They still do sell a low end tower for the education market, both for consumers and institutions, its around 1200 (USD). I'm not sure why they wouldn't offer this configuration for anyone. Perhaps they don't make enough money on a low end tower.
They sort of do, but it's stupid because they only offer it to educational customers. At the Apple Store for education, there are four Powermacs - Entry, Fast, Faster, and Fastest. They have all the standard models, and now they have a $1200 "dumbed-down" 867. It has a CD-RW, no L3 cache, and a 40GB hard drive. Before yesterday, that model was a similarly equipped 733. If they offered it to all customers, it would probably help. Since a single 867 is $1200, they could make a single 733 cost $900.
<strong>I'm not sure why they wouldn't offer this configuration for anyone.</strong><hr></blockquote>
in my opinion, the entry-level tower, which is "configured especially for education", is just there to close out old leftover Quicksilver motherboards and cases. If you don't have access to the Edu Apple Store, you can simply buy a discontinued Quicksilver or older model from a retailer at a significant discount. BTW, I wonder whether Apple offers the Entry-level tower to government customers as well.
Anyway, I agree that an inexpensive sub-$1000 tower for those who would rather not be stuck with an all-in-one would be a blessing. The 17" LCD iMac would be perfect for me, if only I could keep the LCD panel when I replace my CPU. I won't mind trashing the cheap CRT in my Rev.A iMac when I finally replace it, but I would hate to trash a perfectly good (and relatively expensive) LCD panel as part of an all-in-one iMac.
Apple could easily keep whatever % margin they want/need and build a tower to that price point. If it's a 733 MHZ single, so be it. If it has to be excluded from certain promotions, so be it. There would be some people that would buy it instead of a higher priced DUAL, but there is also a large market of people looking for a lower-entry point to a Mac.
As far as I'm concerned, they could offer a tower at the same specs as an eMac, same price as the eMac, just without the monitor. Anyone looking for expandability can get that instead of a built in monitor.
Yep, check out my thread-Apple still doesn't get it'. Towers are the largest segment of the computing world for consumers and Jobs refuses to see that. Apple will never increase market share by a measurable amount until this happens. As for margins-Apple can sell a tower for $999-$1299 and make money unless they are incredibly inept......................
It must be cheaper to make a fairly generic motherboard/tower box than it is to go through the trouble of engineering a compact all-in-one with it's custom MoBo.
To say nothing of dropping the cost of the LCD/CRT altogether.
PPC's are quite cheap, DDR/SDR RAM is also cheap, Opticals are cheap, and GPU's are merely a question of how much you want to spend, same thing with HDD's.
- Video card? Whatever you can get for 100 bucks OEM.
- Optical? figure $50 for 16X CDrw in quantities, heck I can buy retail 16X for 90 bucks Canadian (58USD).
Add it all up
100 + 45 + 75 + 150 + 100 + 100
total cost (using RETAIL component prices):
$620
Remember that's using RETAIL RAM and HDD prices. Figure another 130 for incedental production related this and that and you have 750 total cost on a cheap expandable tower for sale at 999USD. No Monitor but healthy margin fully in tact.
Basically dropping the cost of the display more than offsets any increased cost from using the tower MoBo -- and I was very generous on the component costs, Apple certainly does better than the prices I just pulled off the net at a moment's notice.
When you think of the more standard nature of tower MoBo's I can't help but think that a tower is even cheaper to produce than an e/iMac shell.
Comments
The Mac market isn't ready for a low cost upgradeable tower. It will only cannibalize Powermac sales and hurt Apple in the long run.
<strong>I'm not sure why they wouldn't offer this configuration for anyone.</strong><hr></blockquote>
in my opinion, the entry-level tower, which is "configured especially for education", is just there to close out old leftover Quicksilver motherboards and cases. If you don't have access to the Edu Apple Store, you can simply buy a discontinued Quicksilver or older model from a retailer at a significant discount. BTW, I wonder whether Apple offers the Entry-level tower to government customers as well.
Anyway, I agree that an inexpensive sub-$1000 tower for those who would rather not be stuck with an all-in-one would be a blessing. The 17" LCD iMac would be perfect for me, if only I could keep the LCD panel when I replace my CPU. I won't mind trashing the cheap CRT in my Rev.A iMac when I finally replace it, but I would hate to trash a perfectly good (and relatively expensive) LCD panel as part of an all-in-one iMac.
Escher
As far as I'm concerned, they could offer a tower at the same specs as an eMac, same price as the eMac, just without the monitor. Anyone looking for expandability can get that instead of a built in monitor.
To say nothing of dropping the cost of the LCD/CRT altogether.
PPC's are quite cheap, DDR/SDR RAM is also cheap, Opticals are cheap, and GPU's are merely a question of how much you want to spend, same thing with HDD's.
So...
- 800Mhz G4 < $100
- 256MB RAM ~ $45 (retail, maybe 25 bucks for Apple)
- 40GB 5400rpm drive = $75 (again RETAIL, maybe 60 bucks for Apple)
- 1 Mac Mobo, no more than $150
- 1 El-Capitan style case, another 100 bucks
- Video card? Whatever you can get for 100 bucks OEM.
- Optical? figure $50 for 16X CDrw in quantities, heck I can buy retail 16X for 90 bucks Canadian (58USD).
Add it all up
100 + 45 + 75 + 150 + 100 + 100
total cost (using RETAIL component prices):
$620
Remember that's using RETAIL RAM and HDD prices. Figure another 130 for incedental production related this and that and you have 750 total cost on a cheap expandable tower for sale at 999USD. No Monitor but healthy margin fully in tact.
Basically dropping the cost of the display more than offsets any increased cost from using the tower MoBo -- and I was very generous on the component costs, Apple certainly does better than the prices I just pulled off the net at a moment's notice.
When you think of the more standard nature of tower MoBo's I can't help but think that a tower is even cheaper to produce than an e/iMac shell.
But would people buy it over an equivalent eMac?
I think they would.
<strong>..i sure hope apple listen to you guys.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hope so too, but I know it'll never happen.