Posted on 01/26/2005 5:22:19 PM PST by Vermonter
Limbaugh could sell new Mac
This week, Apple Computer is launching a campaign to sell a new product, the $499 Mac Mini, that portends to transform the world in a way the original Mac didn’t. But Republicans will be needed for the campaign to succeed.
To put this in context, you need to read Revolution in the Valley, Andy Hertzfeld’s new book about the making of the original Mac in the 1980s. Hertzfeld points out that the initial target price for the first Mac was $500. But by the time it was launched in 1984, the price had ballooned to $2,495.
Many of the Mac’s creators felt betrayed. All initial design goals had centered on Everyman, but instead of a computer that changed the world, the Mac became a niche machine mainly for artisans and limousine liberals who could afford one. The rest of us bought commodity PCs. Fewer than one in 20 computers sold or used today to cruise the Internet is a Mac.
The Mac Mini could rectify this. But will it? Will a low price tag and terrific design alone entice a mass market to buy this new product? I’m not so sure. Apple’s image may still be an impediment to Mac sales.
To research this column, I read lots of discussion boards all across the Internet, and it’s evident that politics still play a role in computer purchases. Just as there are red states and blue states, there are also Mac Democrats and PC Republicans. These battles were especially nasty after Apple went public with its politics and added Al Gore to its board of directors.
Apple’s leader, Steve Jobs, seems to have sensed last year that his company was getting too “political.” He backed off some of his campaigning for John Kerry and cryptically signaled to The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg in an interview that he understands the problem.
“People have said that I shouldn’t get involved politically because probably half our customers are Republicans — maybe a little less ... [but] I do point out that there are more Democrats than Mac users so I’m going to just stay away from all that political stuff because that was just a personal thing,” Jobs said.
There are, in fact, devoted Republican Macintosh users, but that is not the perception. So Apple desperately needs to introduce a replacement image to achieve the original Mac’s vision. There would be no better way to do this than to add a Republican or two to Apple’s board of directors. Mac users such as Karl Rove or Arnold Schwarzenegger adviser Mike Murphy would be possibilities, but Rush Limbaugh is the most obvious choice. Rush is an ardent Mac evangelist and knows a thing or two about marketing. Even if Limbaugh is not put on Apple’s board, the company should market through his daily radio program, paying Rush to tout his favorite computer the same way he builds mattress sales for Select Comfort.
Hertzfeld’s book says the team that created the original Mac had a spirit of “urgency, ambition, passion for excellence, artistic pride, and irreverent humor.” That sounds just like Rush Limbaugh to me. I know that if Rush had been a board member in 1984, he’d have had the guts to back the famous Big Brother Super Bowl ad that Apple’s then-timorous board abandoned.
Apple marketers also need to understand that restoration of their brand’s image in conservative and Republican circles can resonate with various factions of the party. I have already read favorable gun-owner comments about the Mac Mini on the discussion boards of Ted Nugent’s populist United Sportsmen of America website. James Dobson and his Focus on the Family might be intrigued by a computer that is affordable for young families and not subject to porno pop-up ads. And business Republicans will be impressed by the seamless integration of the Mac’s OS X operating system with corporate networks.
The Republican Party is a big tent. Apple should come on in.
Agreed. I'd expect they'd start to be concerned if Mac market share approached 10% or so, but that won't happen anytime soon.
And maintain their own car, and do many other things we often pay others to do. Time actually is worth something.
MAC's aren't merely old tech, they are dead tech.
You really have no idea what you are talking about. Compare the PowerPC 970 to the Pentium 4 and tell me which one is modern technology and which is a collection of hacks to support an ancient architecture originally designed for 8-bit microcontrollers.
Do a bunch of new program installs and uninstalls without a cleanup and defrag and see if you don't get some lockups, primarily if you run games.
Been doing that on my Macs for years. The answer is no.
MAC's are about 4 times the cost to get equal value.
Please enlighten us as to where to get the equivalent of a dual-processor G5 for $500, the equivalent of an iBook for $250, or the equivalent of a Mac mini for $125.
By the way, it's "Mac", not an acronym.
