Tuesday, April 25, 2006 |
14:22 - SET VAR MOLEHILL="mountain";
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1936
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Here's today's most misleading headline: Apple's Intel-Macs Begin Shipping with Windows XP Pre-Installed. (Via Aziz Poonawalla.)
No, Dvorak/Cringely/whoever I see jumping and gesticulating in that unmistakable "See? See?" posture: This article is not about Apple suddenly deciding to sell Windows at the online Apple Store and make it a BTO option on new Intel Macs. It's actually about MacMall, an online Mac reseller, optionally preloading Boot Camp and Windows on their stock.
They're not actually the first to do this, but it seems to be becoming a trend, and naturally the tech press is keen to get started misinterpreting it.
What this is about is VARs spotting an opportunity. They know Apple won't be selling Windows, because they know Apple doesn't want to support Windows; so these VARs, ever keen to find some Value to Add, are taking up the slack and offering a Windows bundle to those customers who would otherwise want to play the Boot Camp game on their own steam. If the article's numbers are correct, it even sounds like a decent bargain over going it alone.
VARs have been looking for an edge against the Apple Stores for years now. It's been very slim pickings, too; Apple has been so aggressive about pushing the customer service experience into the hands of the staffers at the Genius Bars that the venerable Apple Certified Reseller network is slowly but surely drying up. Apple has been making it increasingly difficult to be a VAR, whether by being slow with new product shipments, coy with service contracts, stingy with reimbursements, or simply by making the Apple Stores too damn cool for customers to want to go anywhere else. Naturally the VARs see the Boot Camp opportunity as a cash windfall: money in the bank, theirs for the taking, for once in a decade. I'm surprised it's taken them this long.
(Now wait'll they start realizing they'll have to support Windows too.)
Steven Den Beste said in e-mail that the interesting thing about this is seeing how well the Windows bundled Macs sell. And indeed it will be, but the trick is figuring out how to interpret the numbers.
"A Mac that also runs Windows" is not a product that's replacing any single trackable existing item people have been buying; MacMall is selling to a market that has never had a single-source solution for this problem before.
What should we compare the sales numbers to? They're going to comprise people from three distinct categories, all quite different:
1) People who would previously have bought both a Mac and a Windows box; 2) People who bought Macs, and just did without Windows even though they wouldn't have minded having it; 3) People who almost bought Macs, but decided against it at the last minute because of certain indispensable Windows apps (or games).
The numbers won't really tell us anything substantive, unless we know which of these categories the buyers came from.
I mean, hell, if I were in the market for a new computer, I would probably buy one of these things. I'd love to have a Windows boot available so I could do screenshots and documentation for my books, instead of having to mooch off my roommate's machines; and if the article's numbers are accurate, it sounds like a better deal than buying a Mac and a separate retail copy of Windows. That doesn't, however, mean I'd want to use it for my daily computing.
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