Here in the UK, a white MB is £749, and an entry MBP is £899.
At those price points, Apple is still a more expensive purchase, especially for a potential switcher who can get a whole lot of notebooks for £500 or less. While I don't expect Apple to produce a netbook, neither do I see a tablet as an alternative fill in product. I think Apple would do really well with a MB priced at £5-600 point, without sacrificing their brand values. Then knock a further £50 of the entry MBP and the range sits well in price.
The market this would open to Apple would be huge, as consumers are now able to get a lot of hardware for considerably less than the Apple entry price point. Sure, none of it may be as good, but for a huge number of consumers... it's good enough.
The mini needs price adjustment too. Here in the UK the 2GB model hits the store at an unimpressive £649. Far too expensive. They need to get the range starting at £399 at least. There is a need for a headless macintosh, but the last revamp pushed the UK price too high.
The snow white Mac's sell well because of their clean, smooth, white porcelain looks. Women and kids love them.
Johnathan Ive used to design toilets before becoming Steve jobs best friend and designer.
The last line isn't really helping. In the past, I think I've referred to the color as "institutional white" in the pejorative sense. I hadn't found much information on his job designing toilets, but that explains both versions of the iBook.
Actually that is as simple as pie. First Intel does shrink its products, you have heard of process shrinks haven't you. This leads to higher integration which further allows Apple to shrink its products. As for batteries they have been improving by about 8 % a year.
That's fine as an evolution over the years. But they can't simply just make it smaller, otherwise they would. Everything would be miniscule.
This technological progress is no good when it comes to offering the same performance, today, in a smaller package at the same price.
Quote:
You don't have to believe me though as looking at the iPhone 3GS kinda proves the point. Here we have more than double the performance in the same package and it has a longer battery life.
Yes, the key being they couldn't offer that a year earlier because it wasn't possible.
BTW... I'm hoping Apple replaces my iPhone friday.... it is certainly MUCH shorter battery life but perhaps a fault.
Quote:
over-clock it a bit, there is a lot of head room especially in Intel processors.
You're saying that Apple should use smaller/slower processors, but overclock them, to get equivalent performance? I think that would be a Applecare nightmare....
Quote:
The trick to such a low cost device is to engineer simple PC boards with a minimal of I/O, get rid of space wasting devices like optical drives and 2.5" notebook drives. Apples biggest obstacle to being successful here is the reliance on Intel which really has mucked up the low power line up and Atom. Atom should have been delivered in an high integration version with everything but the GPU on board and they should have supported the use of dual core processors in laptops. The artificial constraints put on Atom have been a marketing boondoggle for Intel.
I'm sorry, I just don't buy that Intel is artificially slowing down their processors.... that they could have been much faster at the same cost and price. I'm happy to accept Intel will make as much money as they can.... just not the rest.
Quote:
First the price of $599 isn't realistic at all. There simply isn't enough silicon in the device to justify the price point. I fully expect the unsubsidized price to drop a bit once Apple has a tablet on the market.
The iPhone does things that were impossible a couple of years ago. Is it really realistic to be able for us to say whether the price is realistic?
Fortunately - competition from Nokia, Palm etc helps to keep these things in line. Along with competition between AMD/Intel/ARM of course.
Quote:
As to that expensive contract I'm with you, I want carrier choice.
I just don't want a carrier at all. I understand how much that really costs! I already pay for a phone and data plan, let me tether my laptop or tablet to my phone. Tethering works great on the iPhone already.
Quote:
Beyond all that 16GB is no where near enough memory. This thing needs 128GB to start off on the right foot. I'm not kidding here at all. If you are going to use it mobile, for travel and such, buffering media is going to be a huge application for the device. Plus the reality that there is no perfection with respect to carriers, all of them have dead spots, usually in places where you might want to sit down and actually use a tablet.
I would like to see a tablet designed to run without net connection, seamlessly taking advantage when connections drift by to update caches, send/get mail, etc. It seems that everyone builds for either connected or standalone - rarely a combination.
But I think a good syncing system and online connections mean we can get by with 16GB too... unless it's a HD video device.
...First the price of $599 isn't realistic at all. There simply isn't enough silicon in the device to justify the price point...
You want carrier choice and a price drop?
I can go into any local mobile carrier and get the iPhone 3GS, unlocked, but the price will be £700 (or $1,138!) I don't think your view on what a realistic market price is quite matches Apple's.
