Herbvic; There is a spectrum of WIntels, true. However the price drops have been driven by factory automation, not low cost labor. Many of thos factories are in low labor places, fully automated multilevel board fab and test followed by fully automated insertion and test lines that spit out a bit of paper that tells you if a board works or not, and if not what is wrong and where the fault is to the millimeter. Some make 100,000 motherboards per week. The items are made , tested and shipped with less than $1 of labour in the direct assembly chain. In the USA the labout is around $5 for the same automated lines. AIR/EARTH/FIRE/WATER= modern computer board, and since they are automade the quality is very high. You now shop for chip set brand names to get the best boards. Intel makes the best, PC chips the worst(cheapes). The difference between the two chip sets is about $25 on the mother board end unit cost.
Can you imagine if this was Apple? With standard cases $15, keyboards $12, mice $10, 14" monitor $135 and so ont with Apple selling 1-2 million OS per month and making $60-300 on each one,(it would vary with end system use) and making 1-2 million ROM sets per month from $50 to $300(same ststem variance). Let us say 1-2 million OS/ROM sets at $300 margin each per month= $3.6-7.2 billion per year. Fantasy?. Wintel does 7 million per month now it now with MSFT getting around $60 per OS and the rest scattered.
That is the cloning setup I envision for Apple. Right now the number are around 225,000 per month(is that right) of Apple systems sold. Contrast that with the sales of wintels of 7,000,000 per month.
Cloning need not be bad if managed to grant $$ to Apple as I suggest. It will drive costs down. Logically Apple should make a motherboard that will fit a clone Wintel case so the huge available base of sub components will just drop in and that price factor will help Apple.
Some parts are unique?, but I bet you could make a marriage between and Apple and an IBM keyboard real simple. Just a few new keycaps and a new keyboard CPU and it is done. They should also use both EIDE and SCSI drives. Those that need SCSI can do that, EIDE will get the low cost EIDE drives in there.
Lots of possibilities to get a parallel effort going.
Of course some say Apple will bit the Wintel bullet?, with star trek?
Apple can also make WIntels, but why?, it will lose it's uniqueness. The key is to broaden useage, they key to that is price, the key to price is standard parts via clones(that all pay trubute to mother Apple)
Bill |
