Throughout 2001, Apple positioned Macs as a "digital hub" for connecting to digital camcorders, cameras and music players. The company delivered software for editing movies, listening to digital music and authoring DVDs. Earlier this month, Apple added software for retrieving, managing and sharing digital images to the mix. "Apple is spending a lot of time and effort to get people off the 'speeds-and-feeds' treadmill," Baker said. "All the kinds of software they've released in the last year -- iPhoto, iTunes or iDVD -- are all designed to say it's not about raw power but how elegantly and how well the system manages these tasks. All the products they're coming out with are about what differentiates the Mac from the rest of the business." The Mac maker will have to push even harder on DVD recording and other multimedia technologies if it wants to stay ahead of the pack, analysts say. "In one way, it's good to be Apple right now," Duboise said. "On the flipside of that you have a lot more competition because everybody is jumping on the multimedia bandwagon right now. Apple needs to push that even more than ever--that they've got iPhoto and all this other cool stuff. They're going to have to work harder to differentiate themselves because everybody is going to be doing it now." But Apple may face an increasingly difficult time communicating the advantages of Power Macs over similarly priced PCs. "With the Mac, you're paying more for a machine with less processing speed," ARS' Duboise said. "To the everyday buyer that doesn't make sense. I think price is a problem. It's a very important factor." Gateway's 700XL, for example, comes with a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive, DVD recording drive, 64MB ATI Radeon 8500 graphics and 18.1-inch digital flat-panel display for $2,999. Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion 780n packs a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of memory, 120GB hard drive and DVD recording drive for $1,599. The PCs would appear to offer more than either the entry-level or high-end iMac for about the same price. But NPD's Baker noted that consumer PCs are more commonly compared to Power Macs, which with their optimization for graphics, video and multimedia offer a different kind of value. "Apple is about design, ease of use and elegance, and they need to keep it focused on that," he said.
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Talkback
Apple has more tings to focus on then "elegance"
Biggest issues.
1. why MAC- the ultimate graphic editing machine has no laptop screen choices like XGA UXGA WUXGA like Dell. which makes HUGE differense.
2. where is 128 mb video cards in "power"books?
3. and yes MegaHerz matters when i'm rendering movies.
4. DBL processors dont mean DBL processing speed. 1ghz x2 g4 means both processors will make up speed 1ghz together! whats up with that?!