Sorry to dissapoint you but Nvidia or ATI do not shrink full sized cards down especially for iMacs, iMacs use mobile video cards exactly the same as ones Alienware, Dell etc. use.
A fine example of you imagining how this could be done instead of looking at a teardown. Do you have any idea how much those custom cards would cost ? Apple cards use a custom BIOS to talk to Intel EFI but that is as custom as it gets.
Every Mac uses identical chipsets and boards to PCs. If anyone paid you $.02 for that they overpayed !
Why are you berating me? My talk of NVIDIA was not in reference to their 9400m GPUs, which are integrated with the motherboard and do not produce excessive heat. It was in reference to their GTS 150 card, which is not integrated, large, and requires much more heat dissipation capabilities. Even more so with an ATI 4850. I haven't been able to find a tear down of a high-end 24" iMac that sports either one of these to see how Apple fits the suckers in there (plus a heat sink and fan, mind you), hence my curiosity. I do have an idea how much custom cards cost, since all 3rd party manufacturers' graphics cards are customized in some way or other from the reference designs of NVIDIA or ATI (from the enclosure, to the heat sink & fan, all the way down to what type of capacitors are used). To suggest otherwise indicates you do not have knowledge of how graphics cards are manufactured. Whether it is "custom" in physical form or the BIOS, it's still a custom card. EVGA is one of the few 3rd party manufacturers out there that offers an NVIDIA 285 for Mac, and that card goes for $100 more than the exact same PC version, which isn't terribly surprising or different in terms of price, IMO. Also, iMacs do not use identical boards and chipsets as PCs. Graphics chipsets, yes. But look at the 20" iMac tear down over at iFixIt and tell me how any of those components (especially the logic board) are the same as what you would find inside a PC.
And yet you still have yet to explain your idea to replace it, strange that !
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
Nothing is really obsolete until there is something that can actually replace it adequately.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpamSandwich
Nearly a quarter century after I learned to type, my need for said skill has not diminished one bit... and I don't anticipate it ever lessening in my lifetime (save for a mind-reading computer unexpectedly appearing). The difference between dictation and accurate, direct typing is a gulf that will not be bridged with voice recognition software. Heck it can't even be bridged with a skilled secretary.
Rapidly? You are kidding right? With the exception of the $99 iPhone 3G all of their products are still in the premium market. The economy has been in the tank for a year and this refresh won't see the light of day until sometime in 2010. And you call that rapid?
Apple has been slow to push prices down. No one can deny that.
They decided to wait and see how their lineup stood up to the recession and only react if sales tanked. As sales have stood up pretty well up to this point, all they done is inch prices down (when compared to competitors) and reconfigure certain products. This is logical up to a point but IMO they have missed a golden opportunity (pre Windows 7) to gain market share by pushing prices further down and entering the netbook market.
Apple could easily produce a netbook that wasn't 'junk' (in Steve Jobs terminology) for $499. And I mean really easily, so SJ isn't to be believed on that one. There are other reasons why Apple doesn't want to get into the netbook world (at least yet).
Apple has been fortunate in that sales have held up rather well and no doubt the ability to put OSX on some netbooks without major issues is a good thing for some users too.
Apple has been slow to push prices down. No one can deny that.
They decided to wait and see how their lineup stood up to the recession and only react if sales tanked. As sales have stood up pretty well up to this point, all they done is inch prices down (when compared to competitors) and reconfigure certain products. This is logical up to a point but IMO they have missed a golden opportunity (pre Windows 7) to gain market share by pushing prices further down and entering the netbook market.
Apple could easily produce a netbook that wasn't 'junk' (in Steve Jobs terminology) for $499. And I mean really easily, so SJ isn't to be believed on that one. There are other reasons why Apple doesn't want to get into the netbook world (at least yet).
Apple has been fortunate in that sales have held up rather well and no doubt the ability to put OSX on some netbooks without major issues is a good thing for some users too.
Netbook market share isn't really worth having from Apples perspective, given the low profit margins. I would anticipate the mythical tablet to be Apples attempt to snag netbook buyers, however the tablet will be priced higher than a netbook to get it into the profit margin range that Apple is comfortable at. They will be able to do that because it will be a tablet, not a netbook.
