Is there a need for a new prosumer line?
Some might say the current 20" iMac is just that--a prosumer model.
But it still lacks slots and true video spanning capabilities.
If the rumours of 2.4, 2.2 and 2.0 mhz models coming out in January are true, does that not leave room for a lower priced line of truly expandable 1.6 and 1.8 ghz G5's towers? Or is this too small of a niche.
It would be nice to have a 3 slotted 1.8Ghz mini-tower.
But it still lacks slots and true video spanning capabilities.
If the rumours of 2.4, 2.2 and 2.0 mhz models coming out in January are true, does that not leave room for a lower priced line of truly expandable 1.6 and 1.8 ghz G5's towers? Or is this too small of a niche.
It would be nice to have a 3 slotted 1.8Ghz mini-tower.
Comments
The "prosumer" market is actually two categories: What I call the "broke power user" market, which consists of people (many of them students) trying to get professional work out of consumer goods, and the "loaded consumer" market, which consists of people blowing untold amounts of money on machines that essentially send and receive email and browse the web. So we can come at this problem from two angles: Scaling up consumer hardware and scaling down professional hardware. Since you're asking for the latter, I'll start there.
As I'm fond of pointing out, 80% of all PowerMac 8600 owners never used a single PCI slot. That guarantees that whatever the percentage is that used zero or one, it would account for the overwhelming majority of that PowerMac's market, right up to the 9600. But there isn't a 9600 now, and, if anything, PCI is even more of a niche than it was when Apple took that survey. So, given that a lot of the people who added PCI cards to 8600s were adding video cards, we're looking at a single-slot "minitower" actually meeting the needs of maybe 90-95% of all users who need PCI expansion. If this machine is available for a substantial discount, hardly anyone needs to buy a full-blown PowerMac for PCI expansion. And, of those people who do buy this minitower, I predict that 80%-90% will never fill that slot with anything.
Drive bays? The current PowerMac only has two! You could go down to one, I suppose, and since that's 250GB you're still satisfying most of the needs of the professional (and in particular, the "broke power user") market.
CPU power? You could go with single processor PowerMacs. Who really needs the power of the dual G5? Not that many people, right?
So what we have is a machine that will satisfy the desires of a majority of the PowerMac using population at a substantial discount. But what will it do to the PowerMac? One of the reasons Apple can offer the machines they're offering at the prices they're offering is that they're selling in volume. But - and this is something no "minitower" proponent I've seen is willing to admit, but it's pretty obvious - the "minitower" is designed to cannibalize the PowerMac. Its whole purpose is to offer 80% of the machine at 20% of the price, to borrow an old promise.
Can you really price two PCI slots, one drive bay, one CPU and a little bit of aluminum at whatever savings you're hoping to realize? If you can, can you account for the impact on Apple's margins, and what it would do to the PowerMac's prices?
Here are a few guidelines for designing inexpensive hardware that work just as well in actual design as they do from the comfort of your own armchair:
1) Slots and cards are expensive. This applies to CPU cards, PCI cards, and any other kind you can think of.
2) Integration is cheap. The more things you can stuff onto one chip, the cheaper the whole thing is to make.
3) Slots constrain design. You add 1 PCI or AGP slot - just one little one - and you've lost control over how much heat there will be, where it will be coming from, what kind of airflow you have, etc. You will never see something like the iMac or the Cube with "just one open slot". (The Cube had an AGP slot, but to see how upgradable it is, go and read up on how to upgrade it: Essentially, unless you have one of the non-standard cards Apple specifically produced for it, you've got all kinds of interesting work to do.) Also, if you add AGP, you have to support ADC, which requires 130W, which means that you can't slip a small, tailored power supply into the dome of your iMac any more.
So, if you want something like a "headless iMac," it's going to have to be like a headless iMac: Heavily integrated and slot-free - only with an external power brick the way the Cube had in order to support whatever arbitrary monitor you decide to attach. If you want a "mini-PowerMac," you're going to have to make real compromises (not "maybe just one slot") to see any meaningful cost reduction, and then you'll have to deal with the consequences for the full-blown model if the result is still what most of the market would be OK with.
