The new iMac. Looks very similar to the old one, doesn't it? (Courtesy of Apple.)
Well, Apple’s certainly defied expectations today and has finally announced a sweeping revision to the whole of its desktop product line. The Mac Pro gets the new Intel Xeon ‘Nehalem’ processors, the iMac has switched to DDR3 RAM, and perhaps most significantly, the poor Mac Mini, which must have been feeling neglected having not received an update since the release of Leopard, has finally been revised.
There’s nothing too major on either front: the Mini now uses less power, nothing has a new case design just yet, and the reports and rumours of an Apple netbook are still yet to be consummated. However, for us people in sunny Ing-er-land, all the desktops have experienced quite a large price hike.
The base model of the Mac Mini, for example, now costs £499 despite the fact it still only has 1gB of RAM. That’s… awful. Although OS X (and particularly Snow Leopard, due out later this year) has a relatively slow memory footprint, if you’re anything like me and like to have lots of apps open at the same time (often with a virtual machine in one window), 1gB is appalling value for money. The next model, with 2gB of RAM (which is, by no means, a massive amount–respectable, but not what you’d call generous) is £649. Six hundred and forty-nine bloody pounds? Naff off.
Obviously, Apple has been forced to put its prices up on this side of the pond due to the weakening pound (and its near-parity with the Euro). However, it’s worth noticing that prices didn’t go down last year when you could get two dollars and ten cents to the pound… so it’s hard for Apple to look like they’re not penny-pinching here.
It’s obvious to me that this update is incremental, biding its time until the return of Steve Jobs, when something must be done. Apple must introduce a recession-busting product: during the last major global recession, they did well initially, but then suffered, eventually being saved by buying Jobs back along with NeXT.
True, with Apple products, you do get a lot of bang for your buck. I’ve never known a product of theirs to go tits-up within the first two years. However, if Apple were to introduce a netbook with a larger profit margin (as is befitting to a company that spends most of its profit margin on R&D) it would still, by some shaky mental maths, only come to around £400.
Whether or not Apple’s decision at the moment to remain in the ‘high-end, high quality’ market pays off will be seen in the sales figures a couple of months from now. However, I think that if they don’t provide a reasonably well-priced product by the end of the year, Steve Jobs will have a major problem on his hands.
