Well the time is almost upon us. We’ll soon know what the “brick” is, we’ll know what new laptops look like, and more importantly we’ll see some new price points.
It’s the price points that have me the most curious. Rumors are swirling around that we will see, for the first time ever, laptop models that fall below the eight hundred dollar price point. What does that mean for consumers? Are we going to be expected to sacrifice some of the power that we’ve come to expect? The logical extension is that something has to go to get the price down a bit. We’re all hoping that the savings on hardware is being directly passed on to consumers, and that Apple is finally starting to see the benefit in catering to the poor students of today. After all, if we pander to the needs of a generation of students today, they eventually will become the leaders of tomorrow. Hopefully that would mean more Macs in the corporate environment. If that’s not forward thinking, I don’t know what is!
But, a quick look around your typical first year lecture hall shows that people are affording the price of macbooks just fine. I guess my question in all of this is, why now? What does Apple stand to gain? It can’t be as simple as “Market Share”, can it? More importantly, how would you differentiate between the el cheap-o mac, the macbook, the macbook pro, and the air? The Pro and Air models are easy: power and size respectively. The El-Cheap-o and Macbook might be a little bit more difficult. The logical answers are again, power and size, but that would be direct competition with the other product lines. We’ve been tipped off that we have more pricepoints this round than the previous so Apple
‘s model will likely be scaled on power. There’s nothing ground breaking there, but I wonder if we’ll be seeing more of a “netbook” then “Macbooks”.
What do you think?
Sign off in the comments and over on the forum with your ideas.
