Stephen; A few years ago I saw an Apple ad for a portable, "only $4800, only 4 pounds". The price and weight varied a bit as my memory is vague, but in essence they valued it at $1200 per Lb.
What hubris!!. There has been a glut in active color displays that has dropped their prices dramatically in the past 6 months. This couple d with the huge drop in memory and medium drops in the CPUs has given the Wintel NBs a huge price advantage. Apple has a structure that is slow to develop, slow to make, slow to market, and slow to respond to falls in price of critical components. The Wintels have an extremely rapid development cycle. If a new CPU came out today, a Taiwan company would have a prototype motherboard in under 10 days.(assuming they had all data etc, parts), and the test debug cycle would make another one in a week, and one a week until final glass drilled. Americans also can do this, but are slower to respond. I have seen the facilities the Taiwan gov't makes available to help even the smaller engineering companies, and I was impressed. They ever help them copy Pals etc, as they have a brute force analyzer to even get the state machine types. Of course making a new WIntel board is no cheating, just fast work. Apple is slow as molasses in all the aforementioned areas.
I hear they are kicking out some deadwood to help eliminate some of the above chokepoints.
You and I could live a lifetime on what Amelio got. I for the life of me cannot figure out what made him attractive. His curriculum vitae looked useless, as experience at dead dog failure european
operations would not seem to qualify him in any way.
I suspect an old boys network of bankers, large investors etc, who saw a dogged worker in Amelio, whereas a visionary like me/you/?? was needed.
Bill |