There's usually a delay of a few months, although some companies like Blizzard do simultaneous releases. If you're a hardcore gamer then a Mac isn't for you, at least not as a primary machine. If you just want to play games occasionally, there's more than enough Mac games to keep you occupied.
That long history is over. Realizing a market of 14 million people who generally have disposable income, they're releasing the latest games not long after the PC version is out. DoomIII and Splinter Cell are not dated.
"Even if Limbaugh is not put on Apple’s board, the company should market through his daily radio program, paying Rush to tout his favorite computer the same way he builds mattress sales for Select Comfort."
Why would Apple pay Rush when he gives them so much free publicity already. Hardly a show goes by where Rush doesn't have something good to say about Mac.
You don't get gamers do you, its not a matter of "settling for what makes it to Mac"... if you like to play games, you want to play a game.. not just what you can find.
As I said, the core uses for a computer are surfing the web/email, word processing and games for easily 90% of users... At this point the CPU is negligable in terms of manufacturer on all of these but GAMES.... and Apples going to have to get a lot more market share fill this gap.
The price point is much better than mac has ever done, and we'll see how it goes. However you can't just dismiss out of hand one of the 3 or 4 key uses computers get and irrellevant if your desire is to mainstream.
I don't know, one person I know who's been a die hard Mac fan for probably 20 years, upgraded about a year ago to a new mac, and hasn't been able to publish her newsletters without problems yet with the new one.... She maybe coming over the dark side and going with a PC
Sorry its not over... you can't honestly look at the marketplace and tell me its over. Yes some folks do publish mac games at or around the same time as PC, but this number is hardly representative of the whole.
You don't have to be a genius to observe this, walk into any gaming store and look at the shelves... Games are not released for the Mac nearly in the number or quantity of the PC.
This is one of the primary areas that people use their home machines for, and this gap still exists today, and will likely exist until Mac has a market share more than a few percentage points.
Those days are now past. You can now get high-end graphics equipment for the PC, too. The Mac has lost much of its dominance in graphics.
. In fact, now that the average user can O/C their front side bus on a PC with little effort (check any motherboard manual) the 3.3gig barrier is a thing of the past. MAC's aren't merely old tech, they are dead tech.
A 64-bit 2.5GHz processor with a 128-bit SIMD unit, dual symmetrical FPUs, a 1.25GHz FSB (Intel is at 1066MHz), and the ability to keep 200 instructions in flight is dead tech? This IBM product derived from the POWER4 high-end server chip is far more advanced than the Intel systems, although the Opteron with its on-board memory controller does beat the PPC970 for memory performance.
why did you chop off my quote and merely suggest that I was pointing at defragging only
Because fragmentation doesn't normally cause crashes, although it'll definitely slow your system down. "Defrag it" is the first thing inexperienced techs say when they encounter stability problems.
The above is laughable
Then upon what do you base your statement of them being slow and clunky?
To coin a phrase, "It's the software stupid."
It is? How? I can run Linux on a Mac, so you're not tied to OS X. Or are you talking about how OS X doesn't work on x86 systems? Poor you, Apple doesn't want to develop for a 20 year-old processor architecture.
MAC's are about 4 times the cost to get equal value. (Actually, you can't buy equal value because MAC doesn't even make a rig equal to the best PC that can be made by ordering parts right out of the book.)
Mac and PC speeds leapfrog because Apple releases faster computers less often than Intel bumps its processor speed. Normally, Macs are faster at the time of a new Apple launch, then get relatively slower, then there's another launch, wash, rinse, repeat. We are currently coming close to a new Apple launch, so the fastest Mac will be slower than the fastest Intel machine right now.
But as far as value goes, I can get a dual G5 2.5 and a dual Dell Xeon workstation (not the fastest, mid-range to compare to the Mac), slap lots of RAM in both, and I'll probably spend less on the Mac.
Talking DIY is apples and oranges, so don't go there, since it isn't an option for the vast majority of the population and a rare practice in big business too. Personally, I have an Athlon system that started over 11 years ago as a 486/66, so I definitely know DIY.
LOL- You obviously never had a Mac fanatic be hired, and been totally lost for days, while bitching about the computer that dosen't coddle them like their sainted Macs.