IMO Apple could squeeze a healthly margin out of a $500 netbook and use it as another stepping stone to get people to switch and give established mac users the option of a super compact runaround machine.
There are many PC users that balk at Apple's current pricing for laptops but that might be willing to go for an Apple netbook as a first taste of the apple. It's clear there is a market for netbbooks.
No more than 600 g or so (the lighter, the better) and as much pocketable as possible. With video-out for Keynote and PowerPoint presentations. The MacBook Air is too heavy, too large and too port crippled!
1. If your aim is Keynote and Powerpoint presentations - wait until an app is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch; in the meantime, turn all of your slides into photos, create an album and run a manually advanced slideshow. Video out is already on today's iPhones and iPod Touches.
2. The MacBook Air is not "too heavy" by any stretch of the imagination.
Typing is obsolete. I am ashamed to be living in the 21st century and STILL banging the digits of my appendages against a primitive rectangular grid of tiny boxes with symbols on them.
So now Macs become more affordable and people buy it, only to complain that for such a price they could buy a better PC with more stuff. All BS ( Not the poster ). A PC is incomparable to a Mac. It's like comparing a Mercedes to a Toyota. 2 different leagues. 1 is set apart by design, high quality, thus premium-priced while another is for the masses and has significantly lower quality and not so stellar design. Apple has never targeted for large marketshare, but it's products are so stellar people want them and pay through the roof for them, thus increasing marketshare for Apple. Price chops are good,but not too much IMO.
Comments
At those price points, Apple is still a more expensive purchase, especially for a potential switcher who can get a whole lot of notebooks for £500 or less. While I don't expect Apple to produce a netbook, neither do I see a tablet as an alternative fill in product. I think Apple would do really well with a MB priced at £5-600 point, without sacrificing their brand values. Then knock a further £50 of the entry MBP and the range sits well in price.
The market this would open to Apple would be huge, as consumers are now able to get a lot of hardware for considerably less than the Apple entry price point. Sure, none of it may be as good, but for a huge number of consumers... it's good enough.
The mini needs price adjustment too. Here in the UK the 2GB model hits the store at an unimpressive £649. Far too expensive. They need to get the range starting at £399 at least. There is a need for a headless macintosh, but the last revamp pushed the UK price too high.
The snow white Mac's sell well because of their clean, smooth, white porcelain looks. Women and kids love them.
Johnathan Ive used to design toilets before becoming Steve jobs best friend and designer.
The last line isn't really helping. In the past, I think I've referred to the color as "institutional white" in the pejorative sense. I hadn't found much information on his job designing toilets, but that explains both versions of the iBook.
How do you know if they're best friends?
Actually that is as simple as pie. First Intel does shrink its products, you have heard of process shrinks haven't you. This leads to higher integration which further allows Apple to shrink its products. As for batteries they have been improving by about 8 % a year.
That's fine as an evolution over the years. But they can't simply just make it smaller, otherwise they would. Everything would be miniscule.
This technological progress is no good when it comes to offering the same performance, today, in a smaller package at the same price.
You don't have to believe me though as looking at the iPhone 3GS kinda proves the point. Here we have more than double the performance in the same package and it has a longer battery life.
Yes, the key being they couldn't offer that a year earlier because it wasn't possible.
BTW... I'm hoping Apple replaces my iPhone friday.... it is certainly MUCH shorter battery life but perhaps a fault.
over-clock it a bit, there is a lot of head room especially in Intel processors.
You're saying that Apple should use smaller/slower processors, but overclock them, to get equivalent performance? I think that would be a Applecare nightmare....
The trick to such a low cost device is to engineer simple PC boards with a minimal of I/O, get rid of space wasting devices like optical drives and 2.5" notebook drives. Apples biggest obstacle to being successful here is the reliance on Intel which really has mucked up the low power line up and Atom. Atom should have been delivered in an high integration version with everything but the GPU on board and they should have supported the use of dual core processors in laptops. The artificial constraints put on Atom have been a marketing boondoggle for Intel.
I'm sorry, I just don't buy that Intel is artificially slowing down their processors.... that they could have been much faster at the same cost and price. I'm happy to accept Intel will make as much money as they can.... just not the rest.
First the price of $599 isn't realistic at all. There simply isn't enough silicon in the device to justify the price point. I fully expect the unsubsidized price to drop a bit once Apple has a tablet on the market.