All that said, the popularity of the $1299 PowerMac G4 can't be denied (although it can be at least partly explained by the fact that it boots Mac OS 9 - Quark 4.11 just won't die, will it?). But, really, the iMac 17" and 20" models are prosumer machines. They don't have the PC-clone appeal of zillions of bays and slots and things sticking out, but in terms of what they're actually capable of they seem to hold their own.
One thing is true tho, the computer industry is finally changing from manufacturing computers to what it thinks consumers want to just making what consumers ask for. Apple must adapt, to be able to compete.
There might be room for a new prosumer line, but personally i think the g5 takes taht perfectly. If I could wish for apple to make anything it would be even more professional gear. The thing is apple's sales in consumer sales are strong. Families are buying macs, but businesses, schools aren't. You do the math.
Originally posted by kraig911
interesting point Amorph, but couldn't it be said that now more than ever cards are used than say the ole 8600 days? The add-on market is definitely more ubiquitous than it was back then, at least thats my opinion.
No, I would say the opposite is true. In the 8600 days, it was not uncommon for networking products to ship with Ethernet PCI cards, just in case. PCI cards were the standard way to upgrade a machine, given that the alternatives were either expensive and specialized (SCSI) or hopelessly underpowered (ADB, PS/2) or universally taken up by another peripheral (parallel). The two cards in my own 8600 were a FireWire/USB combo and a Rage 128: The former (and ethernet) are pretty much bog standard everywhere, and the latter category is taken care of by AGP. Everything that used to require PCI is either onboard, moot, or can be added by USB, USB2 or FireWire.
Now, there's hardly any point at all getting into PCI unless you have specialized needs met by hardware that starts in the high hundreds and goes right on up. Even CoreAudio handles audio in software with better fidelity and lower latency than you'd get in a PCI card from a year before it appeared.
One thing is true tho, the computer industry is finally changing from manufacturing computers to what it thinks consumers want to just making what consumers ask for. Apple must adapt, to be able to compete.
This is why the minitower is dying, yes. Consumers want notebooks, even if they aren't going to be toting them around. Which is a better adaptation to this trend, an iMac or a minitower? (Apple's laptops are strong and selling well, so they don't count as an answer.)
However, there's a big exception to your argument: Dell, which still reigns as, essentially, the ultimate traditional maker. (Tellingly, their laptops suck.)
If I could wish for apple to make anything it would be even more professional gear. The thing is apple's sales in consumer sales are strong. Families are buying macs, but businesses, schools aren't. You do the math.
I don't see anything being clearly stated here. To the extent that K-12 education is buying Macs, the constantly increasing trend is to buy iBooks, not desktops or any sort of "professional" gear. Even the sales that go to PC companies increasingly are for laptops. To do the math, you have to look at the numbers, and the numbers say that desktops are steadily declining in K-12.
Higher education is buying Macs at a rate Apple hasn't seen in seven years, so the math looks good there. That's driven largely by the PowerBook and OS X.
"Business" does not imply "professional" hardware. Professional hardware is designed (and priced) to be used to earn an income from its own utility. A PowerMac G5 is professional hardware. Many businesses hardly need computers to be more than consoles running somebody's FileMaker Pro app to talk to the Xserve in the back, so here something like a minitower would just be a waste of cost and space and time to do work that an eMac can do better.
And, of course, the bottom line is that for many kinds of professional work, anything in Apple's lineup will do. The team behind the Perl language is on PowerBooks; at least one senior Linux developer did some of his kernel work on a 500MHz iBook; several of our own members do professional-grade work on iMacs of various vintages; and so forth. A professional writer can get by just fine with hardware anyone else would consider obsolete (and many of them do).
I still think the minitower market consists of people who want a PowerMac G5 but can't see their way to affording one. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but if you want a $1999 machine for $1299 then you'd better be prepared to accept $700 worth of compromises (we know now that a 1.8GHz G5 is worth about $100 now, to give some idea of the scale involved).
Not to say it's not important, as Amorph astutely pointed out, the popularity of the $1300 G4 tower is undeniable. Now that G5 is out and in fairly good supply, the feasibility of the single processor G5 mini tower is even more attractive to Apple. They have to be thinking this. Perhaps the post-G5 G4 tower was a test. They didn't have to do any development on it and they could test a new market. A G5 version would sell even better. That goes with out saying.
