Apple's Day of Wall Street Heart Attacks

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2009 keynote was the strangest ever—and not just for CEO Steve Jobs’ absence. Apple cut prices where unexpected, while keeping them high where Wall Street analysts expected cuts. The $29 Snow Leopard upgrade is simply stunning.

Everyone should ask: Why Apple is asking so little for seemingly so much? That from a company that normally charges more for products.

Today’s shockers:

Mac laptop price cuts came at the high end, making entry-level models still pretty pricey compared to Windows PCs. Wall Street analysts had been pining for $799 Macs.
In what I can only describe as a counter-intuitive move, Apple slashed the price of Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) by about 78 percent compared to every other OS X upgrade. Software tends to pull in big margins. Surely, this is one price cut Wall Street wasn’t looking for.
Apple lowered entry price of iPhone to $99 in the United States, a move some Wall Street analysts pined for. But Apple made the price cut in a surprising way—at least to anyone not closely following the company’s pricing and product strategies.

Snow Leopard Jumps Through Windows
Apple’s Snow Leopard pricing makes leaked, and highly suspicious, Best Buy upgrade pricing for Windows 7 seem suddenly sensible. Apple will price Mac OS X 10.6 at $29 for existing 10.5 users. A Family Pack will sell for $49. Apple’s more typical pricing is $129 for a single Mac OS X license and $199 for a five-user Family Pack. The allegedly leaked Best Buy pricing: $49.99 for Windows 7 Home Premium and $99.99 for Windows 7 Professional—from June 26 through July 11.

What exactly then is the value of a computer operating system? Better stated: What is the value of an incremental upgrade? Apple has described Snow Leopard as a Mac OS X version improving performance and stability rather than adding loads of new features. Microsoft critics have a nasty label for Windows 7: Windows Vista 2. I don’t agree, but that’s topic for another blog post.

Snow Leopard supports finger drawing on MacBook trackpad

The only way I can make sense out of such ridiculously low pricing: Apple is trying to ramp up Snow Leopard adoption quickly. Now why is that?

The next big thing. Perhaps Apple wants to move the install base in preparation for something unreleased, such as a cross-platform application store.
64-bit conversion. The cheap upgrade could get most Mac users onto a single, more architecturally-advanced platform now. It would be good for application development.
Single platform. Microsoft’s unified platform is Windows XP. Apple gains competitive advantage by moving its ecosystem to the newest rather than oldest thing.
Smashing Windows. Apple can undercut Windows 7’s perceived value with lower pricing for an equally good, or even better, alternative. It’s competitive marketing.

Few other things to note:

Snow Leopard will beat Windows 7 to market by as much as six weeks—unless Microsoft lets OEMs ship new Seven PCs sooner. Apple will release Snow Leopard sometime in September. Windows 7 launches on October 22nd. The scenario sets up fierce competition between Macs and Windows PCs going into the holidays.
Only Leopard users qualify for the super-low-cost pricing. Tiger users must purchase the Mac Box Set, which will include Snow Leopard, iLife `09 and iWork `09. Apple Store sells the Leopard Mac Box Set for $169.
Snow Leopard will pull hardware upgrades. Mac OS X 10.6 requires an Intel processor. People running PowerPC Macs will need newer computers if they want the newest Mac OS.

Computers are going to be very interesting commodities this holiday season, as Apple and Microsoft go to war. The decisive battles will wage on the marketing battlefield. A year ago, I would have bet against Microsoft marketing. But recent Microsoft advertising is sizzling good.

MacBook Pro Rewards the Fattest Wallets
Apple mostly got new Mac laptop pricing right, although it’s not what many Wall Street analysts wanted. A month ago I asserted that “Mac prices cuts are inevitable.” I wrote:

Apple cannot avoid the inevitable price cuts, but delays can preserve margins longer. Apple should close the pricing gap at the high end, by lowering 15-inch MacBook Pro to $1,799 from $1,999 and to $1,999 from $2,499. The 17-inch model probably could sell for $2,799 at least another quarter, even with $800 price difference from the high-end 15-inch model.

My reasoning:

Apple has margins to spare at the high end, where price cuts would open up sales for people with money to spend.
Price cuts at the low end would cut into margins, but only marginally Mac sales increases. Meaning: The cuts would cost more than they would be worth.
Sub-$1,000 pricing would hurt the Mac as a brand. Many people view Macintosh as a premium-quality product. Lower pricing would diminish perceptions about the brand.
By contrast, price cuts at the high end should create positive value perceptions about the brand. Apple just made something valuable more affordable than yesterday.

