Apple brings back the PC jr keyboard to life (or the new iMac thread)

[Adrian Hon]

Nikolai: Not to drag this out, but one of the reasons I find the iMac price quite good is because of the monitor. Yeah yeah, it's integrated, but a lot of people don't care about that, and a 20" monitor (or 24") is significantly better, and more expensive, than a 19" monitor. BTW you're also missing a webcam (and a DVD burner?).

[Nikolai]

Adrian: No, a burner was included, I just skipped a few things I saw as less important. You can't get a computer without a DVD burner these days. It's been standard for more than 5 years.

Wiggie:

[snoopy369]

That looks like a computer kit to me, missing not only a dvd burner but a motherboard... and random eshops have very low prices, to make up for the risk in using them, as well as for the quality of some of the parts.

I'm amused you call apple a monopolist... given they're not even the market leader, that's hardly a fair statement. The fact that people buy them indicates they're doing something right, doesn't it?

Anyhow, for the market segment they're offering to, this is a lot of computer for $1200. If you want to compare them to anyone, compare them to computers you can buy at Best Buy or equivalent - major market computer stores, not random e-shops. You'll find a lot lower quality (e.g. emachines) and computers of not dissimilar prices...

[Nikolai]

As I said, I only took the most important things on the list. All computers have a motherboard, come one...

And yes, Apple is a monopolist. They give you the whole package, "take it or leave it", they have full controll over the machine, OS, programs etc.

And to take the price again: To get the same hardware for a mac laptop that cost ~14.000 NOK in Norway, you must out with ~10.000 in Norway IIRC.

[Adrian Hon]

So what about the monitor then? Isn't that important? 20" or 24" monitors have far higher resolutiosn than 19" monitors.

BTW you're using monopoly in a strange way. It's not as if they're the only one selling computers. If people don't like Apple's computers, they can leave it. A lot of people do, because cost is their primary concern. A lot of people don't, because they're concerned about other things.

[snoopy369]

Do you understand what monopoly means, Nikolai? I'm all for calling a duck a duck, but Apple is in NO way a monopoly.

Monopoly either refers to a company who controls the far majority of market share in their product or service (we're talking usually 75%+) such that they can set a price for said product or service that does not bear on the market value of that product or service; or to a company who controls all of the elements of production and distribution for their product (from raw materials to final sale) such that they can outcompete others who are forced to buy from them (or another) at a higher price.

Apple does none of these things. Their market share is quite low, Asher could tell us in a heartbeat i'm sure but it's <10% iirc. They do not control all of the steps of their product; they don't make the most important and expensive part, for example, the CPU, and most software on an Mac is not made by Apple.

Apple is a company that makes computers in the "old style", e.g. they make the computer and its software together. That's not a monopoly unless you use your marketshare in one realm to affect the other realm; so Microsoft can't make computers because they would have something of a vertical monopoly then, that they could use to sell computers at a great discount since they'd come bundled with Windows [and they could raise the OEM price of Windows to drive out their competitors]. Apple has no such ability, due to their low marketshare.

Call them overpriced or form over function; that might be accurate [though I think far less so than you believe]. Monopoly is absolutely false, however. Not sure if you mean some other word when you say it, but it is simply not an applicable word in the situation ...

[Nikolai]

I know that Macs are (or at least were) not compatible with PCs. If you have(had?) a mac, you had to use what Apple gave you, as there were next to no competition. That's what I call a monopoly, as there are little competition.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Do you understand what monopoly means, Nikolai? I'm all for calling a duck a duck, but Apple is in NO way a monopoly.

This is incorrect.

[Verto]

Originally posted by Nikolai
I know that Macs are (or at least were) not compatible with PCs. If you have(had?) a mac, you had to use what Apple gave you, as there were next to no competition. That's what I call a monopoly, as there are little competition.

You can call it what you like, but Apple doesn't have a monopoly with its Macs.

[Agathon]

I don't know about Norway, or Mickey Mouse vendors, but the new iMac is pretty competitive on price when you compare it with what Dell is offering. Dell's XPS desktops are the equivalent of the iMac (the Inspirons aren't in the same league).

I took the smaller XPS 210, since it is the same price as the large one, and it is the closest in size to the iMac and has the same processor (C2D 2Ghz). It has a base price of $999.

