Okay. Hands up who thinks Apple is not marketing the Mac enough? Spending all their time promoting the iPod, eh? Content to let their baby go down the drain? Actively not promoting the Mac, even?
This column is about why.
Competition
Let’s cast our minds back two PowerMac generations, back in January 2003. Top of the line: Dual 1.42 GHz G4 processors on a 167 MHz bus. At the time, would any of you seriously have tried to argue that this tower was good value against a top-of-the-line Intel machine? Let’s recall: I believe a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz was released in November 2002.
It doesn't take too much memory to remember that at this time, Power Mac sales were very very low. And for good reason. There was clearly no comparison between the high-end computers. Has that changed today? By God, yes. You wouldn't hear of new supercomputers being built with Xserves if this wasn't the case.
“Hurrah!”, everyone in MacLand shouts. IBM has prevented the sky from falling. Now Apple has just gotta open up its coffers to Chiat Day and market the bejesus out of the Mac. The fact that they haven’t means Steve Jobs still means what he said back at NeXT that all the Mac had left in its future was a good cash-milking and slow phasing-out. All he cares about now is the iPod and the media industry.
Well, let’s perhaps not be so hasty.
If anything, the situation has become worse since eighteen months ago. What is average Bruce going to spend his hard earned money on when he buys a family computer? Top of the line PowerMac? Dual Xeon processors, maybe? Hell, no. This is in iMac territory at best. Uh oh. Remember when we said a dual 1.42 GHz G4 PowerMac was competing with a 3 GHz P4 system? Well, that is still true. Except now, there aren't two G4s, there’s only one, and it runs at 1.25 GHz sitting in an iMac instead. Hmmm.
Marketing
Do Mac users need much of a push to keep buying Mac? Well, not really. If they have anything from the last couple of years, they’re in the minority if they’re not happy with their system. So, in advertising, Apple is predominantly trying to attract new people into buying a Mac. What happens when you splash big Mac OS X ads everywhere? People become interested. People previously only considering some Windows computer will look into getting a Mac as an alternative. Only guess what? The price/performance point is still not there.
Let’s face it. The computer industry moves very slowly. The introduction of the G5 was the best thing to happen to Apple since the iMac and Mac OS X. But it’s only been released for such a short time, we can’t be blinded by its brilliance and forget that the G4 still exists and is live and kicking in many of the systems that Apple would like to sell. There’s a reason (well, one reason) that laptop sales equal iMac/eMac sales at the moment: the G4 desktop systems are going through the same slump in sales that the PowerMac did before it finally had a G5 dropped in it.
If you want people to look at Mac OS X and be heavily interested in the technology (which they will), you have to remember that they’re simultaneously going to be examining the computer it runs on. I believe Apple simply cannot make that step at this point because of the reaction force from the number of people who say “$1800 for a 1.25 GHz G4 with an LCD? Tell him he’s dreaming!”.
The marketing campaign is so close, people are complaining it’s not here yet. Apple can survive six to twelve months of waiting for the G5 iMac. It would be a mistake to prematurely invite people to compare the medium-end desktop they want to buy to an incredibly old-fashioned G4.
Contact the author, Will Robertson
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