Three months after the debut of the most-hyped technology product in history, the jury is in on Apple’s iPhone: While it’s a ‘beautiful and breakthrough’ product, as Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg wrote in his influential review of the touch-screened smart phone, it simply isn’t worth its initial $599 price tag—a fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs all but admitted earlier this month,” Alex Markels reports for U.S. News and World Report. “‘This is life in the technology lane,’ Jobs said of his decision to slash the iPhone’s price by $200.
MacDailyNews Take: Why, how yellow of you, Mr. Markels. What Jobs actually said in the iPhone price announcement was, “The surveys are in and iPhone customer satisfaction scores are higher than we’ve ever seen for any Apple product. We’ve clearly got a breakthrough product and we want to make it affordable for even more customers as we enter this holiday season.”
Markels continues, “You might have thought such capitulation would send shivers down Apple investors’ spines. Indeed, after it had surged to a record high of $146 a share in July, rumors that the iPhone wasn’t selling like hotcakes sent the stock down by nearly 10 percent after Apple’s price-cut announcement. For smart investors, it appears the recent sell-offs were, in fact, buying opportunities. Thanks in part to a raft of analyst upgrades over the past few days, the stock hit a new all-time high of $153 on Tuesday as news arrived that the company’s core products—its Macintosh computers—are selling far better than the iPhone.”
MacDailyNews Take: Far better? Define “far.” All we know is that 1,000,000 iPhones sold in the first 74 days, there are reports that iPhone sales have, as would be expected, significantly increased since the price cut and that analysts are modeling Mac sales of somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.2 million. The Macintosh is a brand that has been around for over two decades, the iPhone has been on the market for less than 3 months. Does it seem that Markels — through the use of selective quotes and rumor repetition — is trying to downplay the iPhone success, instead of just reporting the facts that Macs are selling well?
Markels continues, “In fact, many believe Apple is finally succeeding at doing what it has long failed at: convincing the bulk of personal computer users to shell out as much as twice the price of a comparable Windows-based machine for the elegant functionality—and the pure ‘bling’—of owning a Mac. Indeed, although the Mac has long enjoyed a cult-like following, its overall market share has only recently vaulted toward the double digits, more than tripling the paltry share it had three years ago.”
MacDailyNews Take: Holy Hit Piece, Batman! Macs are not “as much as twice the price of a comparable Windows-based machine” and we challenge anyone to prove otherwise. Yes, we Mac “cultists” prefer machines that function elegantly as opposed to PCs that sometimes function, sometimes not – for inexplicable reasons. Sue us. “Pure ‘bling.'” Puleeze. The Stockholm Syndrome is strong in this one.
Markels reigns in his fear of the unknown and continues in a somewhat more reasonable manner, “While there’s certainly been a ‘halo effect’ from Apple’s wildly popular iPod and, to a lesser extent, from the iPhone, the growth in Mac sales is thanks mostly to Apple’s decision a few years back to switch to industry-standard Intel microprocessors. With the help of special software, they allow PC users to run all their software applications on the Mac. For many converts, it’s been a revelation: no viruses to deal with, no crapware to uninstall…in fact, some technologists have argued that Windows actually runs better on the Mac—faster and with fewer crashes—than it does on Windows machines.”
MacDailyNews Take: Windows, Windows, Windows – it’s all about Windows. Forget the “bling,” Windows is pure “crap.” Markels comes across as a Windows-only sufferer desperately struggling to report the story of Apple’s Mac success. He’d surely be stunned and amazed to find that the majority of Macs and Mac users do not run Windows, nor do they need or want to.
Markels continues, “Despite fears that last fall’s release of Microsoft’s Vista operating system would dampen Mac sales, the unimpressive, memory-hogging Vista has only given longtime PC users more reason to make the switch. And with Apple’s new ‘Leopard’ operating system due out in October, many believe Mac sales are finally on the verge of the sort of breakthrough that the iPhone promised but has yet to deliver.”
MacDailyNews Take: Praise first, then remind readers that the iPhone, despite selling 1,000,000 units in it’s first 74 days, is somehow failing to deliver on some imagined promise, right Mr. Markels?
Markels continues, “While Apple’s sky-high stock price doesn’t leave much room for mistakes as the critical holiday season approaches, the company’s long-term profit outlook is as good as it has ever been, giving investors plenty of reason to buy the next time the stock pulls back.”
Full piece, Think Before You Click™, here.
MacDailyNews Note: Contact U.S. News and World Report: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/usinfo/infomain.htm
C’mon MDN – give us the link to tell this guy’s editor he’s a hack!
