>>The Mini rakes by itself, and the multi price pointed iMac rakes by itself, but there's nothing in between to catch the customers who like to get fiddly with their cheap computers.
Between the iMac and the Mac Pro it's looking pretty good, but to do a really fine job of raking in the potential Mac buyers, there should be some more overlap of performance. The iMac is just fine as it is. It's not meant to be fiddly. But there should perhaps be another form factor between the iMac and Mac Pro which offers the option of more fiddlyness than the iMac, yet less expensive than the Mac Pro.<<
HV -
That's really the nub of the thing right there. People who like to get fiddly with their cheap boxes aren't Apple's target market. Apple is all about providing a seamless, out-of-the-box experience that doesn't require fiddling. By concentrating on that idea, they are managing to provide just such an experience, and to make a decent profit doing it.
Sure, there are some people who are tinkerers but who also appreciate good design and a solid OS. And yes, those people are not being catered to by Apple. At least, not on the low end.
But those people are a small subset of the market, and the low end of that subset isn't a high profit niche. So Apple has decided to give that niche a miss.
Apple caters instead to a larger group of people who want to do things with their computers, rather than doing things to their computers. They've managed to increase their market share quite nicely over the past several years by doing what they are doing.
- Allen |
