Not that I’m a Apple-basher or anything but I have worked with consultants who have also worked with Steve Job’s direct reports.
Their official name for any phone that isn’t an iPhone? …primitives!
Hmmmmm, not having a strong opinion either way, did that make me more or less likely to buy Apple in the future?
I don’t get all the talk about the MacBook Air, that’s an arbitrary comparison. I could name any number of products to which you couldn’t match for spec for spec.
But that’s exactly the point. Each Mac is a specific product that’s targeted at a very narrow market segment, not part of a broad line targeted across the entire market. If you want the lightest, thinnest, sleekest laptop, or a solid mid-range all-in-one desktop with a nice screen, it’s very hard to beat Apple.
Apple succeeds or fails in large part based on how much of the market is concentrated at those points. And yes, of course their advertising and marketing tries to help that happen, but they can’t do magic; Apple also has to figure out the right points to sell at.
In other words, Steve Jobs treats the computer market like it’s the cellphone market. They act more like Samsung or Nokia or HTC than like Dell or IBM or HP. It doesn’t work as well for computers as for cellphones, but it works well enough for Apple’s bottom line.
The question is, is the tablet market going to be more like the cellphone market, or the computer market? If it’s the former, Apple will do great in the long run. If it’s the latter, they’ll end up making niche products that can’t get them more than 10% market share in the long run. Time will tell.
Boy, I’d hate to be the owner that accidentally bumped that thing into a handrail while I was carrying it or accidentally dropped it.
True story: My buddy dropped his macbook pro about 2 feet while we were getting out of a cab at the airport, it was in its special Apple neoprene case. The neoprene broke, the case has a huge dent, and Apple wants $600 to fix it. Oh, and they put his warranty on hold until it’s fixed, because the damaged case might cause the logic board to fail prematurely. :rolleyes:
Great story, bro.
I’m not a Macbook user but I use lots of notebooks and expecting that even a thick premium neoprene case is going to really protect a notebook in a 2 foot fall to the pavement is a pretty poor bet for any neoprene case and any computer.
This really isn’t an Apple issue. If you are carrying a notebook outdoors you need a more substantial padded case than a neoprene sleeve.
Apple succeeds by concentrating the market into those points. Vast majorities of consumers could not care about the “tech stuff” and to some degree they will let the manufacturer of the product shape their expectations of products. The popular product doesn’t have a marginal feature that isn’t especially necessary? No problem, the consumer base will adapt.
The tech conversations about Apple versus Generic computer manufacturers are interesting, but they are ultimately of no concern to the vast majority of trend-seeking consumers. John Q. Yuppie-Consumer does not give two shits about a solid-state drive or the latest whiz bang. They want consumer electronics that work without having to change and modify settings - they don’t want electronic electronics where tweaking and user customization is a designed part of the product experience.
So, the other manufacturers attempt to differentiate their products because apple is extremely good at focusing consumer attention on their products and selling themselves as the “it” product for whatever they’re focusing on. I’m sure Apple lovers will take that as a slam - it’s not.
Basically, if Apple was making a killing with 7" iPads, other PC manufacturers would bring out a bunch of 10" pads. (at first, then the market will mature and settle down).
That hammer thrown at the 1984 screen, was apparently pitched so hard it has circled around the earth and hit the thrower in the back of the head.
That is the grand irony of the apple renaissance.
You could say the same for most other PCs sold by most other PC manufacturers though. The difference is Dell or HP sells 50 narrowly targeted PCs because they’re trying to hit every single niche, Apple tries to hit a few specific niches where it thinks it will make a lot of money, while delivering a general product that may attract customers who probably weren’t looking for that exact product initially but are willing to buy the Apple product if it is marketed well enough.I
There’s nothing bad about 10% market share, in 2008 (quickest found year for this data) Apple had $4.3bn in sales of desktops alone (and $9.4bn in notebooks.) Apple has probably sub-5% market share in desktops, and right around 10% in notebooks and as you can see their net sales there alone would make them a very successful company. Apple I think has never passed 25% market share in cell phones and they make billions there, too.
according to this, Apple’s got 39% of the handset industry profits despite a less than 3% market share in terms of units sold for the first half of the year.
This seems like a necessary move. They know that it doesn’t present a compelling case for individual users because it’s big and clunky and heavy and runs a desktop OS. The only feature it can compete on is the fact that you don’t have to go through the App store to deploy software to it, so they’re selling it to businesses in the hopes that corporate in-house software will be its salvation. It’s not in the same market as the iPad because it already lost that market, HP knows it, and even entering into it with the Slate will just result in wasted marketing dollars followed by embarrassing TechCrunch headlines in a few months about how they’ve sold a whole 14,000 of them, or something.
Isn’t that exactly what the iPad does? There’s already point of sale apps for the iPad, and hospitals have already started to use them as well.
There are ways for commercial organizations to deploy apps to iOS devices without going through the App Store. The ability to run custom, in-house software is not an advantage of the Slate.
The market for a Slate is companies that want to run their existing Windows software on a tablet. That sounds like a big market, but not being designed for a tablet, existing Windows software is going to be clunky on it.