flyboy's Profile

Part of the Apple brand is producing quality products. A BMW is still a car, just like a Chevy, but people are willing to pay more to get the quality of a BMW. Even if the there is only the perception of quality. Which is better for a companies bottom line, either sell a billion of an item and only make on dollar per unit, or to sell a hundred million and make ten dollars per unit?

The real answer is that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the Bush Administration has been extremely lax in regulating broadband carriers. Congress has been divided almost equally with the small majority only going to the Democrats less than two years ago. Consumer advocates have never gotten a solid majority of Representatives and Senators to put any teeth in consumer regulation of telephone service including broadband. The big carriers like, Verizon, AT&T;, Warner AMEX, and others spend huge amounts of money on Washington lobbyists to make sure that the consumer gets the lowest possible service at the highest cost. Sometimes, deregulation does not produce the greatest value and choice for the consumer. Rampant unregulated consolidation in the communication industry has reduced consumer choice and kept the prices high. Top executive salaries and bonuses in these industries are shameful in relationship to their stock valuations. We get the best government that money can buy.

Mobile Me has worked perfectly since day one. I don't have an iPhone, and I probably won't ever buy one, but I think that Mobile Me is a major upgrade from the great Dot Mac service that it replaced. I now can sync my Safari bookmarks directly to my laptop PC version of Safari. And, the web based iCal, Mail, etc. have worked wonderfully on my PC using Safari. My employer supplies me with the laptop and I use the Mobile Me service to keep updated when I am at the office or on the road. Unfortunately, my company's intranet only works using IE 6.0. I think that Mobile Me is worth every cent that Apple charges.

Big business, big government, and big enterprise, will never buy iPhones, nor Macs. They perceive that they are too expensive and not compatible with Microsoft's products. After all no IT manager ever was fired for buying IBM compatible/Microsoft. But, small business is fertile ground for Apple. These smaller businesses are run by entrepreneurs who would be attracted to the iPhone, but who are already entrenched in the PC/Microsoft world. Apple's betting that once the entrepreneurs get a taste of using Apple's products through the iPhone, they might have their IT manager begin to replace their old computers with Macs over time. I don't think that Apple believes that this will happen tomorrow or the next day, but maybe in a few weeks or years.

I am still running Tiger and I can't find one feature in Leopard that is worth $129. I am running a G5 iMac so I am not even sure that Snow Leopard will even work with Power PC Macs.

Steve was right about the Mac Mini if you already own a keyboard and a monitor. A good friend of mine bought his first Mac when the Intel Mini became available. He ditched his PC for the mini as his primary home computer after saving the keyboard and LCD monitor. His PC was always loaded up with spyware and other junk and he got tired of it's high upkeep. He bought an external firewire drive for more storage and is very happily running both OSX and Windows XP (when necessary for weird windows only applications) using VMware's Fusion. His Mini has one gigabyte of RAM and does everything he and his family need to do with a home computer. His wife is very happily using Mac mail, Safari, and the iLife suite.

This is really 'much to do about nothing.' I am sure that Apple has done extensive market research and discovered that their customers don't want a consumer computer that they can change the video card. I would bet that 98% of people use their Macs to surf the web, send/receive e-mail, and use the iLife suite for their digital lifestyle. Some of them may load up Office. My three year old G5 iMac., with one gig of RAM, does everything I need and will probably work for the next several years with the standard video card. The high end gamers, and those who love to tear into their machines instead of using them will buy a PC instead of a Mac. I am sure that the several thousand or so Mac users who agree with with Chris are not a large enough market for Apple or anyone else to go after.

Why would you want to use an online word processor? You can download NeoOffice for free at www.neooffice.org. NeoOffice is a Mac OSX version of Open Office which is a free open source office suite for Unix, Windows, and X11. It was created by Sun Micro Systems and was released to the open source community when Sun stopped its development. It has a word processsing program similar to word, a spread sheet program similar to Excel, a drawing program, and a presentation program. The word processor, spread sheet, and presentation program will open up MS office documents, and save to the MS Office formats. It opens and saves even very highly formatted Word documents including tables. I am using NeoOffice on a G5 iMac running 10.4 with one gig of Ram. It works well, except for the presentation program which runs a little slowly. Also, it works when I am not connected to the web.