The Butt Ugly Weblog

I think you have Apple's business model upside down. It's like saying that Coca-Cola makes its money by selling bottles, and the liquid inside does not make any money. People buy Coke bottles for the drink, and they buy Apple's shiny boxes for the OS. If Apple was just another Windows PC manufacturer they would be out of business very soon indeed.

--Kota, 05-Apr-2006

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My new PC just might be a Mac :)

--kolibri, 05-Apr-2006

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Kota: this is quite different. Using OSX enables Apple to sell their own computers, but the money does come from the boxes, in the end.

Then again, if Apple was another OS manufacturer, they would also be out of the business very soon indeed. Coping with all the PC HW combos can't be done except by really large organizations...

--JanneJalkanen, 06-Apr-2006

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Steve Jobs certainly thinks that software is essential for Apple's success:

"But we became convinced that software was going to be the primary technology, and we're a pretty good software company. ... We're a good hardware company, too, but we're really good at software. So that led us to believe that we had a chance to reinvent the music business, and we did." http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2004/nf20041012_4018_PG2_db083.htm

"Well, Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: We do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we're really good at packaging that all together into a product. We're the only people left in the computer industry that do that. And we're really the only people in the consumer-electronics industry that go deep in software in consumer products. So those talents can be used to make personal computers, and they can also be used to make things like iPods. And we're doing both, and we'll find out what the future holds." http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5939600/steve_jobs_the_rolling_stone_interview/

--Kota, 07-Apr-2006

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Hmm... My reading of that stuff is that integration is essential, not SW.

But essential does not mean this is where the money is. Essential does not mean sufficient. Pretty good does not mean that you make money out of it, either - there are a lot of companies out there who are pretty good at making software... Be Inc comes to mind.

Taking a look at Apple's Q1 financial data, we can see that desktop sales are 912 M$, laptops 812 M$, and iPod 2906 m$, for a total of 4630 million USD. That's 80% of Apple's sales... All from shipping shiny boxes. Sales of pure software is 325 million USD, not much to write home about, and that does include sales of 10.4 and Apple's pro software. Even then, most of that software gets installed on Apple-built hardware...

--JanneJalkanen, 07-Apr-2006

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