Why Macs Cost More

bazingajournal.com

7 points·shawndumas··4 comments

>Apple’s computing hardware, and the software development behind OS X, actually cost more to manufacture.

Does Apple really spend more on software development than Microsoft? It's slightly plausible that they spend more on items specifically related to home users and designers, but overall?

This link: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/07/apple-adds-staff-boosts-randd... has Apple spending a little more than $1B on overall R&D, and this one: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/08/04/charts-micros... has MS spending about $8B.

Microsoft Isnt producing the computers though which apple does so you have to compare the software cost to that of say HP:s software cost.

But HP doesn't make their own PC operating system (yet).

I don't think the $8B goes all into the set of programs that can be compared to what goes inside a Mac. Apple has a much narrower set of programs it offers their users and part of that $1.1B will go into hardware development. Also, by cleverly leveraging open-source software, their development costs are considerably reduced when compared to Microsoft.

OSX comes with Apache, Samba, GCC, SQLite, Python, Ruby, Perl and a host of tools Apple didn't have to develop themselves, while Microsoft has to fully fund, by itself, IIS, file and printer sharing, their C compiler, Jet, and PowerShell (something that can't compare with the flexibility of the last 3 I mentioned).

To put it very concisely, Apple spends less than 12% of Microsoft's budget, but spends it much more than 8 times better.

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