[X4U] How can we compete?

[Eugene]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 05:19:04PM -0500, Richard Gilmore wrote:
: Mike wrote:
: >
: > And for a LOT less than you would pay for a comparable Mac bundle.
: > I paid over $200 more (education price) for my eMac with SuperDrive
: > and I still would need to add hundreds of dollars worth of
: > accessories to come close to the specs on this PC.
: 
: It is frustrating. One of my PC friends has a very kick ass 64 bit AMD 2.x
: Gig , 1 G of ram, machine that he built out of his previous P4 machine all
: for about $400. I could never upgrade to a G5 for anything close to that.

Apples and oranges.  You can't compare between a machine that you
assembled yourself vs. a prebuilt machine sold at retail prices.
It is difficult to upgrade a Mac beyond a handful of components.
So things like swapping the motherboard to take advantage of newer
CPUs and faster RAM are out of the question.  A fair comparison
would be to buy a new machine from HP or Dell and compare their
offerings with those from Apple.

: > I'm just saying that I think Apple needs to do some stuff to market to the
: > "other" 95%... Whether it's a low-cost Mac, a digital set-top box, or
: > something else.  Or maybe, as Judi suggested, Macs just aren't the main
: > priority of Apple anymore.
: 
: I agree Apple should do something. I hope Macs aren't sideline then we would
: be stupid to keep supporting them.

Apple can do two things.  One, cut corners to drive hardware prices down.
Two, add more features to help justify its premium prices.


-- 
Eugene Lee
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/