Myths of Snow Leopard 6: Apple is Out of Ideas! June 27th, 2008
An article touching on aspect Daniel at Roughlydrafted.com's already talked about in previous articles.
Snow Leopard doesn't indicate Apple is out of ideas for new applications and features - it indicates it's not willing to promote and advertise features and applications it doesn't want to talk about yet.
Marketing. Jobs and Apple aren't giving away their grand views of the road ahead, unlike Microsoft.
Another aspect is the strange notion that having a list of new applications and features is better (maybe a hangup from drinking Microsoft Kool Aid) rather than wanting features and applications only on merit - only if they're useful, and worthy enough to be included.
From what can be read between the lines of the known confirmed Snow Leopard information thus far, Daniel makes the assertion that Apple has laid out a cohesive strategy for strengthening Snow Leopard’s performance and its suitability for running the next generation of software on the next generation of hardware. As Daniel says, clearly "Apple is being lead by engineers, not just clever marketers."
OpenCL, Grand Central, LLVM, ZFS, CUPS, Quicktime X to name the advances that have been published -marketers can get to work
after the work is done...
Apple's continuing investment in enabling technologies seems to be going to pay off again, when Snow Leopard rolls out. "When viewed within context of technology cross pollination with the iPhone, Apple’s Pro Apps, its consumer app suites, and its expanding role in online subscription software, it’s clear Apple is not running short of ideas. As for Snow Leopard, there’s still a lot to be revealed."
From the comments:
"OS X made the iPhone possible. The iPhone feeds OS X both financially and in feature demands. OS X matures further still as a desktop and a handheld platform par excellence. What’s not to like!"
A line of thought coming from the comments and other articles, is the possibility of Apple championing portability of the OS with Snow Leopard - e..g to have the OS on an SSD to give performance gains. The possibility of 10.6 being a (mini) "code review".
"It’s nice to hear, read, and see Apple increasingly described as an engineering firm within the “Halo Effect” realm. The end-user products naturally garner the deserved accolades — design aesthetic, ease of use, ergonomic attention, stability, and the intangible sensory experience — from its consumers."
Myths of Snow Leopard 7: Free?! July 1st, 2008
Why $129?
Selling Snow Leopard for Less Would Make Selling 10.7 at Regular Price Rather Difficult.
- If Apple sold Snow Leopard at a steep discount as an apology for not adding fluff features, it would deflate the perceived value of Apple’s operating system software.
- The main group to benefit from Snow Leopard will be owners of recent, 64-bit Macs who are likely to willingly pay full price to fully unlock the power of their existing hardware.
- Everyone else is just as likely to just wait for Snow Leopard until they buy their next new Mac and are able to take full advantage of its advances.
- Keeping the retail price of Snow Leopard unchanged wouldn’t help set any new sales records for a reference release of Mac OS X, but would help induce sales of new Macs, because buyers would think of new systems as including an additional $129 of software for free.
Apple doesn't make much money from OS software sales. Apple, unlike Microsoft
- does not sell bundled licensing to other hardware makers.
- is forced to actually deliver a product that is good enough to convince the market to go out of its way to choose to buy it.
- can't coast on a software licensing model like Microsoft’s (which has allowed MS to continue making money on sales of Windows XP for years despite minimal feature enhancements over the last half decade.)
- has to work harder to add value and differentiation to the company’s OS software.
- has to work hard to trumpet the retail interest in Mac OS X at every release
4Q 2007 - Apple brought in $9.6 billion, almost entirely from Mac and iPod hardware. It "only" earned $170 million from sales of Leopard that quarter.
1Q 2008 - Retail box OS sales quickly dropped down to $40 million.
There are no compelling reasons to lower the price of Snow Leopard - Apple doesn't need to induce volume sales to broaden its installed base, and has no direct rival that it has to compete against.
Apple would rather you buy a new computer, than give away Mac OS X. Most of Snow Leopard’s features announced so far exploit the potential of new and forthcoming hardware. The primary purpose of Mac OS X is to distinguish Mac hardware from PCs. Selling it at retail only helps Apple pull in some extra revenue from users who are not ready to buy new hardware.
The alternatives to buying a Mac OS X upgrade at retail?
- Not upgrading at all
- Buying a new Mac
- pirating a copy.
It now makes no sense for Apple to give away its development work - Mac users who aren’t going to upgrade unless the software is nearly free are not worth Apple’s attention. They are likely to just steal it anyway.
We see it with Microsoft, and it happens with Apple. But Apple doesn't go all WGA on us. Apple doesn't really police Mac OS X licensing with DRM, activation procedures, or spyware because it only sells to premium customers rather than trying to tax the entire PC market.
The majority of Microsoft’s customers are thieves that would only pay for Windows if they had no choice. A fair percentage of Apple's customers probably use a non-licenced version of the OS too.
The key benefit Apple has marketed in Snow Leopard so far is Exchange Server support. But there will be more benefits to come, and any current Mac Pro, or MBP, or any version prior to Snow Leopard will be definitely able to receive a decent performance boost from it, if Apple's enhancements bear fruit.
Exchange - Microsoft charges Mac users $500 (a whopping $350 premium over the regular version) for the version of Office 2008 that includes support for Exchange. Why? Microsoft knows that the organizations who have chosen Exchange are not price sensitive. Those customers already pay absurd licensing costs for its server and client access licenses, so they are likely to also shell out crazy amounts of money for a slightly less awful version of the Entourage Mac email client.
If Microsoft can get away with charging businesses and education users $500 for Exchange support in Office 2008, Apple will have no problem selling those same customers an overhauled operating system that adds Exchange support for Mail, iCal and Address Book for just $129.
What about home users who have no need for Exchange? Outside of those that want to buy every new release, that segment of the market is unlikely to buy Snow Leopard. We know this because they largely didn’t pay for Leopard.
Who Bought Leopard?
Only a minority of Mac users will actually upgrade at retail. Then a number will upgrade via a nbon-licenced copy, and a large number will upgrade via hardware purchases.
(Consider the Leopard launch. Apple’s $170 million in Leopard revenues reported in its debut quarter is only enough to buy 1.3 million copies at retail price. A third of retail packages were family pack versions, meaning Apple actually sold fewer boxes than that at full price. Of course, lots of those retail boxes where sold to retailers at lower wholesale prices and then marked up by the retailer.)
Apple reported selling 2 million copies of Leopard in the first weekend. It did not continue to report how many additional copies it sold after that initial figure because Apple didn’t want to highlight the fact that most of the people who bought Mac OS X in the quarter did so over the first weekend. That weekend figure also probably included shipments to stores, further padding the number with marketing muscle.