Obviously it would have G5 tower styling, only smaller. The specs are up for debate, but it will be single processor, 4 DIMM slots, and an AGP slot. External ports would be the same as the full tower G5 (maybe minus the optical audio) and I think PCI gets nixed. Make the full towers all dual, bump the low end back to $1999 and have the new low end G5 take over the low end at $1699 (2.0GHz, 512MB, 160GB, Super Drive) & $1299(1.6GHz, 256MB, 80GB, Combo Drive).
Originally posted by bunge
Offer the current iMac with an upgradeable video card and nothing more. It might make the case a little bigger to accomodate a bigger card and an extra fan, but it would be a perfect machine for what you're discussing.
That'll be a tricky endeavor and you'd have to rework the entire case. They will eventually anyway, but an upgradable video card in an AIO? Don't see that happening. The iMac base is big enough without the added support for an AGP slot and card.
So, you're talking about a completely redesigned machine, larger (how much larger? There are 12" AGP cards, and cards that take up a PCI slot above the AGP slot, too), with either a bigger and hotter internal power supply (more size, more cost, more heat, more fans) or an external brick, and the option to do something that requires cracking the case open (another point against a compact design: You have to be able to expose the entire slot), handling a big, expensive circuit board and pressing it down firmly until you feel an alarming thunk, then reassembling the case. Everything about the process screams "not Mac like."
The only reason to ship an AGP card is that the cards can be a lot more powerful than the standalone chipsets and you can play with BTO a little bit, and for a workstation those are pretty good reasons. But in that case there's no reason to expect it to be any more expandable than the Cube's was.
Now I'll admit that I'm playing a role of skeptic here. I'm looking at the PowerMac G4, and I'm looking at Apple's claims that the $1299 model is one of the top sellers. OS 9 notwithstanding, that tells me there's a market and the PMG4 is a stopgap of sorts. I fully expect Apple to cover this hard-to-define midrange somehow, and sooner rather than later. What I'm asking for is some consideration that what you'll get is not the iMac with AGP added, or a PowerMac with two slots missing. In fact, you might just get the iMac.
Something to consider: If Apple has indeed found ways to make the case and structural elements significantly less expensive, that gives them two options: They can keep spending their current budget on components and drop the price, or they can spend more on components.
Would the dome get bigger? Would it turn into a cube? Would it be an octogon?
I'm just thinking that a machine with an upgradeable card and that perfect screen arm would finally combine enough elements to make the premium price of an LCD iMac worth the extra dollars.
1. g5 is overkill for word, excell and internet
2. imacs are great but you just bought a 20" LCD screen
3. you IT department has many high quality screens purchased earlier
4. using an all-in-one machine means if yout screen dies, so does your computer.
Many potential switchers have a large supply of monitors, and do not want throw them away. IT departments can not afford to lose the entire computer because the screen goes out.
All-in-ones are great for people with no hardware investment, but in order for apple to move into the target business markets and hit more switchers... a cheaper tower is necessary. Not everyone can afford the $1800 cost of entry for apple towers.
It would not have to be the latest and greatest.... and single processors would be an easy differentiator.
An ideal desktop line up.
$699 emac: 256/80/combo faster "gobi chip"
$999 emac superdrive 256/160/same chip as above
"the g5 cube"
nvidia 5700 video, no firewire 800 or optical audio, 1 pci slot, agp slot, airport extreme slot, no dual display support
$799: 1.6 g5 with combo drive 256/80 no dual display support
$1299: 2.0 g5 with superdrive: 512/160, airport extreme, bluetooth, geoforce 5700
*BTO options: bluetooth, more RAM, dual display video card/128 mb, bigger hard drive, different optical drive
*Enough power for most users and reasonable enough for office users. More importantly fairly price competitive with PCs. Easy to differentiate the two models.
