★ The New Apple Advantage
[Via Daring Fireball]
Peter Bright wrote a good piece earlier this week at Ars Technica, documenting his attempt to buy a MacBook Air-like Windows laptop (he doesn’t want an Air running Windows using Boot Camp because he doesn’t like Apple’s U.K. keyboard) and finds the experience confusing (too many models to choose from) and expensive (comparatively-equipped machines from Dell, HP, and Lenovo cost considerably more than an equivalent MacBook Air.
E.g., here’s Bright on shopping from Dell:
It’s even worse if I just browse without searching. The options I get are just… meaningless. Yes, I want “Everyday Computing,” so I want an Inspiron. But hang on, I also want “Design & Performance,” so I want an XPS. Wait a second, I want “Thin & Powerful,” too. So maybe I want a Z Series? But the only line that apparently matches my broad search criteria — lightweight, 11-14″ — I wouldn’t even consider because I don’t want a “gaming” laptop, and so I’m never going to click Alienware!
From HP:
The same odd labels cover everything — I know I don’t want “Mini/Netbook,” but I want both “Everyday Computing” (that term again) and “High performance” (because I don’t want it to be slow, do I?). And who knows what “Envy” means? When I tick my screen size and weight boxes, I get back a crop of lousy netbooks that are almost the complete opposite of what I want.
And Lenovo:
It starts off with the same stupid classifications that must make sense to some guy in marketing — “Powered for productivity” and “Optimized for entertainment” and “No-nonsense features built for versatility”.
Here’s what I wrote back in July, linking to Cory Doctorow’s review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab Some-Size-or-Another:
Cory Doctorow calls the new Samsung Galaxy Tab “meh”:
Ever since the iPad shipped, I’ve been waiting impatiently for a comparable Android device to emerge — something of like shape, size and capacity, but from a more open ecosystem than the one Apple offers.
I love these sort of reviews. I want an Apple-quality product without the Apple, and I’m sure I’ll get one soon.
And don’t forget the Apple-like prices, which is where Bright’s laptop hunt faltered. But so why the dearth of Apple-caliber products from companies other than Apple?
[More]
Gruber makes a great point. Other PC makers allow so much user configuration possibilities that it loses the benefit of scale – prices are cheaper when you make a million of the same device, not 100,000 of ten different devices.
Apple reduced customer configuration but adds not only ”it just works” benefits but because virtually every Macbook uses the same parts, it gets economy of scale not available to other makers.
But now that Apple’s products are more popular, we’re beginning to see another benefit to Apple’s lesser degree of configurability: greater scalability. Apple needs larger quantities of fewer different components to manufacture the same number of computers as other companies. It’s not just the economies of scale that all companies get when they sell 3 or 4 million laptops in a quarter — it’s greater, because Apple’s 3 or 4 million laptops sold share a larger number of the exact same components.
This advantage is more pronounced with iOS devices. In four years, Apple has gone from not being in the phone business to reaping a majority of the handset industry’s worldwide profits. Yet they make only two phones — the iPhone 4 and 3GS.
The fractionation of the Android market just makes this worse.
And it can easily be decided that while the design side is due to Jobs, the scale benefits due to simplicity is due to Cook. And, as Gruber comments, while the Jobsian design can be copied, Cook’s scalability can not.
