Apple declares war on the entire PC industry | Hacker News Reader

Apple declares war on the entire PC industry

betanews.com

23 pointsfiaz44 comments

MS is missing a huge opportunity. While Apple may be reaching the tech savvy and elite, MS needs to market to the "everyday average normal guy". Look at the Chevy "Like a friggin' rock" commercials. Is that guy going to buy some namby-pamby macbook if there's a real man's alternative somewhere?

Instead of two nerds making passive-aggressive beta-male comments to each other in the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials; imagine replacing the nerd with a Brett Farve type of guy. Not only is he an alpha male, but he's intelligent enough to be successful.

Apple may have already stepped up to that with the "Call me when you're ready to compromise" ad starring Patrick Warburton.

Agreed. Patrick Warburton, though manly looking, isn't quite the alpha male that a football star type represents. Heck, Warburton was the Tick; a live action comedy character based on a cartoon character for children and Puddy on Seinfeld. Not exactly the guy known for playing an alpha male.

Apple is for betas, plain and simple. MS is missing an opportunity to reach the alphas.

Brock Sampson, voiced by Patrick Warburton, stabbed Hilter to death in the season opener of The Venture Bros. If that's not alpha male, I don't know what is. But you're, ahem, probably right, I bet he is totally over compensating by voicing that role.

Microsoft quite happily sell X-boxes by the tonne to football-playing beer-chugging mouth-breathing fratboys, if that's your definition of "alpha male".

everyday average normal guy

Said guy's too busy listening to his iPod ;-)

Seriously, tho', Apple has simply chosen not to compete in many of the markets MS sells into. There's no Mac for gamers, for example, Apple simply aren't interested. They aren't interested in selling into corporate desktops either. There's no technical reason Apple couldn't flog 20,000 desktops to Boeing to use as Unix workstations, for example.

That's the secret, really. You don't have to be tech savvy or elite to use a Mac. You just have to be in a sector that Apple is interested in. A non-technical entry-level graphic designer is going to be using a Mac 'cos it's the right tool for the job, as is a hardcore geek who wants a decent Unix laptop.

Pretty much for the same reason BMW don't sell pickups.

It's not like BMW's engineers couldn't master the technology of the solid rear axle.

What is a veteran graphic designer going to be using?

My point was that eliteness is nothing to do with Mac usage.

Mac == PC (Personal Computer).

I think the author meant to say on Microsoft.

Language changes over time. You are technically correct but no one is confused by the author's terminology, because people clearly understand what he means.

And since people clearly understand what he means, there is no reason for him to change what he says or writes, because by definition he is using language correctly: he is communicating.

Well, maybe you do. But I was wondering where apple would get their harddrives, screens, processors and other bits and pieces if they declare war on the entire PC industry. The only thing that differentiates a 'mac' from a 'microsoft windows computer' is the software, and the design.

These terms come from 80s and 90s when PC meant Intel/Windows and Mac was Mac. I had not seen this usage for some long time now. No wonder the newer generation who missed the PC/Mac war will find it very confusing.

Those terms come from the 70's when PC meant 6502, 6800, 6809, Z80 or other 8 (and later 16) bit small computer which was meant for a single user instead of the time sharing minis and mainframes.

No wonder newer generations who missed the transition from minis and mainframes to personal computers find it very confusing.

Your honour, I present exhibit 1:

http://codytaylor.org/images/apple/apple-computers-personal-...

Apple promotes the distinction between Macs and PCs in its extremely successful advertising campaign. Anyone who doesn't understand the difference is either ignorant of current computing culture or being willfully obtuse.

I think it shows great restraint - the headline for an article like this if it was someones blog would be "Why Microsoft is dead" or "how Apple won the windows 7 war".

I wouldn't call it restraint - calling it war is still hyperbole.

Of course, Apple has really always been at odds with the PC industry, so making a play around the 7 release date comes as no surprise given that Vista tanked.

Microsoft will still make more money from Windows7 than Apple makes form selling computers. They made more from Vista than Apple makes.

There is a big difference between 'fails with the HN/Slashdot crowd' and fails to make money.

"Microsoft will still make more money from Windows7 than Apple makes form selling computers. They made more from Vista than Apple makes."

Probably true, but it may be closer than you think. According to Yahoo, AAPL had $4.8 billion in profit. According to MSFT's annual report, Windows profit was $10 billion. Some of that is XP sales, so lets say $8 billion for Vista. It took Microsoft 5 years to make Vista, and Apple easily cranks out new versions on gorgeous hardware and makes 50% of Vista's profit. Plus, the Windows sales derivative is flat to negative, while Apple's is steeply positive. Microsoft may be making tons of money, but from a business perspective, Apple is a better business.

Always tricky to get real figures, a lot of Apple's revenue comes from iphone/itunes and the details of the deals aren't public.

MS also has a lot of income from licenses/service/support it would still make money for years if it fired all it's devs tomorrow.

The point was that hype aside, an MS 'flop' still makes more money than you can imagine.

Why are netbooks only the problem of the PC industry? Surely they "cannibalize" Mac sales just as they cannibalize PC sales. Except for the people who would buy Macs no matter what.

