What is with the MACevangelists here?

not likely, they sold 50% fewer G5's this year than last year, which means revenue is not even comming close to covering production costs for their desktop PC's...


s'ok, everyone is entitled to be wrong sometimes

heh, if I wanted to cut corners on production cost I would certainly swap out the CPU for something cheaper first... the desktop production definitely took a huge hit this quarter even though it was there second best quarter. This quarter's 26 million revenue resulted only in a profit of 4.6 million which doesnt really even dent previous quarters where Apple took serious loss. The revenue generated by sales here was a defecit and did not cover it's own production costs. The i-pod carried the quarter.

wait... how would you know? I had to dig to get insider info on number of units sold, you are totally making this "double the number" thing up... Why don't you just google for yourself apple q3 breakdown you will see that I know there's no way for you to be doing anything but guessing here, Apple hasn't included to the public a # of units sold breakdown since early / mid 2005.

Um, maybe they sold 50% fewer G5s because people are buying the Intel models! You can't even buy any G5 models from the website anymore! You're basing things on a discontinued model?!


It had nothing to do with cutting corners. The G-series processors had hit the wall! What, you want people to live with G4 notebooks for the rest of their lives?


But notebook production must have made up for it because total units were up 12% from same time last year...and you're saying that's a huge hit?


My apologies...after re-reading, I was thinking of an article by an analyst that upped the guidance for Q3 + Q4 due to higher Macbook sales and incorrectly remembered that as just Q3.

Still, though, if you follow your own advice and google, you'll find that the iPod side of Apple accounted for roughly 45% of revenue and the Mac side of Apple accounted for roughly 55%. The iPod did not, as you claimed, carry the quarter.

I think it was the market share that went from 6 % to 12 % of all laptops sold. Thus total units were up 100 % in a year. Right now Apple is shopping around for a third laptop manufacturer to build their MacBooks.

The biggest problem with Windows is security holes, and also, until 2000 and XP, it wasn't even a truly multi-user environment--you had to be the administrator at all times. The entire base of Windows is shotty. The base of OSX is solid solid solid. The biggest problems with Windows is NOT the issue of multiple hardware maufacturers--yes, that's a problem, but only a small one, unless you're talking about customer support. If Apple releases their OS to non-apple hardware, they should only have to give customer support to people that are using specific hardware.

If apple doesn't -at the very least- start making computers other their super-high end towers and crappy Imacs built into monitors, they're never going to get past the 10% mark. Never. And even if they do that, the most they'll get in the market is 25-30%. The only way they can become viable competition to Microsoft is if they open it up to non-apple hardware, even if they only accept certain hardware manufacturers, they need to open it up at least a little bit if they want more of the market. Too many people build their own machines, and there are too many computer companies building machines for Apple to take a proprietary route and expect to truly have a place in the computer market.

Wow you people are MAChiavellian.

It's really down to PC and MAC users being MACho.

When it comes down to it, one is better at one thing and another is better at another.....oi....

I think 25 to 35 % of the market is perfect. One does not have to have a monopoly to be successful.

I have a PC and have used and PCs for over 10 years.

Since MacOSX came out, I've considered the Mac to be by far the best platform, but since Apple does things the way they do, it limits Macs to only having certain types of software, and those kinds of software are the best on the Mac, hands down.

Since the PC is the way it is, you can build it yourself, do as many upgrades as you want as they come out, it lends itself to games a lot better.

SO--

If you're mainly wanting productivity software and internet applications and don't play games much, the Mac is the way to go.

If you're mainly into games and surfing the net (making sure you have protection from spyware and viruses), and playing games, the PC is the way to go.

Agreed--but to even get past 10%, they're going to have to build some lower-end towers. They need to make more than Imacs and super-high-end towers.

Hey Uma--let me ask the question I guess I've been weaving around:

Do you think it would be to Apple's benefit to release some low to mid-grade towers? If not, why?

Fmeh-

A Mac-mini stacked on a firewire drive. There's you're low-end tower.

Seriously though.... low-end towers?

The need to protect one's hardware investment is still there, even for low-end stuff, but the 'how' has changed.

Instead of trying to boost an old low-end tower with new hardware components, folks put their new stuff on their desk (or, more likely, in their lap) and make their old "no user servicable parts inside" computer the house itunes, file and print server.

Hardware hobbyists can (and apparently do) have fun putting different OS's on the new mac intel hardware. Personally, I'm glad to get rid of the old tower I used as a home web-server and it's noisy fans, it all runs on a mac mini now, Tiny, Cheap, Silent, Cool.

Fmeh-

A Mac-mini stacked on a firewire drive. There's you're low-end tower.

Seriously though.... low-end towers?

The need to protect one's hardware investment is still there, even for low-end stuff, but the 'how' has changed.

Instead of trying to boost an old low-end tower with new hardware components, folks put their new stuff on their desk (or, more likely, in their lap) and make their old "no user servicable parts inside" computer the house itunes, file and print server.

Hardware hobbyists can (and apparently do) have fun putting different OS's on the new mac intel hardware. Personally, I'm glad to get rid of the old tower I used as a home web-server and it's noisy fans, it all runs on a mac mini now, Tiny, Cheap, Silent, Cool.

I"m not talking about one of their old towers that aren't on the intel platform. I'm talking about a new tower that isn't based on the latest and greatest Intel chipset, and is something that people can still upgrade later--the option of being able to do things on a mac hardware-wise the way people do them on PCs.

This would require that Apple be willing to sell individual components, something they've never allowed for before. Get a low end tower now, and a year from now, upgrade the motherboard to what's currently a high standard, and continue doing that same thing every time one wants to improve their machine instad of having to buy a whole new computer. This would bring them out of their "elitist" business model they've went on for years.