"the newest imacs"
$1599: 17", 2.0 g5, superdrive, 512/80/128 geoforce 5700
$1999: 20", 2.0 g5, superdrive, 512/160/128 geoforce 5700
options: bluetooth, airport extreme, RAM,
the new g5
$1999 dual 2.2 512/160/ PC3200 RAM/128 ATI 9800 pro/
$2499 dual 2.4 512/160/ PC4000 RAM/ATI FireGL? T2-12 level workstation video/airport
$2999 dual 2.6 512/250/ PC4000 RAM/ ATI FireGL? T2-12 level workstation video/airport
usual options
Distinct levels:
1. cheap
2. cool, powerful all-in-one
3. Prosumer tower
4. professional
PC competitive pricing and specs!
When I talked about you do the math, yes, apple is in schools, but you must be kidding when you say apple's education sales are strong. Think of this from figures from other computer companies, lets say this, when Dell recently reported its market sales per computers sold, something like only 20% went to consumers, another 60 went to business, and the rest schools and government. Apple's right now is really about 65% i would think, consumer sales, and the rest fragmented pro sales, and government and schools. Now I can't find the article where i read this, unfortunately
As in business sales, i wish they'd make one computer look um professional. A lot of people like the iMac at home, and stuff and I think it looks great, but I have a lot of older guys who say yeah it looks cool but I don't wanna work with it 8 hours a day. i just want a regular computer.... Small, and that works.
Also personally I think this regular computer should have a monitor built in as well, hopefully with an LCD, be grey and "office" like, maybe the grey of Ti notebooks finish. Just simple, and elegant. not so flashy like the current iMac
Originally posted by jade
1. g5 is overkill for word, excell and internet
2. imacs are great but you just bought a 20" LCD screen
3. you IT department has many high quality screens purchased earlier
4. using an all-in-one machine means if yout screen dies, so does your computer.
These are all excellent points and good reasons why Apple needs a lower end tower to replace the MDD G4. This would be a distinct machine, unlike Apple's old days where there would be very similar models with slight differences.
Being able to differentiate shouldn't be an obstacle to Apple anymore. Now they just have to figure out how to keep their margins on the low cost box so many people are clammoring for.
No, but...
For lack of a better term, prosumer models? Yes.
Why? Because there is a natural progression in features and price from the low end to the high end, and very often, sweet spots fall somewhere in the middle. This middle tier is denoted as "prosumer" but prosumer and consumer are just funny armchair psuedo-marketting terms for customers. Professional has a real connotation that has nothing to do with what you spend on equipment and everything to do with how you put it to "work."
And so, when it's used here, even "professional" is often used erroneously to denote the cost of a machine, rather than it's use.
Does this play into Amorph's arguments. In a way, it does. But in a more imporatnt way, it does not. Pros might just buy the minimum needed to get by, but they do not have to buy it from you.
The people who need a lot of speed, will buy the costlier configs, if they need them. The people who do not, in my experience, will NOT buy the costlier configs if they cannot afford, do not need, or cannot justify them. They will not be up-sold.
The wannabe "pose-sumer" won't spend the extra cash, neither will the starving artist. They might buy an iMac or a PC, but you won't get that mac-tower sale from them. If you cannibalize iMac buyers, who bloody cares? A headless machine would be cheaper to build and sell anyway -- such that for the same MSRP, you can NET a higher profit.
But without choice, not constrained choice, but real choice, customers will simply buy the machines that fit their desires and price. iMac, even with a huge screen, is NOT what most peope want. I want to choose my monitor and so many others, and seperate the buying cycle for the display from that for the machine. Many people want too add internal drives and at least entertain the fantasy of future upgrades and forstalled obsolescence. MOST people prefer towers over AIOs when it comes to desktops, you cannot argue with the worldwide numbers.
The only real loser, for not offering this configuration to a broader range of customers at a broader range of prices, is Apple itself.
It would be better to do away with one of the AIO ranges and replace it with a headless machine. These two consumer offerings would offer roughly the same speed (single G5 class). With the AIO you get a display; with the cube/headless/tower you get flexibility, and moderate internal expansion/upgradability and more of the performance of a higher-end machine.
The other way to read what Amorph writes about the PM is to say they cost too much, since they're not needed by most pros. -- that even pros should stop buying them. haha.
For some pros, that's already true. It's been true of the "Office" market for a long time. The fastest machines won't give a substantially better performance than a $500 budget machine, so why spend the money?
