Monday, March 25, 2002 |
21:16 - Apple Innovates Again!
http://money.cnn.com/2002/03/25/technology/pc_prices/index.htm
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Yeah, first I'd better get this out of the way: the $100 across-the-board price hike in iMacs that Apple announced last week in Tokyo.
Well, at the time, people were scoffing and clucking and dropping their ratings on Apple stock. "Oh no!" they cried. "Apple is having to raise prices on their already overpriced computers! And the rest of the computer world isn't raising their prices, so... you know all that positive stuff we've been saying about Apple for the past year? How they're on the rise, how they're bringing fresh new ideas and robustness to a flaccid tech economy? Well, forget it! Because they're now doomed! Dooooooomed!"
Well, Steve gets the last laugh, because (as he did say in the keynote) the price hikes are due to pressures that the whole computer industry will soon be feeling: RAM prices are rocketing up, and so are LCD prices. You can't get DIMMs in your breakfast cereal anymore. Even if you buy a Dell.
In the coming months, there are likely to be fewer bargains to be had as PC vendors shift the costs to consumers, offering systems with less memory and bumping up the prices for packages that include a flat-panel display.
Why, yeeeees. Didn't Steve, in fact, say almost exactly that? While he anticipated the other PC makers would respond to the price pressures by de-contenting their product line, offering less features for the money-- Apple would hold its product line outfitted as it was and simply raise prices by a Benjamin.
Of course, most people will only look at the price tag. Never mind that the machine they're looking at doesn't have an LCD (or a bundled monitor at all!), or FireWire or a combo drive or even any more than 128MB of RAM. It costs less! That's all that matters!
Well, we'll see what happens, anyway. But it does make me feel vaguely reassured whenever something happens exactly as Steve predicts. It's bad news, yes, but I'm certainly more willing to weather it now that I know they've got a plan.
The PC makers always come to adopt Apple's innovations, after all!
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