The iPhone does things that were impossible a couple of years ago. Is it really realistic to be able for us to say whether the price is realistic?
Fortunately - competition from Nokia, Palm etc helps to keep these things in line. Along with competition between AMD/Intel/ARM of course.
As to that expensive contract I'm with you, I want carrier choice.
I just don't want a carrier at all. I understand how much that really costs! I already pay for a phone and data plan, let me tether my laptop or tablet to my phone. Tethering works great on the iPhone already.
Beyond all that 16GB is no where near enough memory. This thing needs 128GB to start off on the right foot. I'm not kidding here at all. If you are going to use it mobile, for travel and such, buffering media is going to be a huge application for the device. Plus the reality that there is no perfection with respect to carriers, all of them have dead spots, usually in places where you might want to sit down and actually use a tablet.
I would like to see a tablet designed to run without net connection, seamlessly taking advantage when connections drift by to update caches, send/get mail, etc. It seems that everyone builds for either connected or standalone - rarely a combination.
But I think a good syncing system and online connections mean we can get by with 16GB too... unless it's a HD video device.
...First the price of $599 isn't realistic at all. There simply isn't enough silicon in the device to justify the price point...
You want carrier choice and a price drop?
I can go into any local mobile carrier and get the iPhone 3GS, unlocked, but the price will be £700 (or $1,138!) I don't think your view on what a realistic market price is quite matches Apple's.
Sorry to dissapoint you but Nvidia or ATI do not shrink full sized cards down especially for iMacs, iMacs use mobile video cards exactly the same as ones Alienware, Dell etc. use.
A fine example of you imagining how this could be done instead of looking at a teardown. Do you have any idea how much those custom cards would cost ? Apple cards use a custom BIOS to talk to Intel EFI but that is as custom as it gets.
Every Mac uses identical chipsets and boards to PCs. If anyone paid you $.02 for that they overpayed !
Why are you berating me? My talk of NVIDIA was not in reference to their 9400m GPUs, which are integrated with the motherboard and do not produce excessive heat. It was in reference to their GTS 150 card, which is not integrated, large, and requires much more heat dissipation capabilities. Even more so with an ATI 4850. I haven't been able to find a tear down of a high-end 24" iMac that sports either one of these to see how Apple fits the suckers in there (plus a heat sink and fan, mind you), hence my curiosity. I do have an idea how much custom cards cost, since all 3rd party manufacturers' graphics cards are customized in some way or other from the reference designs of NVIDIA or ATI (from the enclosure, to the heat sink & fan, all the way down to what type of capacitors are used). To suggest otherwise indicates you do not have knowledge of how graphics cards are manufactured. Whether it is "custom" in physical form or the BIOS, it's still a custom card. EVGA is one of the few 3rd party manufacturers out there that offers an NVIDIA 285 for Mac, and that card goes for $100 more than the exact same PC version, which isn't terribly surprising or different in terms of price, IMO. Also, iMacs do not use identical boards and chipsets as PCs. Graphics chipsets, yes. But look at the 20" iMac tear down over at iFixIt and tell me how any of those components (especially the logic board) are the same as what you would find inside a PC.
And yet you still have yet to explain your idea to replace it, strange that !
Nothing is really obsolete until there is something that can actually replace it adequately.
Nearly a quarter century after I learned to type, my need for said skill has not diminished one bit... and I don't anticipate it ever lessening in my lifetime (save for a mind-reading computer unexpectedly appearing). The difference between dictation and accurate, direct typing is a gulf that will not be bridged with voice recognition software. Heck it can't even be bridged with a skilled secretary.
Sarcasm, my friends.
-Clive
Sarcasm, my friends.
-Clive
Well played.
Well not very a tablet but a macBook without keyboard, but with a multitouch screen. So a MacBook with two screen.
That's it
Rapidly? You are kidding right? With the exception of the $99 iPhone 3G all of their products are still in the premium market. The economy has been in the tank for a year and this refresh won't see the light of day until sometime in 2010. And you call that rapid?
Apple has been slow to push prices down. No one can deny that.
They decided to wait and see how their lineup stood up to the recession and only react if sales tanked. As sales have stood up pretty well up to this point, all they done is inch prices down (when compared to competitors) and reconfigure certain products. This is logical up to a point but IMO they have missed a golden opportunity (pre Windows 7) to gain market share by pushing prices further down and entering the netbook market.
