Science & Technology World

$999 is as low as Apple will go. (Credit: Apple) By not coughing up a
low-cost MacBook, as some had expected , Apple has ceded a
potentially huge market to PC makers. But is this just all part of
Apple's marketing genius? during the third quarter, putting it right
behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Acer. Comparatively, overall PC
shipments in the U.S. grew by 3.5 percent from a year earlier. But
among those unimpressive overall PC numbers (HP's third-quarter
shipments grew only 2.7 percent), was an impressive statistic for
Acer: buoyed by Netbooks, Acer's shipments grew by 61.4 percent
year-over-year, and it blew past Dell to become the No. 2 PC maker
worldwide based on this growth. Granted, Netbooks are a relatively
low-profit segment (i.e., profit on a $400 Netbook is going to be a
lot less than that on a $999 laptop). Nevertheless, they're a hot
market. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has stated numerous times that Intel
was able to create a market that grew faster than either the iPhone
or Nintendo Wii . Case in point: Windows 7 -based Acer Netbooks are
now big on the Home Shopping Network-- which claims to have sold more
than 5 ,000 in one segment on Saturday. And that's not the only
market Apple is punting on. A new category of inexpensive, thin
laptops has emerged with the roll-out of Windows 7 on Thursday.
Like Netbooks, these laptops are light (typically 4 pounds) and
don't include an optical drive. But they are relatively powerful and
full featured. The 15.6-inch Acer Aspire Timeline , for example,
with a 320 GB hard disk drive and dual- core Intel processor is fairly
well-endowed at only $500. Apple is not receiving a lot kudos in the
mainstream business press by sticking to its $999 guns. The Wall
Street Journal said that users can get roughly equivalent laptops
for a lot less at Dell and HP. And other publications have said
that Apple is not just ignoring new market realities but, in fact,
ignoring the Mac lineup as a whole in favor of the iPhone . So, do
consumers lose by not getting the chance to buy a competitive
low-cost Apple MacBook? The short answer to that rhetorical questions
is yes--because Apple offers no alternative to, for example, a thin,
light $650 HP Pavilion dm3 laptop. But an apples-to-apples (pun not
intended) comparison shows that while Apple skimps on a couple of
white MacBook features, it's not an egregiously bad deal for $999.
Let's do a quick side-by-side of the cheapest MacBook with a
mainstream HP laptop. • For $999, you get white polycarbonate wrapped
around a 13.3- inch 1280- by-800 LED- backlit glossy widescreen
display, a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of memory, a
250 GB (5400 RPM) hard disk drive, an optical drive, and the standard
wireless features. All in a 4.7- pound package. • For $997, HP will
sell you (online) an HP Pavilion dv3 t series with a 13.3- inch 1280-
by- 800 LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, 2. 0 GHz Intel Core 2
Duo processor, 4 GB of memory, a 500 GB (5400 RPM) hard disk drive,
an optical drive, and the standard wireless features. Also, in 4.7-
pound package. Apple beats the HP by a hair in the processor category
and loses in the memory and storage departments. If polycarbonate
is, in fact, better than the plastics HP uses, then that aspect of
the design would be a win for Apple. The real win, though, is for
Apple the company. It avoids the cut-throat sub-$900 laptop market
and still sells--quite profitably--a lot of laptops. But will Apple be
able to snub this growing market of inexpensive Windows 7 laptops
indefinitely? We should know in about six months when Gartner
reports first-quarter 2010 numbers.