furious said:
if you reduced your margins by 10% you have to sell 10% more to make the same money.
so use that logic Mr common sense
Speaking as someone who as a profession part of the job is to set pricing on a computer product..(not apple)
Doing the first doesn't guarantee the second. Also, why give away money when your other products with similar pricing structure are doing well? Sure you can always do 'better' but if you're making a solid profit with solid run rates you don't want to monkey too much with the price if you don't have a direct competitor for the box.
For the big customers you can always negotiate a price, but if people come into your stores and walk out with a computer on a regular basis and come back for another one on a regular basis you don't just drop the price to get some whiney person who really doesn't want your product in the first place or isn't your target market.
Here's a shocker for you. There are people in this world that find an objection so they can have an excuse not to buy your product. You can do everything in your power to fix that objection, and then they'll find another one. And another one, and another one, and somtimes it'll really make your day when you fix that one and then they object to something you fixed because of an objection they had.
In otherwords, they are big circle jerkers that hate you, will not buy you, and instead of saying so they delight in making you run around trying to appease them and the get a power trip off of that.
I'm not saying all of the 'cheap headless whiners' are like this. I agree you have some validity. I have had an iMac G5 since they announced two years ago and would really have liked to been able to add a few more firewire ports in the form of some I/O expansion, and I'd liked to have kept the 20" screen when I placed my order for the Mac Pro the other day.
but I'm more of a power user than a huge portion of the iMac target market for the iMac. The iMac is succeeding where it is targeted at and that's the home user who buys a computer once in 5 years, if that. If you want an interesting experiment you should shut your mouth off and hang out in a Best Buy computer section some time. It's a facinating thing to watch. For 98% of the people coming in to buy a computer they buy everything meaning Computer, Monitor and Printer. Those packages best buy put together are what people come in and get 90% of the time it seems like at least in the Raleigh-Durham area here in North Carolina.
If you come in looking for things like 'hey, does this have a PCI-E slot video card or is it down on the planar'? they look at you like you just grew a third arm and try to make you use a computer there to look on their website.
I guess what I'm saying is all the yelling at people here in this forum isn't going to get you what you want. Buy your home built parts and move on, it's just not going to happen at this time.
Could Apple change their mind? Absolutely, and their marketing will shift when they change their mind. What changes their mind? Strong profit platforms to allow them to expand.
When I started with my company that I am with now we had four products lines. Low, Med, Med-Hi, and Hi configurations. Now we have fourteen platforms that segment the market much finer. We've seen some growth and recovery in our market space similar to what Apple is trying to do with their end user platforms.
The Mini was a great start, and I'm hoping that we'll see a iMac Pro one day that will give you what you're asking for, an expandable single socket system.
I'm speaking from my personal experience here, not as a company bigwig either. Just some observations on what works and how taking it slow can be a challenge for a while but pays dividends if you maintain it and build the momentum. For a while it hurts more than helps to have someone say 'which one should I get' vs. them 'knowing' that this one is for them.