Would you rather hire a driver that learned on a stick shift on winding snowey mountain roads, or one that only knows how to drive a Mercedes on open highway ?
Or until Microsoft stops buying out Mac game makers such as Bungie (makers of Halo)
HEY!! They make like 15 games for the Mac now, and some of them are almost current!!! :P
Yeah, PCs can be hard to use. Right clicking is just . . . so . . . hard.
http://www.deadtroll.com/video/helldeskcable.html
Long download, but there's a nice cheapshot at imacs at the end.
I meant the age where there were no meaningful games for the Mac. There are now many, and the number grows.
I can understand the historical reasons for there not being many good games, and they're not necessarily about marketshare. I read John Carmack's .plan (kind of an old-time blog) about converting Quake to the Mac in OS 9, and it was a nightmare with the old OS's poor memory management. Now there's OS X, a programmer's paradise. Plus there weren't many good gaming graphics cards from the major manufacturers getting released for the Mac. Now you get the best from nVidia and ATI.
Like I said earlier, a game you want may not be available for the Mac, and that could be a reason not to buy, but that doesn't say that there aren't lots of the good games available for the Mac.
I'd rather hire a new Mac fanatic, who would know how to dig deep in the OS's powerful UNIX innards when necessary, and otherwise enjoy the "coddling" and stability.
To use your car metaphor, someone used to driving not a Mercedes S-class on the highway, but a G-class through the mountains.
I didn't buy my G5, my G4, my G3, my 6360, IIci, IIx, Plus, nor my original "fat Mac" for games (I've had others, but my feeble memory prevents listing them all)... its always been a tool/aplliance! I usually sold them, gave them to family, or donated them... they all worked and served others for years after!
I do confess that I like MS Flight Sim, though I need their Windoze emulator to run it on my Mac!!! Other than some solitaire, or dominoes, I just fly, and cruise the net, for S&G!!
I could say the same things about the low end dells. The G4 1.25 is on par with the P4 2.5. The memory is a bit small (256) but upgradeable for not all that much, and it comes with a DVDR drive. And yes it come with OSX which is every bit the equal of XP.
It gets you going on the OS with the intention of sticking it to you down the road.
Like MS bundling IE with windows was anything different..
People who buy MACs are like those who pay someone $50 to carry their small bag, then brag about it.
No they are people like my wife who bought a mac because she knows I have to fight with computers all day long and dont want to deal with it when I get home. They are people like my mother who ran for 7 years off a 800$ pc that went from OS8-9-X with one memory upgrade and the purchase of a USB harddrive.
I made the decision to go to the macintosh because of Rush. I wrote them a letter telling them so too.
"who would know how to dig deep in the OS's powerful UNIX innards when necessary"
LOL- The overwheming majority of the worlds business dosen't need someone who can dig into UNIX, and the overwheming majority of the real world schools don't teach UNIX programming - most graduates who are MAC fanatics don't even know how to spell UNIX :-)
Most college grads who "learned" computers on Macs and are fanatics about them wouldn't dream of it, like most people with G-classes never take them off the pavement - it might dislodge the rear seat DVD players ...
I used to be an online gamer where speed and perfomance is everything. Not one top player was on a MAC, matter of fact I never heard of any the gamers talking about how fast their new MAC was. In online gaming machine speed is everything. Same goes for crunching 90 meg 3d rendering application files. The biggest 3d rendering programs weren't even ported to MAC when they first came out. There is no question that PC's are the fastest machines to work with and if it is setup right it won't crash any more than MACS do. Just because something costs more doesn't mean it is better.
APPLE COMPUTER (NasdaqNM:AAPL) Delayed quote data After Hours (RT-ECN): 72.66 Up 0.02 (0.03%)
I don't own any Dell stock, but I bought my Apple stock a year and a half ago... at 13.375! I just wish I had bought more than the 3k shares that I did! (PS- I bought Xerox and sold it three times within 10 months and quadrupled there, as well!)
There are some of us with a proper perspective. We know a good thing when we see it! Others just tilt at windmills...
You slander OS X, especially since the version of XP in the cheap computers is Home Edition. Longhorn might be comparable to OS X, but it's not coming for at least a year.
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