That march of transistor power will eventually gobble up the typical artistic suite as well. 2-d/3-d illustrators, photgraphers, and even movie makers and animators will eventually find their needs chased down and met by cheaper and cheaper machines. Enough so, that there's less point in buying more expensive stuff unless you REALLY need it, or you just want it.
Think of the customer. The customers (en masse) are always right. If they want headless expandable machines at a "consumer" price, then the wiser man finds a way to give them that and doesn't try to fight a philosophical battle with people's desires.
\tConcerning the cost of manufacturing, There is no way Apple could make such a product as cheaply as Dell, etc... The cost of R&D would have to be absorbed in much smaller production runs, which is true of all lines currently offered by the company. To meet the prices of its competitors. Anyone hoping that such a product would be more competitive would be disappointed. The pursuit of lowest overall cost has its price in QA (look at the problems with the iBook).
\tCost non withstanding, how can the box be compared favorably with its competition? Unless PPC performance greatly outstrips its x86 counterparts, few are going to be persuaded to switch from their investment in PC hardware and software. I have not yet seen that is the case. As for upgradability selling them on the Mac box, most PC users I know are those that never upgrade anything or those that scour the web to find the absolute cheapest price on the card they want. There is no way they would pay the premium charged to Mac users for video upgrades, or the limited choice of upgrade cards in general.
\tRegarding how it will impact the bottom line of Apple Computer Inc., there is no doubt it will not be immediately beneficial to the company. If it were priced aggressively I?m sure it cannibalize sales of Power Macs, iMacs and eMacs. If not, then Apple would have something like the Cube, with limited market appeal and low sales. Neither option is going to please the stockholders, to whom Jobs et al. are answerable.
\tSo unless IBM has some surprises for us this year (P4 butt kickin? 750vx for dirt cheap!), I don?t see such a product on the immediate horizon. But then what do I know about what goes on Stevie?s head?
Cannibalizing sales of other products does cause other problems though. If the iMac doesn't sell enough because of this new product then they'll never get their R&D back on the iMac.
So that means the LCD iMac, like the gumdrop/eMac before it, might be at the end of its AIO life. That is, the LCD iMac has already made back its R&D money so it now should be a persistent product like the gumdrop. No more R&D on it, it'll just remain a product Apple sells. So any future cannibalization won't hurt the iMac other than reduced sales, not reduced profit margins.
Anyway, the eMac and iMac can exists for a long time. The AIO market is perfectly set with these two products. Apple now needs to cover the tower market as completely as the AIO market is covered.
It's unrealistic to say a high end iMac covers the gap left by the low end Tower. They're different products. It's like saying if only mid-size and luxury cars are available, a high end bicycle fills the gap left by not having a compact car available. It's unrealistic.
Now it's Apple job to accomplish this.
\tAs far as cannibalizing sales of the iMac or eMac, there is, I believe, the crux of the matter. Part of the profit margin they receive from each iMac and eMac is for the LCD or CRT that is attached. I?m sure they believe that they would lose significant revenues by detaching the display. I know I have a perfectly good 17? CRT that I could use now. When my Grape iMac started showing its age, I bought a duel 867 MDD. It provided the upgradability I wanted, and I paid the premium for it. But I couldn?t afford to buy an Apple LCD to go with it. I doubt that if the tower could have been had for $500 less that I would changed my opinion of the monitors cost. However, I had to upgrade to the Power Mac line to have the luxury of choosing my monitor.
\tThat is why I don?t believe that Apple would introduce anything that would jeopardize Power Mac sales. The Power Mac and Powerbook lines are their cash cows, and the company will do nothing to cut into sales of those. Apple?s only attempt to meet the demand that is between the Power Mac and the iMac was the Cube, and sales of that were disappointing for them(I know they were expensive, but they held their margins up that way).That only leaves The bottom of the product matrix for such a product. Less powerful, less options, but still not for a price that meets the competition.
\tMy only hope that such a Mac would come to be is if eMac sales go completely in the toilet. Such a dire fall off of demand would force Apple to put a new product in the matrix. An eMac replacement As described would be perfect for me,and the difference in cost would allow me to buy more software and peripherals, encouraging more 3rd party companies to support the platform. As things stand today, however, I don?t see such a replacement in the cards.