Joseph Valente:
Essentially it turns around Apple’s complete willingness to destroy its own revenues. It built a phone that destroyed it’s major source of revenue, the iPod. It built Macbook Airs that have now disrupted another major source of revenue, their Macbook Pros. It built the iPad, which is already beginning to disrupt the Macbook itself.
Apple also killed off the iPod mini at the height of its popularity and introduced the iPod nano in its place. That completely disrupted the competition because at that time they were all trying to copy the mini.
Really? I would doubt the MacBook Air destroys the MacBook Pro. I’d blame it for killing the Macbook for sure. But are MacBook Pro numbers down? I thought they were up.
Its killing Pro in the long run. Soon all Apple notebooks will be like Air…
Agreed, once they can make a Pro-like machine with the Air form factor I suspect you’ll see the laptop line collapse down to 2-3 Air models with various screen sizes. Even the 17″ could go this way despite the fact that it’s so large (width wise anyway).
They create great products whenever it is needed, no matter what.
They create great products no matter what.
Not necessarily. There will most likely be a Pro Air. The iMac is the focus of their desktops, but they still make a pro.
I don´t think there will be need for Pro in notebooks – when then will be only one form factor only difference will be configuration. Many Pro function will be externalized by Thunderbolt (external high speed storage, graphics etc…) Tha
It seems very common to reference the Nano vs Mini as an instance of Apple cannibalizing one of its own products, but the Nano is really just a smaller Mini with a new name. It was all part of the same iterative, downsizing trend that birthed the Mini to begin with. It’s not as if the Nano was some new technology that was vastly different than the Mini (which had already switched to Flash storage). They could have left the Mini name and it would have probably had the same effect on the competition.
In fact, they have done just that with the Nano itself. There were only 2 models of the Mini, but the Nano has had 6 generations with many different form factors, some of which showed a greater change from the previous model than the Mini to Nano transition. I just think it’s weird that it is so often repeated.
It’s repeated because, at the time, the Nano’s popularity was so unexpectedly enormous. Common wisdom assumed that would guarantee its longevity, and that Apple would milk sales out of it until they stalled.
In this case, common wisdom was worth every penny paid for it. It was an early, interesting lesson to learn about the new Apple.The later model changes you cite merely repeat the philosophy that released the Nano and killed the Mini, regardless of the degree of actual form factor change.
Depends I guess. There’s undoubtedly a subset of customers for whom better performance, speed and so on would have looked to the Pro model.
Now, with the Air, that additional speed comes not in the form of a faster processor, or more RAM, but by replacing the Hard Disk Drive with Solid State storage. So those customers buy the Air instead.
I think we can also take a steer from what Apple have said before on the Air; that one day, they believe all notebooks will look like this. I think it’s reasonable to assume that at some point in the future the Pro ‘tag’ will be dropped and customers will simply buy the version of the MacBook that suits them, the same way they select an iPod, iPad and iPhone (the latter two both being both wildly successful with both consumers and the enterprise, despite none having a Pro label.