But once you select a 20" monitor and Windows Vista Ultimate (which you need to do to make it equivalent to the iMac, which has a 20" screen and OS X with everything) the Dell ramps up to $1376. Admittedly, the Dell has 1GB more memory. But you have to add another $40 to give the Dell the equivalent of the iMac's optical drive. There's no equivalent card (I'll leave the Dell with the Intel 3000 graphics to save money). I added Photoshop Elements (to match iPhoto) and Roxio Creator Nine (to match iDVD). It costs $50 to give the iMac the same HD as the Dell.

The main differences are that the iMac has a camera and a better video card, and the Dell has twice the memory. The Dell comes with Microsoft Works and the software I added. The iMac comes with iLife 08. iLife 08 is far superior to any consumer digital media editing suite available for Windows, so that is a hard comparison.

The Dell also has no Wireless networking, while the iMac has 802.11n, which is the latest and greatest. The iMac can also be used as a wireless base station for any other computers in the house, whereas the Dell cannot.

But to be fair, I added $79 to the iMac's price to give it iWork 08, which is I guess like MS works, except it is better in that it is compatible with MS Office (which Works wasn't last time I checked). I even put in an extra 1GB of RAM from Apple (which is obscenely expensive, and most people would buy it from a third party vendor for half the price – but let's give Dell that one).

The price for this slightly souped up iMac is $1477.

The Dell is $1525 (but a high quality webcam will be $50 or more).

Let's call these roughly equivalent computers. The iMac is slightly cheaper and has better software.

Now let's be honest. The iMac is only slightly larger than the Dell's monitor. It completely pisses all over the Dell when it comes to design.

Now I'm guessing that you could buy a Dell cheaper without the equivalent software, and without a professional grade operating system, and without a comparable monitor, but it wouldn't be an equivalent machine.

Dell is well known for having excellent prices and, as I just showed, an "equivalent" machine is about the same as the iMac. You can buy a cheaper Dell, but to add the bells and whistles to make it comparable, you will pay about the same.

So please take the bull**** that Macs are ridiculously expensive. They aren't when compared to products by other name brand computer manufacturers. You might get something cheaper from Artie's Krazy Komputers, but there will probably be quality shortcuts taken in that case.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

This is incorrect.

You are in error.

In a sense every company that manufactures its own brand name products has a monopoly over them. Coca Cola has a monopoly over Coke. Nike has a monopoly over Nike shows.

What people worry about are anti-competitive monopolies. We know for a fact, since it has been tried, that there is no market possible for Mac compatible computers. So it's not anti-competitive for Apple to be the only Mac seller.

But the market Apple is in is the computer market, which has lots of vendors, none of which has a monopoly.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Agathon
You are in error.

In a sense every company that manufactures its own brand name products has a monopoly over them. Coca Cola has a monopoly over Coke. Nike has a monopoly over Nike shows.

What people worry about are anti-competitive monopolies. We know for a fact, since it has been tried, that there is no market possible for Mac compatible computers. So it's not anti-competitive for Apple to be the only Mac seller.

But the market Apple is in is the computer market, which has lots of vendors, none of which has a monopoly.

So you said he was wrong and then said in a sense he's right. Knowing what you know about Kuci, he couldn't have just been arguing semantics, could he?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

So you said he was wrong and then said in a sense he's right. Knowing what you know about Kuci, he couldn't have just been arguing semantics, could he?

The "in a sense" in which you can use the word monopoly of any company is not a sense in which any sane person uses it. This is because it renders the term meaningless.

For example: I am selling lemonade on a Tuesday. If I am the only seller of Agathon's lemonade on a Tuesday, then I have a monopoly on Agathon's lemonade sold on a Tuesday. But there are twenty other lemonade stands next to mine.

Some monopoly...

You can describe any good sold in such a way to make it unique, and then it automatically follows that the seller has a "monopoly" over it.

Since no individual transaction is repeatable, you could describe every possible transaction as "monopolistic" in this sense.

Such an argument is only made by a complete drooling idiot. Unsurprisingly, it was one of Asher's favourite arguments. Go figure...

[Q Classic]

I'm not really enthused by the new iMacs or the new Keyboards. With the keyboards, it's mostly aesthetics. They are displeasing to me.

To be perfectly honest, I kinda like them to have a bit of heft--there was something genuinely satisfying about those old IBM keyboards that click-click-clicked with the metal...

...though nowadays, I like my Microsoft and Logitech keyboards with several functions quite fine.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Q Cubed

To be perfectly honest, I kinda like them to have a bit of heft--there was something genuinely satisfying about those old IBM keyboards that click-click-clicked with the metal...

Not you as well.

So many people love those old keyboards you could thump. Is there a surfeit of closet sadists in the world?