Apple’s Four Product Matrix Revisited
If you cast your mind back to the early days of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple, you may remember when he introduced the four product matrix. It was breathtakingly simple and reasonable. Instead of selling a bunch of more-or-less randomly configured models in the pursuit of market niche “sweet spots” which led to the Performa debacle, Apple would sell four kinds of computer, based on a simple 2×2 matrix: professional vs. consumer, desktop vs. portable. It seems to me that this beautifully simple matrix has become badly unstuck, and needs rethinking.
MacBook
When Apple introduced its consumer laptops (the original blueberry and tangerine iBooks) they designed them with both displays and a “look” that begged to be excluded from Office environments. With the introduction of the white “iceBook”, they reinvented the iBook as, perhaps, the best balanced portable computer ever, and many “professionals” opted for their elegant looks, small size, functionality, and price. If you didn’t know that the Aluminum “professional” models were more expensive, would you think they looked better? Today’s MacBooks have a rather unsettling keyboard (I can’t comment on how good it is since I’ve only played with it in stores, although many have said they prefer it), but they remain supremely well-balanced computers — and until Apple replaces the 12″ PowerBook, they will be the most portable Macintosh on the market.
Mac Mini
The Mac Mini just has too many things in its favor to be dismissed as a consumer toy. It’s tiny form factor and hefty CPU power make it an ideal media center or server to tuck out of the way. To get a similarly compact PC you need to pay as much or more and settle for a much uglier result. Recent tests have shown the Mac Mini to offer superior performance to dedicated server hardware based on the G5.
iMac
The problem with the iMac is that it’s just too good, but as an all-in-one you can’t upgrade its components, so when one becomes obsolete you need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In the short term it has excellent horsepower and graphics — more than enough for most “professional” users, and thus cannibalizes Pro sales, but in the long term it frustrates power users and enthusiasts.
The Hole in the Middle
Aside from having its consumer computers doing far too good a job of satisfying pros, the product lineup has a huge hole in it. A number of websites have proposed a product to fill that hole, and the most popular name for it is xMac. The problem for Apple is that if it shipped the xMac it might well completely cannibalize its entire desktop computing market.
xMac?
The central problem with the Mac Mini and the iMac for a certain demographic, let’s call them gamers, is that the Mac Mini uses notebook hard drives and doesn’t have a “real” GPU (video chip) and the iMac has a pretty good one, but you can’t swap in a better one every six months. Ideally, they’d like the xMac to be a headless iMac with a slot-mounted video card sold for, say, $899. It would either be a bigger Mac Mini or a pint-sized Mac Pro tower. Consider the following:
The chances are a sizable proportion of you are salivating at the thought of this hypothetical product. So why doesn’t Apple ship it? Are they stupid?
Unfortunately, quite the opposite. Apple has always been very good at identifying features key to a given market and then setting its price points accordingly. For example, for a long time iBooks couldn’t support dual displays because of the way Apple’s software worked, not because of any intrinsic feature of the hardware (there were hacks to get around this, but 99% of users would never learn about them). Dual display support is a pro feature, and this let Apple sell machines that were twice as expensive to people who simply wanted that feature. (I just noticed that Apple seems to have reversed this policy and enabled dual display support even on machines sold as not having the capability, but it may just be certain models.)
The Fatal Flaw
The fatal problem with the xMac is that if it’s priced high enough to preserve Apple’s profit margins it will be irrelevant, while if it’s priced low enough to satisfy gamers and other members of its supposed target market it will make every other desktop and server irrelevant. Consider that when the Mac Pro shipped, everyone knew that 4-core CPUs were around the corner. Who would have bought a Mac Pro (for $2500+) knowing that their $900 xMac would be able to tide them over until the 4-core CPUs were out, and would then run faster, for $1000 less (including the new CPU)? Worse than that, if xMacs became really popular, everyone would start building cheap accessories for them, and soon it would be far more cost effective to buy a stripped down xMac from Apple and reconfigure it for almost any purpose than buy a more expensive model from Apple. As well as destroying Apple’s margins, this would reduce their economies of scale for higher-end machines, driving the price of Mac Pros and XServes even higher.
The xMac would do for Apple what SGI’s move to NT did for SGI. Well, not quite: Apple could still sell iPods.
Final Thoughts
Does Apple care about “the hole in the middle”? It seems like the only way Apple can satisfy this group is by getting out of the hardware business (because if their margins for hardware drop to Dell’s, they might as well). Until they have a vastly increased market share, this is simply not a viable option, and it’s not clear if it’s desirable for any of us. It seems like to sell Macs to gamers, Apple needs to become Microsoft, and we’ve already got one of those.
From a gaming perspective, Apple really doesn’t add any value anyway. Games don’t run better on Macs (although they don’t necessarily run worse). Typically, games don’t care about file interoperability, System services, drag and drop, or the ability to print across a network. And by switching to Intel, Apple allows us to take the money we’d spend on a PC for games, save half of it, and spend the rest buying a better Mac. Maybe that will have to do for us for now.
next on my wishlist are mac mini, macbook, and ipod touch.
those who has a mac mini please do tell whether it’s worth buying or not. cheers.
I just bought a mac mini and it is definitely worth it. I am using it as a home entertainment hub for watching movies, a software base station, a web server hosting 4 sites, an email serve, etc.
It is rock solid and works great. I wish I would have bought one sooner. My kids use it to play internet games, do their homework, etc.
The mac mini has proven to be very responsive and stable. It offers more performance than you would expect from such a small computer.
The mini is great as a computer but more importantly nothing approaches its size&price together. There’s an A-Open on the Windows side but it costs more than a mini. Great for that niche application, like in a car/SUV/van/motorhome or as a media hub or tiny server. I use a mini as an entertainment center too. Can be used as a regular household computer if you have an extra keyboard, mouse and screen. However if Intel built-in graphics turn you off or you have a need/want to run two monitors spanned off the same cpu box, then you will have to look at an imac. Good news, first generation Intel iMacs are starting to be available used at $700-900, not much of a premium over a mini. As a note, despite the bugaboo that first gen products should be avoided as potentially flawed or buggy, Intel Mac desktop models show no huge problems, so you don’t have to buy on the current cutting edge. It’s your choice how you proceed, just look at all your Mac options.
To me the discussion of “why I love my particular Mac” misses the main point the author is attempting to address. Step back and ask your self how the computer business has changed since Steve first presented his first matrix, and how it might change in the future. If you then work back towards a new matrix (or series of matrices), you might see things entirely differently, and undoubtedly, more like Steve and the far-sighted folks at Apple do.
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