“Apple could grab more market share if it lowered prices, but O’Donnell wasn’t holding his breath. ‘The talk on the street is a $799 notebook,’ he said, referring to persistent rumors that Apple will introduce a lower-priced MacBook this year. ‘But I don’t think they care about prices. They’re all about making profit.’”

(Via MacWorld.)

Technorati Tags:
mac, sales

“I think [the way] they’re responding to our advertising is a reflection of what’s happening out in the market (both IDC and the NPD Group show Mac sales dropping in the U.S. in recent months).
They’re scared. The Ad Age survey shows how our brand is coming alive through three things: the ads, hitting our commitment to build a fantastic product with Windows 7, and around delivering the truth about the ‘Apple tax’ and the value you get when you go with Windows.”

(Via Macworld.)

It’s hard not to laugh at such delusions. Apple isn’t sleeping on Microsoft, but scared? Jokes. I love the misdirection on the sales figures. Every manufacturer saw their sales slump, except Apple saw it’s sales slump the least. Notice no mention in the interview of the Zune or Windows Mobile versus the iPod and iPhone respectively. Methinks somebody is projecting some fear.

“The venerable publication gave the company top rankings in three of its notebook categories: 13-inch machines, 14-inch to 16-inch laptops, and 17-inch models.
The MacBooks bested their competitors, despite the lower cost of many of the Windows machines rated.”

(Via Macworld.)

And that’s what the laptop hunters ads always seem to miss: you go cheap, you get cheap.

“PC makers in the Windows camp have done everything possible to make their products progressively worse by cutting corners to save pennies per unit and boost sales volume. There’s good reason Apple is seeing healthy profits while grabbing market share. It refuses to budge on quality and so charges a higher price. Rather than running ads that seem clever at first but really aren’t, the Windows guys ought to take the hint and just build better computers.”

(Via BusinessWeek.)

How a $699 really costs $1500 but all you really get is $699 worth of computer.

“The strangest point of this ad is that Giampaolo didn’t get the portability, battery life, and power he was looking for, he just ended up with a cheap-appearing machine that obscured its real technical limitations under a flashy layer of misleading, specification-oriented marketing, the very thing he thought he was avoiding with HP: buying a brand rather than a computer. And that’s exactly what Microsoft wants people to do: buy its brand rather than a computer that does what they want it to do.”

(Via Roughly Drafted.)

Great summary on why Microsoft can’t even sell itself. It has to sell others. I wonder how Dell or Lenovo feel about this ad.

“That has hit Microsoft particularly hard, resulting in an 11% drop in profits over its year ago quarter and plans to cut 5,000 jobs over the next year and a half. On the other hand, Apple posted its best quarterly results ever, with 9% growth in its Mac sales over the previous year.”

(Via RoughlyDrafted Magazine.)

This what happens when you have to focus on making great products in order to survive.

“The Verdict: Apple
Mac: In both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple’s computers were the winners. Oddly, the big difference didn’t come in our user ratings, where we expected the famously friendly Mac interface to shine. Our respondents liked the look and feel of both operating systems but had a slight preference toward OS X. In our speed trials, however, Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown and program-launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did. “

(Via Popular Mechanics.)