1. Apple\'s profit margins on laptops are roughly 20-30%. Dell\'s profit margins on laptops are nothing. From an investor standpoint, they should probably shut down the laptop business and put the money in a savings account instead. It\'s what IBM did with Lenovo. It\'s what Apothekar wanted to do with HP. Apple is the only company that makes substantial money making computers, and yes, the value it builds is in the look and feel (and the look and feel is not cheap... see no. 2).
2. Next time you\'re in a store, compare a Lenovo to a Macbook. Lenovo\'s are constructed out of shaped sheet metal. Cheap, easy, fast. MacBooks are constructed out of machined aluminum and then anodized. Expensive and time consuming. Why did Apple choose such an expensive process? Because it looks better and feels more solid. But how can they put a price competitive item to market if the manufacturing process is so expensive? By reducing the product line, reducing customizeability, and *mass producing* the limited product line. How can they get a Macbook to *half* the thickness of a comparable laptop? By removing components and using a single board. How can they get a long battery life? But further reducing the size of the circuit board, and making the battery like 2/3rds of the internal guts of the computer. Everything they do is very deliberate. They cannot win and make money by fighting PC\'s head to head. They differentiate, very intelligently, and now everyone is trying to copy them. Dell started to make a unibody machined block laptop. Everybody else started making \'ultrabooks\' on a single circuit board with no upgrade path.
So basically, think about it... does everybody really need an upgrade path? These days, chip, GPU life cycles are so long. The last time I upgraded my computer, I completely built a new one. I\'ve swapped a few things here and there, but in reality, the next time I upgrade, I have to change *everything*. There is far less of a need for upgradeability now than there was 5 years ago. Apple is capitalizing on that.
3. You\'re making a value judgement on art. I.E. you\'re saying that the simple, clean design of the Apple products isn\'t good. That\'s a personal judgment, not a observation of the actual business practices of Apple. Apple\'s simple, clean designs are very deliberate. (The curve on the MacBook Air chassis... it\'s easier to make it flat!) But the real business practices at Apple are simple: the industrial design team leads all product designs. Not OS, not supply chain, not electronics engineers.. not even marketing. Jon Ive goes into his design studio and they work on the shape, the texture, the size, and the materials of the product. It\'s not the reverse... it\'s not a bunch of engineers making a product, then handing it off to design with a note: \"make this pretty.\"
Nov 26, 2012 at 05:47 PM
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