I disagree with Wall Street analysts calling for $799 Macs. Apple made the right move for the mainstream market. That said, contrary to marketing perceptions generated during the keynote, new Macs fall short of Windows PCs in many meaningful areas:

Screen resolutions are still too low for the price. My 13-inch Sony VAIO has 1600 x 900 resolution. The 13-inch MacBook Pro: 1280 x 800.
Inclusion of SD Card slot is oh-so catchup. MacBooks should have had these years ago. What took Apple so long?
Apple should never have taken away FireWire ports from lower-cost MacBooks. Bringing them back is a concession of mistake.
Where’s the HDMI port, which is now pretty much a standard port on Windows laptops, even some cheap netbooks?
Apple’s closest netbook kin is the MacBook Air. While Air is much more affordable, the Mac still costs $1,000 or more than Windows netbooks.

Still some little touches improve usability, such as the backlit keyboard across the MacBook Air and Pro lines. Then there is the promise of super battery life on new MacBook Pros. I’ll believe it when I see it.

You Can Be Cool for Just 99 Bucks
Apple mostly priced new iPhone as I predicted last week. The company stuck to tested-and-true pricing strategies used with iPod. Apple lowered iPhone pricing to $99, while keeping $199 and $299 in place. What I got wrong: 4GB model for $99. Instead, Apple did something more sensible: Offer the existing 8GB model for $99, which is a 50 percent discount.

That’s an extremely sensible approach. A year ago, Apple absorbed the costs of starting up iPhone 3G manufacturing and distribution. Related, Apple already has taken the largest portion of margins out of the 10 months of sales. The lower margins from the lower price will give away little, but potentially take away lots in sales volume. For just $99, most anyone qualifying for subsidized pricing can get an iPhone.

At that price, I predict iPhone sales volume will go nuclear. The blast could literally incapacitate every other smartphone now sold or coming to market. Think of App Store as Apple’s electromagnetic pulse. Nokia and Palm picked lousy months to be launching new, flagship smartphones.

But people shouldn’t overlook iPhone shortcomings. There is little in Apple’s published documentation to suggest that newer iPhone 3GS will have better battery life than existing 3G model. Apple has revealed nothing to indicate that telephony calling and audio quality will improve.

That raises question: Is iPhone primarily a phone? Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller sure didn’t talk much about telephony during today’s WWDC keynote. But he and others sure spent a long time showcasing data feature and applications. Others have said, and my testing confirms, that 3G telephony is main culprit draining iPhone’s battery. If iPhone is more handheld computer than smartphone, phone calling quality and battery-draining 3G telephony are more minor considerations.

But what about video, which is a new feature with iPhone 3GS? How will video capture affect battery life? “Well goddamn, iPhone gave out half way through the concert I was capturing for YouTube.” Only testing will show for sure, eh?

Still, there is one place where battery life limits iPhone compared to competing smartphones: Apple doesn’t widely allow background applications. Multitasking defines all major operating systems, whether desktop or mobile. Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm and Research in Motion mobile operating systems all allow background apps. Apple’s compromise—push notifications—trails behind rather than blazes the trail ahead. That’s not very smart.

By the way, Apple’s stock opened at $143.90 today and dipped below $140 during Snow Leopard and MacBook announcements—the ones not greeted well by Wall Street. But by market close, the stock rallied to within a nickel short of the opening price. That was good news for any Wall Street investor or analyst not being resuscitated by EMTs.

15Comments

Add yours

1

JohnJ on June 8, 2009 at 9:04 pm

The price problem with smartphones isn’t the device price, it’s the data contract price.

In the US, iPhone is still chained to the low quality AT&T network.

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2

Bob Jones on June 8, 2009 at 9:52 pm

Placing an emphasize on the first word in your lists is annoying, I keep thinking there’s a secret message within.

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3

Ian Betteridge on June 9, 2009 at 4:25 am

While Snow Leopard is obviously a step towards being able to unify the platform on 64-bit, it’s not quite possible yet.

Remember that the first generation of Intel-based Macs used the Core Duo, which wasn’t 64-bit. That only arrived a few months later, with the Core 2 Duo-based updates. So Apple will be supporting 32-bit Intel as a platform for some time to come, as those machines are only three years old.

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4

whatever on June 9, 2009 at 5:19 am

Indeed, not to mention that for most 64bit capable users absolutely nothing changes other than having more 64bit compiled bundled applications, as Leopard was already equally 64bit capable other than the kernel which for most Snow Leopard users will still default to 32 bit.

