Originally Posted by vinea
That's because there are multiple people in the same thread with different positions. If that's confusing then internet forums are not for you.
Hmmm..... possibly not. This one seems afflicted with pointless contentiousness. Nevertheless, those two and contradictory ideas are being presented in the thread as if they were self evident facts and I'm merely pointing out they can't both be true.
A cheaper tower would cannibalize iMac sales because its a better value proposition. Even with the same margins you end up with less revenue and you risk a monitor sale. Apple monitors are high margin and folks are likely to go elsewhere. This also leads to Apple selling fewer LCD panels leading to higher cost (lower profit) on every LCD they do sell.
How is that a problem if the tower you buy instead costs as much as the iMac? As far as margins go, the whole point would be to sell more computers
, not just shift around some absolute number of buyers, yes?
It is debatable if the targetted demographic that Apple is chasing adds much to their Macs that can't be handled by external devices with the exception of video cards.
Yes. Debatable. As in "you don't really know". Neither do I, but this notion is being brandished as if it were well established truth.
Mkay...if you can sell all the $2000 computers you can make why do you need to offer a $1700 one?
Um, because you can sell all of those, as well? Apple sells all the 20" iMacs they make. Why offer the 17"?
Is a $1700 Conroe all that great a deal? Sure, if you can't some up with the $300 that's what you'd get. But how many sales are lost from that 15% price difference vs the opportunity costs of the investment required to create and support a new line at this time? Their engineering staff can handle creating only so many models at one time and increasing staff increases cost. Perhaps in the future they will offer one as they have in the past.
But its all in the specifics, isn't it? You've argued that a tower cheap enough to be competitive, or satisfy this den of braying fools, or something, would cannibalize iMac sales, while a "$1700" tower wouldn't make any sense when a "much better machine" is available for $300 more.
So what about a $1500 tower, since that was the entry level tower price until recently? Has Apple's business model and economics really changed that much?
$1500 + monitor makes that comfortably more expensive than an iMac, and if we accept the notion that "most people" don't really want or need expansion capacity (which I don't necessarily, but then I'm not the one who's putting it out there) such a model wouldn't do much to cannibalize iMac sales, would it? "The demographic that Apple is chasing" would presumably prefer AIO designer goodness with its simplicity and ease of set-up, yes?
And a $500 jump seems plenty big enough to moot the "why not go for the next model up" argument, which personally I don't find persuasive even at the $300 gap, but that's just me. So it looks like the real question is whether such a model would cannibalize more expensive tower sales.
So you drop some firepower on the lower end model, as has been suggested, just like any line-up, to encourage the up-sell. I don't know exactly what that configuration would be, but I find it hard to believe that if Apple can sell a $2200 box that undercuts Dell they can't make a "competitive" box at $1500 that doesn't directly compete with quad core workstation.
If it does-- if Apple can't sell a less powerful box at $1500 because too many people would get that instead of quad core workstation, then it's merely true that Apple is kinda screwing us by forcing anyone who wants anything more than an iMac to go big. Way big.
We can talk all we want about Apple's sales model or business plan or what people actually do or do not want but there is undeniably a big-ass gap in the pricing scheme now that didn't used to be there.
We're still in the 32bit to 64bit transition phase with the MBPs and iMacs needing a new rev soon. MBP should be reasonably easy. iMac may require more work depending on which chip they go with.
If you're thinking that cheaper towers emerge when the dust settles that would make sense, but you seem to be saying the whole idea is an abomination.
Well, maybe not an "abomination", exactly, but at the very least unwise!