Comments on: The worst analysis ever

By: albrecht schmitz

albrecht schmitz — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:33:14 +0000

One point to take into consideration concerning the “special treatment” of Apple by Intel is not only the 5 percent marketshare.
In the high end chips suh as dual core Apple is by far the biggest customer since it lowest model is already equipped with it.
Furthermore, when Intel launched it first for Apple and the only for the pc-market, that was an intelligent sales decision. Which other manufacturer would have decided to change it’s entire product line to the new chips. Only Apple. Probably Intel would not have had enough production capacity in the beginning for Apple as well as for the others.
Conclusion : Apple has reasonably good prices for a high end product which leaves Intel a good profit together with an immediate mass production to start cutting production costs. In a traditional launch these chips would have been marketed in the pc-market in small quantities until a certain volume was achieved.
Conclusion : plain busines sense for both parties.

By: Ian Devin

Ian Devin — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 02:28:52 +0000

talk about good analysis … the site switch to a mac predicted almost head on that apple would ship 1.6 million computers in the fourth quarter. the predition was as follows:

notebooks = 1 million
desktops = 640,000

the actual numbers were:

notebooks: 984,000
desktops: 624,000

i was surprised becuase most everyone else was expecting lower numbers.

http://switchtoamac.com/site/prediction-of-164-million-macs-for-q4-2006-misses-by-only-30000.html

By: Randy Sailer

Randy Sailer — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:16:38 +0000

Apparently, the folks at Business Week agree with you!!

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ByteOfTheApple/blog/archives/2006/10/what_would_we_d.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_byteoftheapple

Randy

By: Brandon Eley

Brandon Eley — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 09:10:56 +0000

Of course Apple gets special treatment. Apple may not be big in market share for operating systems, but as a PC manufacturer they have a huge market share and are right up there with the big guys. HP, Dell, they all get price cuts and special treatment to some extent. Intel saw an opportunity to tap into 5 % of the hardware market it wasn’t currently getting a piece of. As Apple’s PC market share grows (and it’s growing) so does Intel’s.

I haven’t read this “analysis” but I don’t think Intel or Apple are going anywhere anytime soon. These kinds of analyses have been around since the ’90s. I can’t count the number of articles I’ve read that spelled doom for Apple. Apple’s still here, and sometimes I wonder what’s happened to those writers with such skill at fortunetelling.

By: Mantiz

Mantiz — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 08:38:54 +0000

I think what he meant with intel proping up Apple is that they did not just support apple like they would do with any pc manufacturer,
they brought the intel core duo for example, first to the mac and a couple of months later to the pc market.
And yes, apple is stll able to sell computers not because intel feels like it, but because of intel doing business with apple.

If at a point they were not be able to strike a good deal intel could bail, that would mean at the point where they are now, big problems for Apple.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:47:17 +0000

I have had the “pleasure” of presenting to Gartner and many of their ilk while representing a major consumer electronics and software company or two. Whenever I read a report concerning a topic with which I am intimately familiar, I conclude that the writer is an imbecile, or at best, a lazy moron. I try to keep that in mind when reading analyst reports.

By: Leon

Leon — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:24:01 +0000

this is just another example of how erroneous Gartner’s research tends to be. I can’t believe that people continue to give their “insight” credence.

By: Robere

Robere — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 22:52:02 +0000

The basis of this analysis left me with whiplash … what, higher volume ‘increases’ your component costs?? Since when, per unit costs go way down with bigger orders …

This just seems like a dig.

Intel seems geniuinely excited to be working with Apple on new products which offer the promise of new untapped markets for those custom chips.

Has it been sugested that Apple gets fovarble pricing for the same chips compared to PC makers other than in this article?

By: matthew

matthew — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:35:27 +0000

Worst Apple analyst, yes, but a great publicist. He’s getting this article plastered everywhere today.

At any rate, there are a ton of reasons even the vaguely Apple-informed analyst would never propose such a pairing.

Not to mention the fact that these companies are reported to be on two ends of the reliability survey scale (Apple, 201; Dell, 4). Nice.

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:26:56 +0000

Contra Gartner, The whole point of going to Intel hardware was to neutralize the differential between Apple and Dell and HP. If Intel declares bankruptcy tomorrow, Apple, Dell, HP, and the others would all simply move to AMD, or whatever other chip company sprung up to serve this vast market.

I fail to see how Intel’s fortunes affect Apple any differently than the rest of the PC makers.