Comments on: Still not thankful for ZDNet.

By: Jesse

Jesse — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 02:17:15 +0000

Apple DID make a netbook. It was called the air, and it was nice, and good for airports and things, and everything that a netbook is, except prettier, faster, actually useful, and a number of other things that apples are that pcs are not. Apple has yet to ‘flop’ on anything, as far as I am concerned, they haven’t lost money on a product yet. I personally haven’t used an apple mouse for about 14 years, (on my mac classic), I try them when they come out, and I stick to my logitech mouse with way too many buttons. I don’t care for bluetooth or wires, and I need all the buttons I can get. But as far as I’m concerned everything apple has done, short of mice, has been solid gold. People love to bash apple because it’s so easy to love them, but I wouldn’t follow investment advice of a rebel without a cause. That’s kind of the point.

By: Troy

Troy — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:43:43 +0000

Hey Robin Harris — did you see the Q1 sales numbers for the Unibody Laptops? RECORD numbers. Yep…really hurt Apple. Your Prediction = Epic Fail.

By: drow

drow — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:11:19 +0000

gawds, this is just like the last time, when apple ignored the booming tablet market, its stock crashed, it went bankrupt, and steve jobs had to sell the company to dell.

JUST LIKE IT.

By: The Macalope » Blog Archive » MacBook sales crushed by netbooks

The Macalope » Blog Archive » MacBook sales crushed by netbooks — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:09:13 +0000

[...] to you, Robin Harris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, [...]

By: Robin Harris

Robin Harris — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:23:11 +0000

O mighty horned one,

I’ve been enjoying your stuff for years. Call me biased, but this is one of your weaker efforts. I’ll take it from the top:

Flimsy: My 12″ PB and MacBook seemed to be about the same in sturdiness and way ahead of the Sony’s, IBMs and Dells I’ve owned. The only thing more solid was the HP Omnibook 300, from their Corvallis calculator group. My 128GB SSD MBA is pretty solid too. Maybe I’m just to gentle with my ‘books to notice I needed sturdier.

Jobs flops: hey, I didn’t want to excite the fan boys too much by a longer list. But we can start with the 128k Mac which almost sank Apple; the epic 1-button mouse stupidity; the puck mouse; the mighty (bad) mouse; the NeXT cube & the G4 Cube were both sales flops – and I owned the latter – which sacrificed function to form; the swing-arm’s short life is proof enough of its flop – due to cost – status; ADC monitors – available for a song on eBay – perhaps to be joined by the new 24″ desktop with its very neat and proprietary connector. And how about the Mini and the Apple TV? Or the nickel plated power supply in the NeXT cube? Jobs has some history here and he does regularly over reach.

Netbook vs MacBook: Hey, I already have an underpowered device with a tiny screen called an iPhone. Have you heard of it? I love it. Netbooks are having teething pains, but the sales are good and stepwise enhancement will push them towards mass acceptance and Moore’s Law will increase performance. Full size keyboards and newbie friendly Linux – if that ever happens – will put them over the top.

But the key point is that Apple is adding cost to the MacBooks with the unibody design. While people expect a higher quality product from Apple you seem to forget that Apple was ALREADY shipping a higher quality product. Given the drop in average Wintel notebook prices, Apple could have – and should have – passed on component price drops in LCDs, storage, processors & RAM and cut their prices to maintain their historic price differential over Wintel.

Conclusion: I stand by my analysis. Apple is frittering away their notebook momentum by adding cost to solve a problem most people don’t have. They don’t need to follow Wintel to the bottom of the market, but the fact that they kept the plastic ‘book at $999 is a sign of the real pricing pressure they face. If unibody MacBooks – not the Pros – are around in 2.5 years I’ll be very surprised. In the meantime let’s watch their quarterly numbers.

Cheers,

Robin

By: EJ

EJ — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:59:38 +0000

The flops had their fans. Heck, there are still forums devoted just to G4 Cube owners.

Also, those swing-arm iMacs? Perfect for a classroom lab setting, from “Turn your monitor so we can all see your work” to “Everyone turn your monitors towards me during the lecture”.

(I can’t say I ever liked the hockey puck mouse, though.)

By: » give us this day our daily kool-aid i drank the kool-aid: clutching my dixie cup of apple goodness

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:01:02 +0000

[...] ahhh the Macelope – Still Not Thankful for ZDNet. I love the Macelope but thus far it is an unrequited tragic love. The horned one keeps turning his [...]

By: Justin Bell

Justin Bell — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:32:36 +0000

I didn’t like the hokey puck mouse. I liked that it was small, but the annoying part was that I’d often go to use it an find my pointer was veering off to one side because I a wasn’t holding the mouse straight. It also had only one button, and more annoyingly, no scrollwheel. Their current mouse if fine enough that I haven’t bothered with a replacement.

Jonas.E: It actually has 4 buttons, and I think it’s pretty clever, as it would be hard to have 4 buttons without making it bigger or otherwise changing the ergonomics. Hardly form over function.

By: Jim Byrne

Jim Byrne — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:34:45 +0000

I only retired my hockey puck mouse a few months ago when i got a new iMac. I attached it to quite a few different Macs over the years because I liked it.

All the best,
Jim

By: Jonas. E

Jonas. E — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:14:26 +0000

Apple hasn’t made a decent mouse in their life.
Everyone likes to shit on the hockey puck, but what about the current line? The one where the hole mouse was the button was utter crap.
And don’t get me started on the mighty mouse. The very essence of form over function. If you have two buttons, give me TWO buttons. And the “squeeze”: What. The. Fuck.