Quote:
Originally Posted by
mickeymantle 
sooner or later (after Ballmer), the other competitors will start getting their act together. You can see the players lining up against apple with the Droid. all these different models, and then there's RIM. . . . .
But when my daughter, who has used a Mac for the last 10 years asks for a cheap PC with 7, because she can't afford a mac, you're leaving the masses behind. There's a huge market for a lower cost computer, and by ignoring it, apple leaves the door open for the competition. And if she has to buy another one in a year because this one fails, so what, she can buy two for the price of one apple.
A few points:
1. Android is splintering like Linux. There are android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0 phones being sold out there right now. Google is rumored to be coming out with its own phone that will have the "real Android" on it. An app developed for one version is not guaranteed to work on all other versions. This is not good for developers and not good for Android.
2. Apple's market share is growing quite healthily right now, there is no need to go down market. When market share growth stalls and they have run out of ways to restart it, then that's the time to look down market. Even then, going low cost will stand on its head everything that the Apple brand represented. They will only do this as a last, desperate measure.
3. The huge market in low-cost computers operates on razor-thin margins. There are only two reasons why anyone would want to swim in that pond: First, they need the market share to get network externalities and/or economies of scale, and second, they have no choice. (i.e. Windows PC mfrs would love to swim in Apple's pond but obviously very few people would buy PCs in the Apple price and feature range.)
So why would Apple want to spend precious resources (and cheapen their brand) by wading into the lower end of the market? They have the higher end all to themselves, and it is really not that small a market, plus it's growing by leaps and bounds right now.