Apple sells a high-end product; anyone who might be tempted away by a netbook would likely have already been tempted away by a lower-cost PC. It's the same reason that inexpensive Japanese cars don't cannibalize BMW sales.

Also explaining why the Japanese car makers have built more expensive product; the two markets overlap but aren't the same.

Still, it seems weird to put those into different categories. There could be a PC maker creating expensive PCs that don't compete with netbooks. In fact, there probably are (for example creating high end PCs for architecture and film editing). That PC maker would not be cannibalized by netbook sales.

Maybe if it is Microsoft vs Apple they are talking, but MS also sells stuff for netbooks.

Also, if there were no netbooks and no PCs, there probably would be more Apple sales. So Apple loses sales to PCs and therefore also to netbooks.

Japanese cars absolutely eat into BMW's sales, or have you not noticed the army of hybrids gliding around?

Of course if you are really smart you build the same car and sell it as an Audi (to mac owners), VW (to laptop buyers), a Skoda (to desktop buyers) and a Seat (to netbook buyers).

Whereas if you are GM you build 10 different cars with different badges from different parts that all compete with each other in the same market.

What is the article even talking about? Netbooks are destroying things? Netbooks are the best thing to happen for ages.

From the article:

    [Netbooks] are cannibalizing Windows PC sales at an alarming
    rate. By comparison, laptops commanded higher margins and
    average selling prices when their popularity started to
    increase. PC manufacturers -- and even Microsoft -- benefited
    from notebooks' reversing the trend of falling computer ASPs;
    for a time. By comparison, netbooks are a plague, because
    they dramatically lower ASPs and margins and pull away sales
    from real laptops.

They are "a plague" for hardware manufacturers. For the ordinary user - a great many of who only really use their computers to read email, access facebook and watch youtube clips - I suspect they are ideal.

They seem to agree

I am an oldtime-A-fanboi. Netbooks are the first event that let me consider buying a PeeCee since when I decided to do A-miga instead of 386. And sooner or later I probably get one.

Translation: "those consumers! We used to force them to accept a bundle of all the unnecessary extra features of a laptop with their netbook-level compute needs. Now the sneaky bastards are un-bundling it and ruining our sweet scam! The cads!"

OK, the source of my confusion was not knowing what "cannibalizing" meant in this context. Turns out they mean Netbooks are taking sales away from PCs.

have margins on hardware ever been that high in the world of the commodity PC?

Given that most netbooks now run XP, (and shortly should be shipping with Windows 7 given the focus on performance) how can they be "cannibalizing Windows PC sales". The whole quote makes no sense, unless the low margins on netbooks are being passed on to Microsoft.

edit: despite the title the actual premise of the article is that Apple are declaring war on Windows 7. Given that netbooks will shortly be running Windows 7, how are they a disadvantage for Microsoft - in reality, mass produced, low-margin cheap netbooks must surely be a huge worry for a high margin retailer like Apple.

Margins on desktops went to nothing. That was helped by people buying laptops for home use. Noticed how a laptop costs twice as much as a PC and isn't upgradeable so only lasts half as long - that's a nice business to be in.

Then everybody switched to netbooks which have a smaller margin than the bag you take it home in.

I don't agree with this snippet, at least it doesn't apply to me. I bought netbook, but I wouldn't buy "real laptop" if netbook didn't exist, so no cannibalization happened.

Moreover, I am not sure about that distinction. What exactly is the difference between netbook and co called "real laptop"? Missing DVD drive? Is there any principal difference?

As I see it, what happened was that Asus was able to create cheap small size laptop, and many people realized that this thing is really useful.

Does this sound an awful lot like the pleadings of car companies building SUVs when oil hit $150 and those sneaky foreigners started importing subcompacts ?

I wonder if Apple will try and ruin Microsoft's parade tomorrow by announcing the Tablet?

There have been rumours pinning the releasedate of the tablet to somewhere in the fall of 2009:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/12/rumor-large-for/

So it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they delayed that for a couple of days just to be able to steal microsofts thunder.

The general reception of the latest batch of 'mac stuff' was pretty underwhelmed, if they top it off with a tablet then that will turn around to endless press coverage.

Competition is good.

I doubt they would announce the tablet without a special press event

Don't believe the tablet hype. The only people who want such a thing are the few people blogging about it all the time. (And of course hype is good for getting readers/attention/subscribers etc) (Or trying to justify their own tablet - crunchpad? "Best product of 2009"?!?? http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4332415.h...)

The usefulness of a 'too big for your pocket, half a laptop that you have to hold' device are minimal. Maybe they'll surprise everyone and come out with a tablet, but I really doubt it.

I agree - remember the "iphone nano": much talked about, didn't even make sense as a product and totally non-existant.

If it is true - the noises that do kind of make sense - like Apple being in talks with publishers make me wonder if they are going to compete with the Kindle rather than the netbook.

I'm not disagreeing, but just remember - I heard tons of comments like this about the "iPhone" years before it was actually released. So there very well may be a "iTab" on its way.

Apple was almost forced to create the iPhone, though: much of it's access came from the iPod, but phones were getting better and better at playing music, too.

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