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But if PCs are clunkier than Macs, they have the great virtue of being ubiquitous. While Jobs' Apple may indeed make the most innovative, easy and fun-to-use computers, most consumers want what everyone else uses--big, cheap PCs that run Windows. A case in point: the ice-cool-looking Cube, introduced in July 2000, was a disaster for Apple, partly because no one, not even the Mac faithful, wanted to spend $1,799 on it (monitor not included), no matter how gorgeous and cutting-edge it was. That was probably a pricing mistake as much as anything else--Apple's gross profit margins (the difference between what it costs to make and market a thing vs. how much you charge) have been huge under Jobs. This time, however, with the new iMac, Apple is really keeping the costs down--something it can do because it controls much more of what goes in the box than the typical PC competitor, which buys virtually all its components from third-party sellers.
Still, at $1,299 for the entry-level iMac, the product could be priced too dearly to attract many converts from the PC world. "It's unlikely that any specific product announcement by Apple will have any immediate impact on the company's position in the market," says Al Gillen, an analyst who tracks Apple for IDC. While he hadn't yet seen the new iMac, in Gillen's view, the battle over the desktop standard was won long ago by the Windows-Intel forces.
And Apple's operating systems aren't helping. In fact, they are steadily losing market share, he says, pointing to recent data that suggest Apple OS's accounted for only 3.6% of new license revenue in 2000. Worse, IDC projects that they will amount to even less in 2001. By contrast, Microsoft's share of Windows licenses has increased during the same period.
Forget innovation, some analysts tell Apple. The most important thing Jobs can do is embrace the Dark Side and find other bridges to the Windows-Intel world. Says Gillen: "It's no longer a matter of which product is better but rather which world do you need to work in." That is, if you use Windows at work, you will use it at home. Instead of packaging cool, creative applications in each iMac, critics say, Apple should give people a Windows emulator so they can run PC programs if needed.
Yet the Internet, which was engineered so that every kind of computer could connect, has gone a long way toward making Apple computers compatible with everyone else's. And while it's true that most computer programs come out for Windows machines first and Macs second (if at all), that's not so important as it once was. All bread-and-butter programs, such as Microsoft Office, are available for the Mac. And in the entertainment category, the trend is to do one's video gaming on dedicated consoles like the GameCube, Xbox and PlayStation2, not on the computer.