Apple's Dilemma I (2006)

Let's talk money.

What kills the Mac for a lot of people - regardless of what an ID showcase it becomes - is the sticker shock.

Forget the Mac Mini and iMac for a moment and look at the Mac Pro - you know, Apple's REAL desktop computer.

The entry-level model is $2499.00 without a monitor. Add $599 for Apple's entry-level monitor, the 20" Cinema Display, and we've hit $3100.00 without any other purchases. Three thousand dollars - for Apple's entry-level equipment.

Sure, it's a nicely put together and the included software is very impressive. But for three grand I could put together an Athlon or Pentium machine fast enough to travel through time... AND have my software options increase tenfold, if not more.

What amazes me is how successful Apple has been in convincing its loyal customers that it is David in the struggle vs Goliath (IBM initially, then Microsoft) when - as others have pointed out - Apple is the North Korea of computing environments.

The 'closed' nature of the Mac, then and now, is no accident. Many books about Apple and admissions from its own ranks have made it clear that Apple uses the Mac's proprietary technology to maintain hardware profits as much as for any kind of "quality control" over the "entire user experience," as Mr. Jobs recently said.

Historically, Apple became accustomed - one might say, addicted - to making money off the Mac's hardware exclusivity to let it go even if it meant long-term growth in the market share and user base for the Mac OS.

Since this also meant that Apple had to eat almost every dime of R&D for the Mac, it could not profitably license the Mac OS to "cloners" because they, not encumbered by Apple's overhead, would cut Apple's throat in a price war unless Apple "taxed" them heavily for each machine sold, in which case, the clones become nearly as costly as Apple-branded Macs, in which case, WHAT'S THE DAMNED POINT?!

(Indeed, this is exactly what happened with PowerComputing and others when Apple DID briefly licensed the Mac OS.)

This double-edged sword of hardware control is also why none of the many "port the Mac OS to the (name of chip)" projects in the 80s and 90s ever came to anything.

There has been progress, to be sure. Apple has increasingly made its peace with "PC" technical standards in things like monitor plugs, hard drives, and RAM modules. ADB is gone. SCSI is gone (mostly).

The "killer app" for the Mac OS is the OS itself and always has been. THAT is the 'Mac Experience,' not a MOMA case design. Apple must, in the end, give up its fetish for hardware control if it ever wants to be more than a marginal player, and must get the price of entry for the Mac OS platform down to a competitive level with Wintel computers. Unless that happens, nothing else will matter.

The bottom line for me is: Apple builds clever and pretty computers that cost about twice that of the competition's machines of equivalent power and have a fraction of the software support.

My price comparison concerns the PowerMac G4 for a reason: because the iMac is a closed system, it is not a fair comparison to a mainstream PC. This does not mean the iMac or Mac Mini are BAD, or that the quicksilver nature of PC technology and mutability of PC subsystems are unqualified blessings. They can actually be massive pains in the backside, as I encountered recently when assembling a new Athlon/XP system from Microsoft Approved reference parts that just refused to work (I wound up replacing the mobo).

However, if by "computer" we mean a system where you can make significant changes or upgrades to the key systems (CPU, internal fixed disks, video cards, etc.) then we're not talking about something like the iMac. It and the Mini are great products, but "frozen." It's more like buying a laptop - or even a piece of stereo equipment or a television.

This premium pricing also affects the success and spread of OSX. OSX is GREAT - although its adoption by Apple was an admission that Apple had dug a hole with the old Mac OS that it couldn't escape. But as long as you can only get OSX on such an expensive platform, it will remain marginalized.

We can - broadly - sum up the scene thusly: Apple makes better computers, but the Wintel computers are cheaper, support more software, and are GOOD ENOUGH.

Therein lies Apple's dilemma: its foes can "build up" through continual refinement and enhancement of Windows - and with XP and Vista, they largely have - while Apple cannot "price down" to match them.

If you want a Mac that's not a closed system, you have to start - to START- at damn near $3000. The charm of iMovie burns away pretty quickly in the face of that.

With market share, of course, comes software - or the lack of it. At a certain point, developers will simply not bother to do Mac versions of their mainstay titles. Yeah, we can all run Office. So what? In most specific business applications, the Mac is simply absent. You could easily spec out a new company's entire network - servers, desktops, laptops, network attached storage, etc. - and ignore the Mac entirely.

Yes, even Mac strongholds like PhotoShop work perfectly well on Windows boxes that are - even when you adjust for huge sticks of RAM and the zippiest video cards - cheaper than Macs.

Allow me an example from my own company. We do residential and commercial security system and camera monitoring. There has been a huge shift over the past several years from large, expensive (and finicky) custom-built systems to a smaller "LAN" architecture to automate the handling of video and alarm signals.

The companies that write and maintain the software essential to running these systems - on both the central/server and dispatcher/workstation side - would laugh out loud if asked, "Um, does it run on a Mac?" It's Win2000, XP or (sometimes) Linux. That's it.

No doubt anyone reading this could give you dozens of examples, right off the top of the head, of software markets where the Mac either never existed at all, or has vanished. And, once again, it's not because the Mac technology is bad.