Thoughts? Seems like everyone's taken off for an early weekend. Adam, any idea how seamless the
introduction of Apple's new consumer portable is likely to be in the midst of Palm's massive "installed base?"
Doesn't the Palm already speak Mac? What are the other issues involved in getting potential consumers to
choose the Apple over the Palm?
Someone call my name? :)
I do not think they compete really. I'm fairly sure I have seen marketing analysis that ownership of a portable does not noticeably affect purchase rates for the Pilot. (not relative to other factors).
Palm does speak Mac, and I am a happy owner. However, it doesn't speak Mac nearly as well as it speaks Windows. This will all change this summer, as Palm finally releases the developer tools on the Mac side to allow wide-spread integration of Mac apps with the Pilot.
By Macworld SF, I think you'll see many new products that all cooperate nicely with the Pilot.
The consumer portable is about price point and priorities. Think about it logically: You want to build a machine that you can sell for $1299. What do you put in it, what do you leave out? Well, thanks to motherboard reuse, etc, we can probably expect something similar to the iMac board. So there we get for cheap, G3, Rage Pro, 10/100BaseT, etc. It needs to be able to support a CD. It needs to have a cool case. It needs USB.
Do not expect a 14" screen. It won't be there. 12" is more likely. Don't expect SCSI, S-Video out, or any goodies like that. Not going to happen.
Don't know about PCMCIA cards - probably, but I wouldn't be surprised if due to integration, they don't have them. We'll see.
BTW I have no knowledge whatsoever about these plans, I am just speculating based on logic.
I think this will do a lot for Mac portables. There are many people who would love to have a portable, but can't justify buying last years technology at 2x the price.
The consumer portable is about the fact that in fact, for most things, a portable *is* a better *personal* computer. This is validated by my experiences with students at Stanford (only engineers who felt they needed the power would buy desktops) and with my own life (ditched 8500/233 for 3400/180, loving it).
As for Mac OS Rumors, I think everyone underestimates the damage they do by leaking things falsely. By making people believe in wildly improbably tech, they make buyers disappointed with current offerings, and worse yet, disappointed when the new stuff appears. It dilutes a marketing push over months when ideally it would be presented at once.
Look at the iMac reception, and wonder whether maybe more announcements would be like that if product plans weren't leaked.
This ignores the other obvious problem, namely, competitors can more accurately time counter-marketing when they have months to plan around the times of data presented in the Rumors.
- Adam |