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5

Otto on June 9, 2009 at 5:27 am

I love all the things that aren’t mentioned either in the keynote or in the press. You’re one of the first I’ve read to mention that if you’re not using Leopard right now, the cost isn’t a mere $29 but a whopping $169. I’ve used Leopard, and hated it. Tiger worked, and it worked great. Leopard was buggy and kept dropping my network for no reason, so I wiped my drive and reinstalled Tiger and have perfectly happy with it. Though, since I’m running a G4 Powerbook purchased in 2005, the real cost for me to upgrade to Snow Leopard would come in at $1699 plus tax (to replace my 15″ Powerbook with a 15″ Macbook Pro that meets the new “Intel Only” motto at Apple).
Can you imagine if Microsoft pulled something like that? Sure, the minimum requirements for Vista were steep, but they were nothing like this. Imagine if they announced that Windows 7 would only work on computers that were released after 2006. They would get hauled over the coals and skewered by every tech journalist in the business. So my $2000 Powerbook that I purchased in 2005 is obsolete according to Apple, but my $800 HP Pavilion that I bought in 2004 runs Microsoft’s latest and greatest flawlessly. There is something very wrong with that.
And speaking of the new Macbook Pros, sure they got a bit of a price cut, but am I the only one who is concerned that a 15″, $2299 laptop has no expansion options other than an SD card slot? You have to spend $2500 and lug around a 17″ behemoth if you want the convenience of an express card slot these days. It’s so disappointing. It just means that in a year they’ll bring back the express card and make you upgrade again.
And as far as the iPhone 3G S is concerned, they spent a lot of time talking about how much faster it is, how much smarter it is, and how much more a computer it is. What about the phone part? Everyone I know who has used one (including you) has mentioned that as a computing device it’s great, as far as a phone it stinks. IN all this magic and re-engineering they performed on the thing, did they make the phone part of it any better? I didn’t hear anything in the presentation about that. I’m sure if you were to ask, you’d hear crickets chirping in response.
I used to love these keynote presentations and the new announcements. I would ooh and ah with the rest of them, but now the magic just seems to be gone. I feel like I’m watching a magic show in which I know how all the tricks are performed.

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6

whatever on June 9, 2009 at 7:55 am

A few things –

The $169 is the cost of the so called \"Mac Box Set\", which is in this case Snow Leopard, iLife 09 and iWork 09.

Why would you want to upgrade to Snow Leopard if you find Leopard terrible? Particularly on a 32bit, Single Core CPU and weak GPU toting PowerBook G4. Given Snow Leopard\’s 3 main selling features are bundled apps compiled in 64bit, multicore enhancement and GPU based acceleration – what\’s the point?

Your PowerBook G4 is obsolete if that\’s how you judge it – yes; that\’s exactly why they switched to Intel because the PowerPC wasn\’t competitive anymore, particularly in the notebook space. The G4 was underpowered in many respects at the time of your laptop purchase.

In 2005 I also purchased a laptop, an IBM ThinkPad X40 with a 12.1\" screen and a Pentium M 1.2 ULV CPU and 1GB of RAM. Vista is totally unusable on it, but i can\’t really blame Vista – i knew what i was buying at the time.
PS: i still *heart* my thinkpad… 😀

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7

Bob Jones on June 9, 2009 at 10:44 am

The reason why comments have so many escape characters is because your captcha is broken, it’s hard to read and I swear it’s not working 100%.

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8

Joe Wilcox on June 9, 2009 at 1:09 pm

Magic is only magic until you learn the method to the trick, Otto. Apple product introductions emphasize all the benefits, ignore the deficits and leave people feeling that if they buy that “one more thing” their lives will be better for it. You’re seeing the reality behind the marketing magic.

I love Apple notebooks. But Apple wasn’t advancing the hardware fast enough for me. There are many things missing, like those expansion, slots you noted. Apple has succumbed to putting form/design over function. There are many people who can do without the function for the sake of form; for others, the more meaningful function is the software. Nobody ships anything like iLife for Windows.

As for Apple’s smartphone, I ask: Is iPhone a phone? If so, it’s not a great one for call quality and battery life. The top priority for a phone should be telephony. I’d use an iPhone today if not for call quality and battery life.

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9

NotLovingSnowLeopard on June 19, 2009 at 12:32 am

Snow Leopard sounds like a good upgrade – except for the removal of support for PPC. Understand that it might make good business sense, and the justification “buying a new machine isn’t that big of a stretch for many people”, well, okay.
However, my son’s school (like many schools) is a die-hard supporter of Apple, with 200+ eMacs (of various ages/models) that they try to keep current with the most recent supportable OS’ & software (like many schools). They could see some benefit from the new features in S.Leopard. They won’t however, be able to replace all 200+ with brand new hardware – the budget just isnt there.

Snow Leopard is by no means an essential upgrade, and i can’t think of any reason the school would be negatively impacted by not doing so. The point is that by doing this, Apple may be alienating a good-sized segment that has traditionally been a very strong supporter of Apple – a segment that values the “Macs stay relevent & usable longer than PC’s” mantra – that’s one of the selling points that got this school to invest so heavily in Mac.

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