🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <danpop.807143070@rscernix>, Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop) wrote:

> There are lots of Mac's in the shops in Geneva, but (almost) everybody
> is ignoring them and buying PC's.  How does this fact fit into your
> picture.  I guess Geneva must be a fairly atypical case :-)

I guess so. What are the prices of these systems in Geneva - it's not
exactly known to be a cheap place for US products.
 
> We are living in a capitalist world, where the demand is controlling the
> volume of the production.  If Apple is losing market share, this is not
> because their production capabilities are overwhelmed by the demand.  If
> this would be the case, indeed, they could simply raise the prices of their
> products and earn a lot more until their production facilities are 
> enlarged enough to cope with the demand.  Nobody is sacrificing their
> profits to make the customers pay less, unless they are _forced_ to by 
> the market.

Apple overall margins are something like 28%. For nice systems like the
9500 and 8100's I'd say it's somewhere in the 30's - can you find another
hardware company that can say that? Apple has kept prices high and is
earning a lot. Enough to keep eWorld and Newton afloat until they started
making money. Apple has never had any real system surplus at least in the
last 5 years. Around here people wait 3-4 months for a high end system and
often even 1-2 for a low end system. Not until the Perf5200 came out did I
see a real supply of systems on campus.

You still did not address that market share is tied to production. Do you
really think that Apple market share will increase if they raise prices?
Market share is not governed by $$ sold, or Apple would have had a much
higher share back in the late 80's ;-) Until Apple gets their new plant
cooking, their share will be constrained. 

Perhaps Apple share will pick up a bit when they can drop prices ~20%. How
does a $2800 604 sound to you? or a $1400 75Mhz system complete with quad
speed, 15" monitor, etc. etc. 

> >IMHO, to call the PPC architecture "underpowered" is to reveal a genuine 
> >insecurity, or a genuine lack of knowledge. (the reader is left to decide 
> >which).
> 
> It's not underpowered, but people expected more from a RISC technology,
> when compared to the age old x86.  It didn't performed up to the public
> expectations, hence almost nobody was impressed.  Combined with a crappy
> OS (I mean what's behind the nice GUI), which hasn't yet been fully
> ported to the PPC (why, after more than one year from the PMac 
> introduction?), this explains why the PMac didn't impress the PC user/buyer.

And how does the crappy (behind and before the GUI) OS on Intel impress
the PC user/buyer? Perhaps that's not an issue here, after all?

People have expected a lot from the PPC but March '94 was the first of a
three phase transition. Phase two just began with the PPC Macs and phase
three will come next year with Copland. This has been a public plan for
many years and is not running very far behind schedule. We hear a lot of
grumblings from the PC crowds as Apple has a very clearly stated plan and
nothing is mentioned out of MS/Intel. Sure there's a P6 coming but when?
What about P7 - nobody seems to know what it will do. MS wants to take
everyone to NT but hasn't sold everyone on Win95 yet. There are very
obvious tensions between MS and Intel and I think people are nervous
there.

> >Er, that's another silly thing to be crowing about. How long have the 
> >desktop models been shipping?
> 
> Since October '94.  Just a few months after the introduction of the PMac.
> And the first IBM desktops based on the PPC 601 shipped since 1993.

Those were desktop systems? Boy, they should have reflected that in the
price a bit better.

-- 
Bob Cassidy
UC Irvine