“While a holiday price war is breaking out among laptops, Apple is staying comfortably above the fray with its iPad Air, according to Deutsche Bank,” Brooke Crothers reports for CNET.
“About 60 percent of the 80 best-selling laptops at retailers that Deutsche Bank recently monitored cost less than $400, while 30 percent are below $300,” Crothers reports. “‘We believe this reflects the need for [laptop] vendors to close the pricing gap with tablets which continue to exhibit strong market momentum,’ analyst Chris Whitmore said in a research note published Monday.
MacDailyNews Take: We believe that any laptop below $400 is a fpos.
“‘Tablets are bifurcated between Apple, who commands a premium, and everyone else,’ Whitmore said,” Crothers reports, “He continued. ‘Apple is a best seller and everyone else is playing for scraps at significantly lower price points. Overall, it appears there is little margin in the Android ecosystem but volumes are robust due to very low price points.’ The pricey MacBook Pro also made it into the top 15 best-selling laptops at Best Buy on Cyber Monday. The $1,050 13.3-inch MacBook Pro (non-Retina) was No. 5 and the $1,400 13.3-inch MacBook Pro Retina was No. 10.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As always, the smart tech buyers understand Apple’s value proposition while the clueless wallow in crap.
Yea, just what I want, a $400 laptop. The thing will be falling apart and failing after six months. I’m still using my five year old MacBook Pro. For the amount I still need to use it, it’s fine. Plus it’s still in decent shape. I now use an iPad Air for the vast majority of my consumption. If you purchase a laptop to perform any kind of production, you wouldn’t want to do it with a cheap laptop. Talk about being a penny wise, and a pound foolish.
The strategies these companies are using may work in the short term, but they’re far from viable as a long term strategy. In the end Apple will be amoungst a small handful of companies still standing.
I will generally go first class because I am rarely unhappy with that decision. However, most of the time I regret going for cheap. I think that there are more bad deals in cheap because of who they target.
Bravo! Well said.
Common sense dictate to always settle for the best! Always remember that you only have one life to live!!!!
First of all, you don’t “settle for the best,” you pay for it. If you can afford to buy the best of everything, then more power to you. I generally target the best available compromise of quality, functionality, and price. in many cases there are a range of options/price points and something in the upper middle generally provides the best overall value. In the case of computers, tablets, smartphones, and music players, however, Apple is the only supplier for me. In that particular case, the “best” also happens to offer the best compromise because the next step down is huge…
“…while 30 percent are below $300.”
Does any, literally any, knowledgeable person think a sub $300 laptop is anything but a complete piece of crap?
Are they talking about Chromebooks or equivalents? Why does any sane person even consider these? If you’re ever in an environment with no or poor ‘net connection you’re effectively screwed.
Shadowself half the people in this world are mentally below average. (that is basic math) shame on companies and polititians who exploit this fact of life
Samsung. Preying on the left side of the
” rel=”nofollow”>IQ Bell curve.
republicans too
Think about it. Half are always above or below average no mater what you are looking at.
Granted, this occurs very commonly; but not always.
It’s generally true only for populations that exhibit the so-called normal (Gaussian) distribution whose graph is centered symmetrically about the arithmetic mean (average).
Certain distributions may be highly asymmetric, and are conceivably too skewed to conclude that half are above average and half below. Think about the ASP of laptops.
My sister bought a $300 HP/Compaq laptop with Win7 in 2011. She complained that it was slow for some reason and wanted me to take a look at it. It is the most miserable thing I have ever worked with. Glacial. Then I found out it had a $5 Celeron chip in it – literally the cheapest cpu on the market. If this is what HP calls a computer then they deserve to be crushed by Apple. So I gave my sister a 2008 MacBook Pro that, despite being 5 years old, blew it away.
Microsoft (naturally) is the perfect example of market confusion as its slate is a laptop disguised as a really heavy power hog tablet . as i have said adnausium sales without profit is like eating soup with a fork . Apple is the only company with a full set of silverware .
PC manufacturers, excluding Apple, cannot seem to learn that when you produce a cheap product that fails too soon, the relationship with the customer is soured. Acer makes some expensive laptops, but when a consumer buys from their lower priced products and get something that is crap, they look elsewhere instead of buying from them again at a higher price. You would think this is obvious, but to the bean counters it is rocket science.
I think that Apple has proved – given the development time they needed in creating the iphone/ipad – that the ‘me-too knock out a cheap copy and it’s good enough’ era of computer manufacturing is well and truly gone. Rimm, Dell, HP and MS threw copies of the iPad into the market and found out that there was more than an external form-factor to be matched. Only Samsung who ripped Apple software off has been able to compete, and that is arguably little more than a temporary toe-hold and is slipping away as buyers discover that there’s iPad and no equivalents. This ties in with Apple’s retention of working capital – it takes time (evidently lots of it) and money (evidently lots of that, too) to create truly great products. Without its cash horde, Apple would be at the mercy of Wall Street investors and bankers whose patience for ROI, tolerance of risk and comprehension of inspirational quantum leaps in innovation is zero.