[Doxxic]

Originally Posted by Luca I can't imagine Apple being able to undercut Dell...

Bingo. That's why this is precisely what's going to happen, I think.

The good thing with Apple is that their added value lies in software and design: intellectual property.

Because of that they can produce computers with costs and hardware specs like Dell, which still are better.

And they don't have to pay someone else for a copy of the OS.

[Robo]

Yeah, I'm thinking $999 for a Core Solo MacBook, $1,299 for a Core Duo one. Sorry.

[Wyatt]

Originally Posted by Doxxic Bingo. That's why this is precisely what's going to happen, I think. The good thing with Apple is that their added value lies in software and design: intellectual property. Because of that they can produce computers with costs and hardware specs like Dell, which still are better. And they don't have to pay someone else for a copy of the OS.

Originally Posted by Doxxic And they don't have to pay someone else for a copy of the OS.

No, but they do have to pay millions upon millions in development costs to develop an OS on their own that is on less than 5% of the personal computers in the world and likely costs just as much to develop as Windows, which has the luxury of being paid for by over 95% of computer users worldwide. The OS still plays quite a bit into the cost. There might not be a "Windows tax", but there is clearly an OS X tax.

[JayReding]

Originally Posted by fcgriz No, but they do have to pay millions upon millions in development costs to develop an OS on their own that is on less than 5% of the personal computers in the world and likely costs just as much to develop as Windows, which has the luxury of being paid for by over 95% of computer users worldwide. The OS still plays quite a bit into the cost. There might not be a "Windows tax", but there is clearly an OS X tax.

I'd bet the costs of developing Mac OS X are about equal to Microsoft's budget on break-room snacks. Apple doesn't need to spend money ensuring backwards compatibility with a whole host of applications dating back over 10 years. That adds a lot of time, a lot of complexity, and a lot of headaches.

Plus, the Darwin kernel and many other subsystems are all based on open-source technologies, meaning that Apple gets the benefit of that work for free.

[Blue Light Bandit]

Originally Posted by JayReding I'd bet the costs of developing Mac OS X are about equal to Microsoft's budget on break-room snacks.

Of course, Microsoft profits from licensing Windows and selling over a hundred other titles to a market that is twenty times larger than Apple's.

Where will Apple profit if it cuts back its profit margins on hardware? Final Cut and iWork (and others) aren't exactly big sellers and will not earn enough to both recoup their own development costs as well as the development costs of the OS and the hardware.

Originally Posted by JayReding Apple doesn't need to spend money ensuring backwards compatibility with a whole host of applications dating back over 10 years. That adds a lot of time, a lot of complexity, and a lot of headaches.

But developing new technologies and researching how well or poorly they'll work doesn't require a lot of time and effort? The final products and features we see as consumers aren't the only things that get development time. Plenty of other ideas surely get time and money, only to get axed after a few iterations.

Originally Posted by JayReding Plus, the Darwin kernel and many other subsystems are all based on open-source technologies, meaning that Apple gets the benefit of that work for free.

Before you go spouting about Apple benefiting from open source technologies, you should understand that Darwin's isn't as widely used and developed by the OSS community. Apple's actions in this arena are more political than technological. Apple has periodically ignored submissions and kept the public source way out of sync with its own local copy. There was a similar fiasco with Safari's open source components a while back that had members of the KHTML development community furious because Apple wasn't backporting things nicely. Most of the big work on these technologies is done by Apple in-house.

edit: Whee! 100 posts.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Blue Light Bandit There was a similar fiasco with Safari's open source components a while back that had members of the KHTML development community furious because Apple wasn't backporting things nicely.

I really don't want to rehash the entire story right now, but please, the above is simply inaccurate. There was no "fiasco" (aside from the fiasco of ever-horrible journalism), and there certainly wasn't a "furious KHTML development community".

[Blue Light Bandit]

What about the rest? Is this a pretty accurate take?

http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200602/apple.html

[JLG]

Forgive me if this has been asked a million times already but reading these posts with so many replies gets me in a daze sometimes and I lose track of whats going on......If the Macbook really does come out this Tuesday is it likely that it will replace the need for a 12" MacBook Pro as well or do you folks think that they will still produce one?

[LudwigVan]

My guess: probably not. For one, a 12" MacBook Pro would have a smaller screen than the "consumer" (supposed) 13" MacBook model. Would a pro notebook have a smaller screen than its younger sibling?

And for another--and presuming there may be multiple models of MacBook produced--the high end MB model may be consistant with the "low end," pro-aimed 12" MBP.

[psmith2.0]

I don't think we'll see a 12" MacBook Pro, for reasons - good ones - I've given here several times over the months.

[Brad]

Posts deleted.

Don't resurrect weeks-old threads simply with requests for them to be closed.