“I am a frugal consumer and am always looking for the best value and to me upgrading every revision is foolish.”
I tend to skip at least two upgrades before upgrading my equipment - sometimes more.
My main point remains that Apple has a tremendous profit share of several industries.
“While Apple has just 7% of the share of revenue, it’s grabbing 35% of the operating profit. Deutsche Bank attributes it to the strength of the Mac/MacBook lineup. Other companies are losing profit margins because they have to pay Microsoft for software.”
This is a fantastic business model. The goal of a business is to make a profit by creating value - as judged by the customer.
Against this is a telling statistic:
In 2014, the average profit of a Windows box manufacturer was just $14.87.
(http://bgr.com/2014/01/10/pc-profits-analysis-margins/)
That is a boatload of work and overhead to create $14.87 of profit per machine. This is why you can buy them cheaply. They are a commodity.
In all commodity businesses, only volume will count and average expenses continue to rise - healthcare, salary, operating expenses, fixed expenses. It sucks from a business point of view. It’s like being locked in a death spiral.
As a businessman and investor I will take the high profit margin business model for every business I buy or create. It makes life so much easier and operating the businesses more fun and profitable for us.
As a consumer/employee, I understand why you prefer to buy the commodity platforms. It is also why entire countries have switched to open source platforms.
I wish you the best.
So the Apple software is free versus the MS software costs? Apple is open source? Linux is open source. Ah, you mean BSD. But isn't there a cost for the customized and maintained version of BSD? There is a free version but that is not the same version that is running on Apple computers.
And if there is a cost savings, apparently Apple is not passing this savings on to the consumer because that would be reflected in a lower unit cost which I am not seeing.
Also, it would be hard to believe consumers (or businesses) switching from low cost Windows laptops to very expensive Apple laptops. I know. I considered this option and the bang for the buck just isn't there for me. There is an obvious cost disparity between your typical Apple laptop and an MS/Windows version.
That was 2010, by 2014 Apple was taking home 51% of all PC makers' profits. . . with only 10% of the world's PC market share.