Apple might make a lot of people a lot of money in the stockmarket, in about 2 - 3 years
Today, Apple has a better OS, and better hardware designs, and the best in innovation.
Apple also has much higher prices and a much slower CPU.
What we've seen Apple overcome in the past is much harder to accomplish than deploying a new CPU and lowering prices.
Apple has survived and come through bleak times, when everyone has predicted their demise. They completely eradicated their old OS, which was 15 years old, and put UNIX on the mac desktop, which is the most genius move which may have ever been done in the industry.
At this point, everything about mac is better except price and CPU, and fixing these problems is easier than what's been already done. It's not a walk in the park, however, and it's the last step Apple must take to poise itself to eventually increase its marketshare to about 50% of the market and become great again, as it once was.
Once apple gets its faster CPU it will be better than the Wintel world in:
- Design
- Innovation
- Operating System
- Speed (Better or equal)
- Software
- Ease of use
- Stability
- Electricity / Efficiency / Noise
- PRICE (???)
If price does indeed come down, then we will see that Apple will be better than windows and wintels in EVERY WAY except marketshare and distribution of software.
Network effect does make software more desirable. If a billion people have microsoft excel, then excel will be much more desirable than some other spreadsheet app.
But in today's open standards world, network effect loses its, ahem, effect. If you can open an excel file in any spreadsheet program and work with it, and save it in a cross platform open file format (which excel reads anyway), then what does network effect matter? As long as there is software to get your task done and share it with anyone on any platform, Apple's smaller distribution of software will not be a barrier to Apple's gain of marketshare.
The only exception to this rule is in games. But as Apple gains marketshare publishers will make all games for Apple as well, and get the bonus that now their game is already running on Unix too!
So indeed, Apple will be better in EVERY way, PERIOD. There will be NO reason to buy a PC, as long as a salesperson is aware and unbiased.
Now, what if price is still higher in the future? This will effectively slow down apple's gain of marketshare, but not stop it. With a new faster CPU, apple will still be able to make more sales at higher prices since it has much better hardware and software and will be accepted as a premium product, and worth the extra money. But the masses will still have a good reason to not buy Apple, price.
But if Apple wants to create a firestorm of sales and rapidly gain marketshare, it will lower prices as well as get the new faster CPU.
With Apple better in every way, as well as with Mac OS X and the geeks and salespeople not having any reason to sell a PC instead of an Apple, the masses will all buy Apple, and PC sales will decline.
This will be the day when Apple is better in EVERY SINGLE WAY, and the marketshare starts rising to 10%.... 20%.... 30%.....
and a lot of people will make a lot of money on Apple stock.
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Ok, now back to reality: while Apple is accomplishing all of the above, the Windows world will be doing their own stuff to compete with Apple. They will get a new Windows OS after XP (but not for years), they will increase speed and lower prices as well.
Apple may not get up to 30% marketshare for maybe 5, 6 years or more. OEM is not a factor in Apple's marketshare in the long run. Apple is its own OEM.
But I still see it happening. I see a point where Apple holds all the cards, and Windows and wintels start to suffer.
This will happen when Apple triples its current marketshare, and at the same time, Linux gets much bigger, and Windows is barely moving away from XP to a new version.
Mac OS X and Unixes will be compatible and friendly, and Windows will not. Microsoft and PCs will not lose marketshare, but they won't be able to stop Apple from hitting 30 - 50% marketshare eventually.
As for today, the Alienware machine stomps Apple in raw processing power, but don't forget that Mac OS X is still better at multitasking.
The alienware machine is a better choice if you need a workstation to do this one task. But if you're a consumer, you will have a better experience surfing the net, burning a DVD, listening to MP3s, working with your photoshop files, all at the same time, with a mac.
And that's today!
Also, consumers and the mass market will make Apple a lot more money than professionals. And I love Apple because while they know this and are marketing to them, they are not sell outs like AOL and they are able to keep the pros AND the consumers happy at the same time.
I was about to ditch macs forever until I heard of the OS X public beta, and I hung on to Apple ever since (even though it only came through for me as a computer until all the big apps were released for it, and Jaguar came out.)
Apple is truly a great company, and is about to rise like a phoenix. And I hope I get that Apple stock at the right time! It's 14 bucks a share right now, and Microsoft is at 55 bucks a share! I can see it doubling or more, if apple truly lowers prices and gets its faster CPU and gobbles up marketshare.
Well, I've said enough.
