well, sure, overall profit is probably higher, but overall sales is the big number.
Why on earth does apple bar people from using their own hardware? I would never buy apple just because of that.
Why on earth does apple bar people from using their own hardware? I would never buy apple just because of that.
Ummm..., you may not know this... but Apple "sells hardware" and they use software to supplement the hardware at either give-away prices or for free... :-)
So, with Apple being a "hardware company" it doesn't make any logical sense to have their software support another company's hardware... LOL...
OK, I’ll put on my former Silicon Valley engineer hat for a moment and ‘splain to you why, because it is the same reason why companies like cisco don’t allow you to run IOS on just any box with a conforming CPU and a bunch of ethernet interfaces:
There are two issues at work here. The first issue is one of gross and profit margins. The profit margin on software appears high (NB that word “appears”) but in fact software as a product is a relentless do-over and do-more. Because you need to have more and more software developers as your system becomes larger and carries around more legacy, you find that your assumptions (and MANY software startups make this assumption, BTW) about gross and profit margins on the software-only business go up in smoke as your headcount goes up with the system size and complexity.
Ah, but hardware... oh, that’s the gravy train man. Hardware engineers are much more productive than software engineers - the tooling, simulation and development aides for the HW guys are nothing short of marvelous. You don’t need to hire as many hardware guys these days to crank out a good hardware design - and once they’re done, their amount of “support” cost for the hardware alone is usually a very small fraction of the costs for the software side.
At outfits like cisco and Apple, hardware subsidizes the software side.
Next issue: the compatibility nightmares. When you control the WHOLE system, both hardware and software, things “just work” - because the engineering staff works together, and if the hardware guys do something that really complicates the software team’s lives, the software guys will wander over into the cube farm of hardware guys and say “Hey! WTF, huh? Gimme a break!” and the problem is fixed before the product ships.
Writing software to run on a generic off-the-shelf (OTS) hardware platform is about as much fun as hitting yourself in the head with a ball peen hammer — all you can think about is how good it’s gonna feel when you stop.
Concentrating on the total number of units shipped is a big mistake, one made over and over again in American management. It is why GM is where it is now, for example. They worried about retaining the “#1 in units shipped” position over obsessing about profits per unit sold. Look at where it got them. Same deal for newspapers, too. Given the amount of PC’s coming out of China, and the razor-thin margins that the Chinese are making, there’s no way to make a real profit competing with those guys.