hehe, whats the point making dishonest analogue? you want to say something, say it in plain words. Im not as knowledgeable as you with cars, Sorry I don't even know what you are talking about.
yellow did not make a dishonest analogy. His very simple and direct comparison is meant to highlight the uselessness of the statement, "a Lexus costs twice as much as a Toyota."
Since you said you didn't know what that meant, I will tell you. Lexus is a luxury car made by the same parent company as Toyota. Toyota is a standard quality consumer vehicle company, making everything from family sedans to trucks to minivans. Toyota, unlike Lexus, sells many many units at a lower price and has a standard set of features for the price. Lexus on the other hand offers many many features (automatic parallel parking for example) that are not standard in the average car, and as a result their cars cost a lot more.
Carry this analogy over to Apple now. Let's say that the average HP laptop is $700 (I really have no idea what it is for HP in particular, but let's pretend for the sake of argument) and that the average Apple laptop is $1,500 (I believe this is a figure from the article itself right?). Now, there are two important things to remember about these figures: 1) they don't necessarily mean that a $700 HP model or a $1,500 Apple model actually exist, and 2) that this is actually what ends up selling well in the market.
Let's take a look at point 1 first. The average price simply denotes the mean pricetag of all of HP's or Apple's models put together. HP might, for example, have an offering of a $400, $600, $900, $1,600, and $2,100 laptops. You'll notice that there is no single $700 model, and yet the average is still $700. We can make a similar statement using Apple's lineup, but I take it the concept is simple enough to understand.
Now, looking at point 2, we see a larger chink appear in this article. The article simply took a broad sampling of available models and then averaged their prices. This is utterly useless in understanding who does better in the market. If we assume, using the previous hypothetical HP price points, that $700 is the average price of the notebook sold in the market, we could be sorely mistaken. Suppose customers actually gravitate to the $1,600 model because it offers a more complete package? It is possible that while HP's average price is $700, that the average price of laptops sold is actually higher (say $900 or $1,000).
If we apply the same logic to Apple, we might understand more about why this article is useless. Even though Apple's average notebook (again, it doesn't actually exist) is $1,500, customers might actually be in love with the $1099 macbook and buying it in droves. In this case, the average price of sold computers would drop (which I imagine is the case in the real world, because the two lower macbook models are the best selling of Apple's notebooks).
However, the article tells us nothing in this vein. Instead, the article is attempting to masquerade 4th grade-level math as worthy of basing a new stunning opinion about how Apple needs to pay better attention to the market. Critically, the article is trying to say that Apple can't sustain growth
because its models are too expensive, when in fact there is very little to base this on (in fact, NOTHING to base this on).
The article essentially lets us know that Apple does not sell cheap computers, which frankly wasn't a huge secret to begin with. Just like Lexus, we know that Apple doesn't cater to the bargain basement crowd. That's why everyone is saying this article is devoid of actually substance.
I hope that makes it clearer.
As for
yellow's argument regarding economies of scale, I'm having a hard time buying into that as a reason for the increased cost. Apple does produce fairly large numbers of its units, to the point where I imagine that each further unit would only marginally make the net cost lower. I suppose it's possible that it affects the price, but I'd venture that it's only a few dollars per machine at most. In many ways, Apple minimizes variation in its computers, so I'd bet that many parts are very easily used in several or possibly all models. I'd bet that HP and Dell would actually have a harder time, since many of their models are drastically different in size and shape.
