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The price arc
Jan. 29th, 2005 09:38 amInteresting long Mac mini review from AnandTech.
People have been talking about this thing (and the iPod shuffle) as if Apple is making a major strategic shift here and trying to compete on price—which immediately leads to the observation that if they're doing that, they're failing, because it's far from the cheapest usable PC you can buy (especially considering that you really need to put 512 MB of RAM in it). I think the review gets it right: they're actually doing exactly what they've been doing ever since Jobs came back, competing on design and brand recognition at a price premium. They're just doing it in a lower-priced market segment that they had lately been neglecting to some degree. Think of the Michael Graves stuff at Target.
Or, for that matter, the original iMac. It cost considerably more than the Mac mini does, even figuring in the built-in accessories, but at that historical moment, computers were more expensive. Which brings up another observation.
I've heard the complaint that, at any given moment, the computer you really want always costs $3000; the specs improve, but the actual prices available are driven by market considerations, so the prices of low-, middle- and high-end PCs stay more or less constant over time. But I'm not sure it's entirely true. For consumer PCs there's been an arc that rose and then fell again. It seems to me that there was a flourishing sub-$1000 mass market in the early 1980s that almost disappeared by 1990 (or maybe just got surrendered to no-name white-box PC vendors, but I get the impression even they were charging more) and then came back just in the past few years. My first computer, an Atari 400 that I bought using every cent that I was able to accumulate plus some parental assistance, set me back about the same as a Mac mini.
The price range has contracted slightly at the high end, too, especially adjusted for inflation. The computer you really want may still cost $3000, but it's probably pretty loaded rather than being the base model of the line; and it's actually a bit difficult to blow $5000, which was not at all the case 15 or 20 years ago.
People have been talking about this thing (and the iPod shuffle) as if Apple is making a major strategic shift here and trying to compete on price—which immediately leads to the observation that if they're doing that, they're failing, because it's far from the cheapest usable PC you can buy (especially considering that you really need to put 512 MB of RAM in it). I think the review gets it right: they're actually doing exactly what they've been doing ever since Jobs came back, competing on design and brand recognition at a price premium. They're just doing it in a lower-priced market segment that they had lately been neglecting to some degree. Think of the Michael Graves stuff at Target.
Or, for that matter, the original iMac. It cost considerably more than the Mac mini does, even figuring in the built-in accessories, but at that historical moment, computers were more expensive. Which brings up another observation.
I've heard the complaint that, at any given moment, the computer you really want always costs $3000; the specs improve, but the actual prices available are driven by market considerations, so the prices of low-, middle- and high-end PCs stay more or less constant over time. But I'm not sure it's entirely true. For consumer PCs there's been an arc that rose and then fell again. It seems to me that there was a flourishing sub-$1000 mass market in the early 1980s that almost disappeared by 1990 (or maybe just got surrendered to no-name white-box PC vendors, but I get the impression even they were charging more) and then came back just in the past few years. My first computer, an Atari 400 that I bought using every cent that I was able to accumulate plus some parental assistance, set me back about the same as a Mac mini.
The price range has contracted slightly at the high end, too, especially adjusted for inflation. The computer you really want may still cost $3000, but it's probably pretty loaded rather than being the base model of the line; and it's actually a bit difficult to blow $5000, which was not at all the case 15 or 20 years ago.