| Tuesday, February 5, 2008 |
11:09 - Floating on air
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2254759,00.asp
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Tim Bajarin at PC Magazine thinks the MacBook Air will "be a big success". His reasoning goes like this:
It seems, however, that almost everybody has missed the real significance of the MacBook Air. Sure, it's a very thin laptop that a lot of serious road warriors will buy, but its greatest importance lies in the fact that it will attract hundreds of thousands of new customers. All of these folks are going to flock to the Apple stores to see it first hand and while they're there...
In fact, this is an underlying strategy for all of Apple's "cool" products. First, design a sleek, incredibly well-designed product. Second, create TV and print ads that are super-slick and show off the product's "wow" factor. This, of course, leads to lust: people want to see it and touch it. Third and perhaps most important, entice people to come to the Apple store to check out the product in person.
Of course, once you're there, Apple's people dazzle you with all of the other cool-looking Macs, iPods, iPhones, and so on. Then you watch the demos of iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand, etc. Suddenly you're thinking, "Should I switch?" Well, that's Apple's plan anyway.
In other words, it's a halo product. It's Apple's Corvette. Not intended to move a lot of copies in its own right, but with the primary purpose of building out the brand, of creating mindshare—not market share—in a world slowly but increasingly cognizant of the fact that market share is not, in fact, the most important thing evar. Profitability is. Profitability comes from a powerful brand more easily than it comes from a ubiquitous platform, as Microsoft is beginning to learn.
The trouble is, I don't know how that equates to the MacBook Air itself being a "success". I mean, certainly the Corvette is a success; Chevrolet sells enough of those, to well-heeled and die-hard enthusiasts, that it's been an immovable fixture of the American landscape for more than half a century. But will Apple be able to make that metaphor stick in the world of computers?
Laptops are pretty commoditized items, probably more so than desktop computers. There's a finite number of features one can reasonably expect to stick in one. You don't get to wow customers anymore with your own company's zany insightful inclusion of a port-replicating dock or an integrated webcam or a fingerprint scanner or a magnetic power cord. You can try making a business case based on these things, and certainly all the laptop makers do their best to differentiate themselves based on whatever patents they can claw out of the landscape. But they rarely make the difference in a buying decision. I'm not that well-seasoned of a laptop customer, so I could be completely off-base on this; but my feeling is that people buy laptops based on the price/performance/size calculus more than anything else, with brand loyalty running a close second (or a distant first in the case of Mac people). When you buy a laptop, that laptop's value proposition has to make sense.
Apple might be thinking that the only way to break out of that treadmill is to shake things up with a laptop that patently doesn't make sense. Something that costs a boatload, that doesn't have a footprint advantage, that's missing a lot of major features, and whose only claim to competitiveness is that it makes people's eyes bug out when they look at it. It's the iPod shuffle all over again: slash away features that previously had been considered indispensable (e.g. the screen), play up the lack of features as a feature in itself, make sure it photographs well, and sit back and let the media sell it for him.
If they aren't actually expecting to sell any, and just hope it'll get people thinking "Hey, Apple's the company that makes the coolest stuff", then it'd be a departure from their history of only making products where there was at least a semblance of a sensible business case to be made, one you could believe as long as Steve was standing up there on the stage. But if it can get those Apple Stores even more jam-packed than they already are every time I pass by the one at the mall, and buying high-margin products that may or may not have anything to do with laptops that fit in manila envelopes, well, score.
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Brian Tiemann
