the Mac.) Don't forget to add a couple of bucks for an adaptor if you don't want to be a pricy (but gorgeous) Apple monitor.
1 million songs at $0.99 is about $1 millions/week. Assuming that the demand stays constant--which is unlikely as there was probably pent-up demand, as well as let's give it a try users in the first week--the total revenue for the year will be about $52 million. Although this sounds like an astounding success, it is less than 0.2 percent of Dell's revenue (FY03 revenue $35.4 billion), and less than 0.02% of Walmart's revenue ($218 billion). And it will only account for 1% of Apple's revenue.
Has anyone done a comparison to PC browsers? It would be nice to see how it stacks up against IE on a equal cost PC. Learning a new browser is just one more barrier to switching from the PC. Not only do I have to learn a new OS, but everything I learned about my browser stops working too. A "think different" browser is just another barrier to switching...especially one that is released a "let the users debug it" beta.