“In the weeks before Apple introduced the new MacBook laptops, there was speculation that Cupertino’s favorite son would introduce a model under $800 and jump into the value notebook category, where most of the competition plays today. In fact, if you look at the majority of laptops sold in the last two quarters, a very large proportion of them were in the $600-to-$800 price range. Conventional wisdom suggested that since the current economic downturn was hindering people from buying upper-end or premium laptops, surely Steve Jobs would finally release a model in this lower price range to try and entice even more consumers to buy Apple,” Tim Bajarin writes for PC Magazine.
“Trying to be like everyone else almost buried the company… To Jobs’s credit, [upon his return to Apple] he tossed out [previous CEO's philosophies] of compatibility and revived his original strategy for Apple: being different. Remember the candy-colored all-in-one Macs? Apple has since owned the MP3 player market, made major strides in smartphones, and gained market share against the PC makers. All this by creating products that are easy to use and have superb integrated software. The company continues to add layers of differentiation to the Mac platform at the OS and design levels,” Bajarin writes.
“Now take a look at the new MacBooks in this light. Apple very clearly wanted to create a product that would be radically different. So the company created a brand-new case using a precision aluminum “unibody” enclosure—and put in an LED backlight using seamless glass for instant full-screen brightness. The kicker is the nVidia GeForce graphics processor, which handles graphics five times faster than that in most laptops and in essence lets the mainstream MacBook double as a serious gaming laptop,” Bajarin writes.
“Apple does create products that carry a premium price, but I believe Apple feels these products add value to the overall personal computing experience,” Bajarin writes. “While that may seem hard to swallow for a consumer who wants a lower price, the fact is that when Apple played the low-cost game, that strategy nearly buried the company. In the end, Jobs has shown that by creating products that are different and yet still deliver real value, he can keep the company in the black.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Fred Mertz" for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last week, “Macintosh is the aspirational brand in the personal computer market and Apple is smart to keep it that way.”
What we want to do is deliver a lot, an increasing level of value… There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve and there’s a lot of them. And we’ve seen great success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not trying to be everything to everybody. So I think you can expect us to stick with that winning strategy and continuing to try to add more and more value to those products in those customer bases we choose to serve. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, October 21, 2008
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