Apple's Annual 10-K Filing

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MacCentral posted Apple's 10-K SEC filing, which gives an interesting insight into what Apple thinks is going on. One interesting note is that Apple blames clock speed for slow sales.



<a href="http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0212/19.10k.php"; target="_blank">http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0212/19.10k.php</a>;

luca

Funny how they don't recognize why their educational sales are slowing down... it's not because of decreased demand or squeamish school districts. It's because their best offer to the educational market is a very limited $800 computer that may be easier to use than a PC but is $300 more expensive. School's aren't all that concerned about ease of use... at least, the people in charge of the budget aren't. Maybe the teachers want to keep Macs, but if the school needs a hundred new computers and they're working on a tight budget, they'll go for the PCs anyway. If they want the educational market back, they have to make the CRT iMac cost $500 or less, possibly with a headless version for $300 or so. Remember how well the LC did? It was a sucky computer... but that didn't matter. It was cheap, it offered an inexpensive color monitor which is really helpful for educational purposes, and it was small. The various revisions of LCs were probably the worst computers you could get at the time, but nowadays they are reliable little workhorses. Maybe a 25-33 MHz 68030 sucked in 1994, but it stacked up well against previous 68030s. I have an LC III+ and it's still going strong; no components have ever failed on me.



By making the CRT iMac cost so much, Apple's basically sending the message that they don't want the educational sales. If they wanted them, they'd go get them. Unlike most Mac fans, schools are not loyal to any single company and they buy things almost entirely based on price.