MDN Magic Word “set” – this guy’s mind set is confused
OMG, I want to stab Alex Markels in the eye with a pencil!
That’s the meme of the moment about Apple.
-iPhone sales = disappointing
-Vista is driving people to expensive Macs
They don’t even have to be shills or hacks. They just have to be lazy and afraid of independent analysis . . . you know . . . journalists.
Markels really shows his bias and ignorance here. The myth of the mac as “twice the price” has been burst before. Don’t believe us? Go to Dell.com and spec out an equivalently loaded laptop, for instance, or even try to find one with a built in camera, and one will find the prices very comparable, or even a bargain.
The truth is, Apple builds a few specific configurations for meeting minimum modern mulitmedia need; they don’t sell low end, minimum specced junk. Even the inexpenve mini is fine for all but the most graphical intense 3D applications.
But overall, what does the opinion of one columnist matter…the sales figures (and stock price) speak for themselves.
I don’t know why today’s “reporters” cannot resist the urge to editorialize in their reportage. As MDN states, write an article about the present state of Mac sales and marketshare without the clearly opinionated and outright inaccurate side trips. A story of that nature would be interesting on its own.
Yet another Moron (that’s with a capital M).
It’s sad to see the Cult of Microsoft fanatics clinging to their zealous beliefs in the face of all the overwealming evidence.
Or overwhelming evidence. Whatever.
I’m guessing he was not one of the “smart investors”.
This article’s writer will surely be the top candidate for Gruber’s “Jacka$$ of the Week” – and the likely victim of a pointed response by the Macalope, too.
What drivel.
My email to U.S. News & World Report:
Apple’s Mac Sales Are Surging
Its stock price has also soared, thanks not to the iPhone but to its other products
By Alex Markels
Posted September 26, 2007
Wow! Did Alex Markels do any research whatsoever? Alex? From your article:
“‘This is life in the technology lane,’ Jobs said of his decision to slash the iPhone’s price by $200.”
Jobs said those words, true, but not in that context (he spoke those words a day before he lowered the price; he said that in the context of “Hey. That’s life. Too bad for you…”. Not in the way you lead people to believe…
Here is an excerpt of Jobs’ remarks regarding the iPhone: (not some other event_entirely_ that you decided to use for your own purposes)
“The surveys are in and iPhone customer satisfaction scores are higher than we’ve ever seen for any Apple product. We’ve clearly got a breakthrough product and we want to make it affordable for even more customers as we enter this holiday season.”
This is easily verifiable by countless sources on the Net (including the link below, from Apple’s own site!) and in print – perhaps you should actually do some research before compiling your story…
Please read the press release (for the first time?)
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/09/05iphone.html
I have only provided one example of poor journalism in this “article”, but suffice to say there is plenty more where this came from.
People come to U.S. News & World Report for accurate journalism. If people like Mr. Markels continue to concoct inaccurate “hit pieces” on the companies they have a predisposition against – for whatever their reasons – then U.S. News & World Report will lose credibility, and, in turn, readership.
The most important quality for a reporter to have is accuracy. This should not come as a surprise or anything new to you since this is actually your job! It would behoove you to publish a retraction, and with it an apology for being entirely inaccurate.
It’s hard to understand all the hostility here. A little sloppy in places like articles on Apple by the mainstream press often are but it hardly seems like a hit piece. For what it’s worth, I pretty much got the same impression he did about Steve admitting that the iPhone wasn’t worth the $600.
“Worth” in this case meaning a price that more than 2 of the 8 million consumers Apple said they’d have by the end of 2008. Why else would he slash the price by $200?
I took your advice to not click, so I’m just relying on the excerpts. Which seems reasonably fair, since they are your excerpts.
I still feel like Vista was intentionally designed to crash MS and make people switch to the Mac. I mean, you could not have done it better if you tried, right? Between that, and the Zune… my conspiracy-theory-paranoia runs wild on this one. If I ran MS and I wanted to crash the beast, I would have done just what Bill did: Hire a nincompoop CEO, dump money into dead-end hardware projects, coast on what you do best (or most completely) until it starts to rot and fall off, screw your partners, ignore your opponents, and actually try to sell brown electronics.
When you look at it like that, it’s brilliant.
Any other way…
Not so much.
-c
MW: ‘system’ (storage upgrade: delete windows)
(p.s., I heard that the Halo 3 Special Edition packaging was damaging the disks when people opened them. Anybody else heard about it?)
magic word : “led”
I guess most of the posters here must be Apple shareholders. Otherwise why get so upset about a dumb article like this? You people take this crap too personally. Does an article like this make your iPhone crash or your iPod and Mac give up? Come on people, get a life!
