Joshua David's Profile

The short answer: no, there's no 'room' for a really cheap Mac. The longer answer: Apple is not a commodity vendor of computer products. They sell a quality user experience, and they charge a premium for that over the 'really cheap' products that are available from Dell, etc. The reason they do this is not only to protect their brand. Apple currently has 5% or so of marketshare, but it's a very profitable 5%. There's still a large group of folks that are gamers or other power users that Apple is trying to attract with Boot Camp and the like, and they could double their marketshare just picking up this group of people. Compare this to if they sold a 'really cheap' Mac (these aren't real numbers, but they illustrate the reason why Apple doesn't go down this road). Say Apple sells 5 million MacBooks in a year at 20% profit. How many 'Really Cheap' portables would they have to sell to match the amount of profit they are taking in? The MacBooks would bring in about 1.1 billion in profit ($1099 x 20% x 5 million). At your price point, at say 5% profit, Apple would have to sell over 31.5 million machines to make the same amount of profit. Then you have to figure in cannibalization of other products (like the MacBook and the Mac mini), loss of trust in the Apple brand, and my personal beef with 'really cheap' products, the fact that Apple would probably have to pour more resources into their support infrastructure than necessary. I guarantee you that the support cost for a lower cost product is higher than a high-end product, plus the customer is going to be less knowledgable and they will be less likely to buy profitable add-ons like AppleCare. So yeah, Apple *could* come out with a 'really cheap' Mac, but there isn't a convincing reason for Apple to change their business model to do so.