begin  quoting Lan Barnes as of Tue, May 24, 2005 at 02:54:55PM -0700:
> On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 02:41:48PM -0700, John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
> > 
> > Where is the gain for Apple to keep its market limited?
> 
> What exactly is Apple's market? I ask seriously. I've never gotten it.

People with higher standards than the average crowd.

> They're a HW company, but their stuff is expensive, proprietary, and not
> cool enough (or cooler enough) to justify the price bump.

Sez who?

The up-front costs are most expensive, but people tend to be happy with 
their Apples longer than people are happy with their x86 MSWindows boxen.
The average TCO is therefore lower.

Most people don't care about proprietary. They just want it to work.
And, by and large, Apples do "just work".  There are a lot of things
that would annoy a geek, but Apples aren't in competition with the 
geek OSes (Linux, BSD, etc.), but with MSWindows.

And Apple _dominates_ the "coolness" factor.  Apple products *look* like
they've been designed by talented and artistic engineers. Even the packaging
is cool.

>                                                           Their GUI is
> more like other GUIs than different. OsX is BSD.

All the GUIs are pretty much incestuous anyway; apple just does it
without making it feel like something from Fischer-Price.

The BSD underpinnings attracts the geeks.

>                                                  What are they trying to
> do?
 
Not play at lemmings.  They're playing the "be different" card.

> They have and retain:
> 
> 1. anti-PC types
 
Always a good thing to have a place for the disenchanted to escape to.

> 2. education, especially secondary school

Hard to do, and harder to keep hold of. MS has made serious inroads
here.

> 3. the clueless (SDMUG?)

That's "Aunt Tillie" (of ESR fame).  That's _most_ people.

> 3. used to have serious typesetting

And they now are getting more into music and video.
 
> These are frail reeds to float your boat on. I would not be buying big
> blocks of Apple stock these days.

People have been saying that for twenty years.

-Stewart "Been on the wrong side of that contempt for twenty years" Stremler

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