4 ms·

My dream product from Apple would be a bare "Mac" in the form of an mATX motherboard paired with a macOS license. They could even make it very clear that they w

My dream product from Apple would be a bare "Mac" in the form of an mATX motherboard paired with a macOS license. They could even make it very clear that they won't offer AppleCare or full Genius Bar service for it—a product for developers, hackers and gamers who are willing to self-support.

JohnBooty 8y ago
I'd like that too. Thing is, how does Apple prevent something like that from cannibalizing their other sales? The most obvious choice would be pricing them high enough (think: nearly as much as full Mac) so that nobody could profitably build and sell Mac clones. The second most obvious choice would be to release them in such low quantities that nobody could base a Mac clone business upon them. But that would just result in them going for a billion bucks on eBay and you'd probably wind up paying more for one than if they just picked the first strategy. The third most obvious strategy would be to cripple them in some obnoxious way so that they couldn't compete with Macs and were useful only as hobbyist devices... limiting them to 1GB RAM or something. All those strategies would suck for, well, you and me. One posssssssssible option would be to release a hobbyist iOS board. Sort of like all those hobbyist Android boards from China. It's a lot less likely that you'd be able to craft a "hobbyist iOS board" into something that could possibly compete with an iPhone.
- sjwright 8y ago
  One way to restrict sales would be to require the sale to be performed via the Apple Store app on the customer's iPhone, with a limit to the quantity purchasable on a per-iPhone-per-year basis. Not offering any kind of general product support (other than required for warranty support) would also be a significant inhibitor for many people.
jonhohle 8y ago
In the G4 days you could do that through authorized distributors who would sell you the boards directly as “replacement parts”. It was completely possible to build your own beige box Mac running on a real Apple board.

JohnBooty 8y ago

I'd like that too. Thing is, how does Apple prevent something like that from cannibalizing their other sales? The most obvious choice would be pricing them high enough (think: nearly as much as full Mac) so that nobody could profitably build and sell Mac clones. The second most obvious choice would be to release them in such low quantities that nobody could base a Mac clone business upon them. But that would just result in them going for a billion bucks on eBay and you'd probably wind up paying more for one than if they just picked the first strategy. The third most obvious strategy would be to cripple them in some obnoxious way so that they couldn't compete with Macs and were useful only as hobbyist devices... limiting them to 1GB RAM or something. All those strategies would suck for, well, you and me. One posssssssssible option would be to release a hobbyist iOS board. Sort of like all those hobbyist Android boards from China. It's a lot less likely that you'd be able to craft a "hobbyist iOS board" into something that could possibly compete with an iPhone.

sjwright 8y ago
One way to restrict sales would be to require the sale to be performed via the Apple Store app on the customer's iPhone, with a limit to the quantity purchasable on a per-iPhone-per-year basis. Not offering any kind of general product support (other than required for warranty support) would also be a significant inhibitor for many people.

jonhohle 8y ago

In the G4 days you could do that through authorized distributors who would sell you the boards directly as “replacement parts”. It was completely possible to build your own beige box Mac running on a real Apple board.