|
Far Too Good To Pass Up (11/7/02)
|
 
|
| | |
Meanwhile, there was far less debate over what fate had in store for the humble iBook, and pretty much everything that people expected came true: speeds were bumped up an extra hundred megahertz, the graphics subsystem was updated to the Mobility Radeon 7500 that used to be in the PowerBook line (thus bringing Quartz Extreme capability to Apple's consumer portables), and most importantly, two hundred clams were shaved right off the price tags. (Great... now we're going to be carrying a visual of "shaved clams" in our heads all day. Sigh.)
The faster chips and better video are definitely welcome upgrades, but truth be told, the real story here is in the price cuts. The iBook was already a terrific deal, but the latest price drop brings it squarely across what economists (speaking in the technical terms of their trade) refer to as the "If I Pass This Deal Up I'm Going To Have To Club Myself Silly With A Summer Squash" threshold. That threshold, of course, varies depending on the product being sold: for a can of chunk tuna in spring water it's nineteen cents; for a big-screen projection TV it's about $700; for a nice summer squash itself, it's maybe a dime. And for a snazzy-looking laptop with unparalleled ease of use, we're told that $999 is definitely over the line into IIPTDUIGTHTCMSWASS territory.
Seriously, think about it-- Apple now has a sub-$1000 consumer portable, just in time for the holiday spending frenzy. Oh, sure, other manufacturers have $999 consumer Wintel notebooks for sale, but Apple's offering differs in the fundamentally important respect that it doesn't suck. Accordingly, we suspect that Apple's iBook unit sales for the quarter are going to spike sharply following the price drop, assuming the rest of the world hasn't suddenly been rendered blind, limbless, and incapable of swiping a major credit card through that little reader dealie.
What this really means, of course, is that if you were recently in the market for a new iBook and passed it up because of its price, you no longer have any excuse; after all, we're betting there are at least one or two disturbed people out there who are rich enough to pay you a cool thou for any of a number of extraneous organs, fingers, or what have you. Just because eBay pulled the plug on sales of body parts doesn't mean you can't find a buyer some other way. It's time to get resourceful, people-- either that, or time to reach for the summer squash. And we all know how painful that can be.
| |
| |
 |
SceneLink (3826)
|  |
 |
|
And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
| | | |
|
| |
|
 | | The above scene was taken from the 11/7/02 episode: November 7, 2002: Apple did indeed introduce new PowerBooks, and they do indeed include a slot-loading SuperDrive. Meanwhile, the iBook gets a significant price cut that sends the base model into sub-$1000 territory, and Microsoft's real innovation with the Tablet PC actually comes a couple of years too late...
Other scenes from that episode: 3825: Ahead Drool Factor Ten (11/7/02) Well, shave an ape and call it Ballmer-- the kid was right! November 6th has come and gone, and as was widely anticipated, it left shiny new PowerBooks in its wake. That's not the groovy bit, though. The groovy bit, as faithful viewer Michael Brendler kindly pointed out, is that Apple's new top-of-the-line PowerBook indeed boasts an incredibly sexy slot-loading SuperDrive, just as our own six-month-old intern and goddess-in-training apparently predicted... 3827: The One-Finger Salute (11/7/02) Of course, today Microsoft plans to upstage Apple's latest round of portable product updates and price drops by launching a new portable innovation of its own: the Tablet PC. For now, we'll spare you the predictable rant about how we really loved the Tablet PC the first time we saw it (back when it was called the Newton), and instead we'll force ourselves to focus on just one teensy little aspect of Redmond's "Look, Ma, We're Innovating" desperate cry for attention...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
|
|
