Shawn Blc wrote: On Saturday, September 8, 2012, Richard Gaskin wrote: >> I would venture to guess that Apple's justification for not allowing >> purchasers of OS X to run it on hardware of their own choice is that >> the price of the Apple-branded computer effectively subsidizes part >> of the cost of the OS. > > BS. Nowadays there's no need to subsidize a product > (software/hardware). > Companies only do it to draw attention and potential gain.
I suppose that's a possibility, and I can't claim to have sufficient knowledge of Apple's internal costs to be able to say.
But in all fairness, the price of OS X is a fraction of the price of Windows.
Given that Microsoft is able to amortize the R&D and marketing costs of Windows across some 87% of computers while Apple must amortize across only ~10%, and that Apple has higher margins than Microsoft, if the purchase price of the OS alone were to be seen as fully covering the vendor's costs we would expect Apple to charge many times more for its OS products than Microsoft does.
Most of Apple's Mac money comes from markup on hardware. The average price of a Mac is roughly double that of a PC*. Sure, they spend a lot on expensive fabrication for their laptop cases, but most of the internals are off-the-shelf components, the same CPUs, GPUs, RAM, audio and network chipsets, etc. that other PC vendors use. Even with their expensive fabrication, their price on the hardware provides them with the highest margins in the industry by far.
Given that they make so much money on hardware markup and price their OS so much lower than Microsoft who depends on OS sales alone, it seems reasonable to suggest that some of the unusually high hardware revenue is offsetting the unusually low OS revenue.
If anyone here has had the time to go through the shareholder details Apple provides which may suggest otherwise, I'd be interested in any data which shows that this view is incorrect. It may well be, it's just a hunch, but from what little I know it doesn't seem particularly outlandish.
* <http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/24/apple_may_make_more_profit_selling_one_mac_than_hp_does_from_7_pcs.html>
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