Apple could easily produce a netbook that wasn't 'junk' (in Steve Jobs terminology) for $499. And I mean really easily, so SJ isn't to be believed on that one. There are other reasons why Apple doesn't want to get into the netbook world (at least yet).
Apple has been fortunate in that sales have held up rather well and no doubt the ability to put OSX on some netbooks without major issues is a good thing for some users too.
Apple has been slow to push prices down. No one can deny that.
They decided to wait and see how their lineup stood up to the recession and only react if sales tanked. As sales have stood up pretty well up to this point, all they done is inch prices down (when compared to competitors) and reconfigure certain products. This is logical up to a point but IMO they have missed a golden opportunity (pre Windows 7) to gain market share by pushing prices further down and entering the netbook market.
Apple could easily produce a netbook that wasn't 'junk' (in Steve Jobs terminology) for $499. And I mean really easily, so SJ isn't to be believed on that one. There are other reasons why Apple doesn't want to get into the netbook world (at least yet).
Apple has been fortunate in that sales have held up rather well and no doubt the ability to put OSX on some netbooks without major issues is a good thing for some users too.
Netbook market share isn't really worth having from Apples perspective, given the low profit margins. I would anticipate the mythical tablet to be Apples attempt to snag netbook buyers, however the tablet will be priced higher than a netbook to get it into the profit margin range that Apple is comfortable at. They will be able to do that because it will be a tablet, not a netbook.
There are many PC users that balk at Apple's current pricing for laptops but that might be willing to go for an Apple netbook as a first taste of the apple. It's clear there is a market for netbbooks.
What Apple needs is a light and small MacBook, like the Sony Vaio P Series
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/...52921644608896
No more than 600 g or so (the lighter, the better) and as much pocketable as possible. With video-out for Keynote and PowerPoint presentations. The MacBook Air is too heavy, too large and too port crippled!
1. If your aim is Keynote and Powerpoint presentations - wait until an app is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch; in the meantime, turn all of your slides into photos, create an album and run a manually advanced slideshow. Video out is already on today's iPhones and iPod Touches.
2. The MacBook Air is not "too heavy" by any stretch of the imagination.
lol.
Typing is obsolete. I am ashamed to be living in the 21st century and STILL banging the digits of my appendages against a primitive rectangular grid of tiny boxes with symbols on them.
How neolithic.
-Clive
Blasphemy!
Edit: Fine, you want to stop typing?
Get a MacBook Wheel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
The white MacBook is a design classic, and to this day, is still one of my all-time favourite Macs!
+1. It's nice seeing the white plastic being carried on to the iPhones ( 3G/3GS ). Cracking is not a nice thing though..
The snow white Mac's sell well because of their clean, smooth, white porcelain looks. Women and kids love them.
Johnathan Ive used to design toilets before becoming Steve jobs best friend and designer.
It's Jonathan Ive, not Johnathan. And if you say that, I guess some people are using Toiletbooks ...
Good. Chop another $100 off the price, too.
So now Macs become more affordable and people buy it, only to complain that for such a price they could buy a better PC with more stuff. All BS ( Not the poster ). A PC is incomparable to a Mac. It's like comparing a Mercedes to a Toyota. 2 different leagues. 1 is set apart by design, high quality, thus premium-priced while another is for the masses and has significantly lower quality and not so stellar design. Apple has never targeted for large marketshare, but it's products are so stellar people want them and pay through the roof for them, thus increasing marketshare for Apple. Price chops are good,but not too much IMO.
Originally Posted by Johnny Mozzarella
Apple should redesign the White MacBook to look more like a plastic MacBook air
drop the screen size to 10-12"
drop the optical drive
drop the price to $799
(one model available in five colors)
This would get a MacBook/MacBook Pro user near the ever-increasing Netbook price range and save Mac users some weight when lugging things around.
Apple should redesign the White MacBook to look more like a plastic MacBook air
drop the screen size to 10-12"
drop the optical drive
drop the price to $799
(one model available in five colors)
Wow, so they make the MacBook Air plastic and even smaller and the price is cut in two? Funny that. You're sort of not thinking that one through.
Apple should redesign the White MacBook to look more like a plastic MacBook air
drop the screen size to 10-12"
drop the optical drive
drop the price to $799
(one model available in five colors)
I need one! Now!