Jobs reduced iPhone price to allow minions to funnel more expense money to OJ Simpson , who has been contracted to kill opponents of the North American Union. Jobs plans to reintroduce Newton as an untraceable terminal for Michael Vick’s terrorist network/dogfighting ring that has been plotting an assassination of Bezos to keep Amazon from merging with Google and creating online-searchable ebook version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It’s all spelled out in my upcoming lawsuit, which will also be available as the iTunes Free Download of the Weak.
Live long and phosphor,
JLR
FCI Williamsburg
Here is what I sent to USNWR editors:
Dear Sirs:
For many years I have regarded U.S. News & World Report as a place where news is presented without obvious bias, and with reasoned analysis.
The recent article regarding Apple, Inc. by Alex Markels has done significant damage to that reputation.
One of the main points of Mr. Markels’ article is that Apple’s iPhone has not done very well. It is impossible, from the article to tell where that comes from, considering that 1 Million of the devices sold in the first 74 days of availability. That availability was in a single country. Various cell phone industry figures have acknowledged that there has never been a smartphone with sales even approaching that figure.
Mr. Markels makes a number of false statements. One of the most glaring is his assertion that Macs cost up to twice as much as “comparable” Windows PCs. Anyone who has bothered to actually look at what is offered by each camp at a given price point would know that is false. In fact, Apple has advertised that for “comparable” hardware, Apples cost the same or LESS than Dell’s. While it is true that the least expensive Apple machines are noticeably more expensive than the least expensive Windows boxes, the lowest price Apple machines have dramatically upgraded hardware compared to the lowest price Windows machines. In addition, all Apple machines come preloaded with all the software most users will ever need, at no extra cost. That software is widely acknowledged as ‘best in class,’ for most of the titles included.
This type of poorly researched, unsupported, erroneous reporting harms your readers and your reputations.
I hope that your editorial staff will provide Mr. Markels with a bit more supervision and direction in the future.
TMW
He’s a douche bag. Sorry to insult you douche bags out there.
@Jack
Otherwise why get so upset about a dumb article like this? You people take this crap too personally.
I get upset over articles like this because US News is supposed to be unbiased. Tt has been obvious for years they have a political bias. I think people expected them to be fair in other areas. I, however, was not surprised by this article.
The sad fact is that most people don’t check stories from small blogs, much less major news outlets/publishers. I heard a co-worker explaining to another today that Apple lowered the price of the iPhone because “they aren’t selling worth a crap”. I remarked that he “must have heard that from a source with their head up their a$$”. I explained Apple’s actual goals and the fact that they are currently ahead of their expectations, not some analyst’s.
But… Imagine…. a world in which the mac continues to outsell the iphone, not in dollars (which it probably always will), but in units. Not because the iphone is a flop but because the mac is kicking a&&.
It would be a beautiful world indeed.
And then the commentards will all moan that the mac is distracting apple from the iphone!!!
Jack,
Hell yes we get upset. Apple has worked their ass off getting to where they are today. There are people sitting on the fence when it comes to purchasing Apple products and they can be negatively influenced by bullshit articles like this. There is way too much crap being poured out by lying, dishonest, incompetent scumbags like this guy. If I could I would choke the life out of this jerk.
“It’s sad to see the Cult of Microsoft fanatics clinging to their zealous beliefs in the face of all the overwealming evidence.”
I thought that was Mormons.
Uh, why would anyone even want to comment on this piece? Frankly, I didn’t even need to read beyond what MDN put here. This guy’s ideas are stuck back in 1997, except he’s faced with all this future gee whiz bang tech Apple’s put out. Why any publication would let something this shoddy go out from a “real” journalist is beyond me. You know, other than knowing it will generate hits and eyeballs.
Okay, shameless plug time, if it’s alright with you:
http://itjobsrus.blogspot.com
No real journalism abounds there, but we sure do like to get feedback.
Uh, why would anyone even want to comment on this piece? Frankly, I didn’t even need to read beyond what MDN put here. This guy’s ideas are stuck back in 1997, except he’s faced with all this future gee whiz bang tech Apple’s put out. Why any publication would let something this shoddy go out from a “real” journalist is beyond me. You know, other than knowing it will generate hits and eyeballs.
Okay, shameless plug time, if it’s alright with you:
http://itjobsrus.blogspot.com
No real journalism abounds there, but we sure do like to get feedback.