c-man, You have pretty much summed up what Apple has done wrong in the past few years.
Jobs has wrongly killed cloning, he should have modified it to lessen the parasitic nature they had evolved into. They sucked Apple blood as the fees made attacking high end systems the best option.
They should have upped the high end fee and cut the low end fee and lived with the sales and the fees. A strategic advance is what Jobs sees this as, but I see it as a strategic advance to the rear(a retreat) To be sure the cuts made and the new OS hyperbole and the OS high marginsales along with no clones placed a veneer of profits on APple for the last few quaters, but where will share go? Down?
Apple can still make a profit at 1% market share and also be a large company. 1% of the global market is large, if you forget the past. At 1% the share price will settle to the warranted profit point, and it might well be less than now if share falls this summer as the critical school buys get lined up. The predictions of the new imac have the potential to evaporate if the first few do not sell very well, and the rest will get cancelled. By the time it appears the WIntel crash will have made it very expensive, and I hear it is also not expandable? so cloners cannot buy them to make bigger ones out of. I wonder, if you made a new circuit board and took the APple ROMS and the OS could you make a high end G3 system(if you bought a faster CPU)?? . That would mean a fee of about $600 to make a legal clone(as you could use the RAM, CPU, Hard drive, Keyboard, power etc and sell the open frame monitor...
interesting concept and how could apple stop it? Do not call it an APple, it aint, but it would be a compatible. I wonder if there are 70,000 ordered by the Power group descendants?
There you go....a way to stay in business, buy imacs and gut them into high end G3s and have Jobs gnash his teeth at you in impotent rage.
With tongue in cheek a bit, but it could be done, practical peripherals did it years ago, and Apple tried to stop them and could not. |
