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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Saturday, January 03, 2004Rating Apple in 2003: My perspective2003 was a big year for many reasons, and Apple predictably positioned itself for far more press than a company of that size deserves. Here's my take on Apple's performance in 2003:Finances. Apple's sales were flat or down in 2003, depending on the market. The company has $4.5 billion in liquid assets, about the same as last year, but only spends $25 million a year on research and development (R&D). However, Apple's economic realities have never stood in the way of the company's influence on the industry. Grade: B Marketshare. Apple's marketshare in 2003 fell to 1.98 percent, according to IDC sales forecasts for 2003 and Apple's public statements about Mac sales. In short, Apple's marketshare has fallen, year-after-year, each year since Steve Jobs took the reins. And last year's Switch campaign? Useless. Grade: D Mindshare. Quick: Name another company that so thoroughly dominates an industry in which it is such a minor player. Don't hurt yourself, there is no such company. Apple's marketing mistake (Switch, ahem) notwithstanding, no company gets better press than Apple. Grade: A Aluminum Powerbooks (1st generation). Apple fans were clamoring for a TiBook replacement but what they got in January 2003 was something else entirely, a 12-inch PowerBook G4 that was more iBook than PowerBook, and a behemoth 17-inch PowerBook G4 that wouldn't fit on most computer desks, let alone airline seat-trays. Both machines were underpowered, ran hot, and were overpriced. And why wasn't there a 15-inch version? Grade: C Aluminum Powerbooks (2nd generation). Six months later, Apple delivered on speed bumps, price drops, and even fixed the heat problems. But the big star of the 2nd generation AlBooks was the new 15-inch version, which finally provided an adequate replacement for the aging, peeling TiBook. Grade: B G4 iBooks. I've been using a G3 iBook 12-inch for over two and half years and really wanted to get a replacement in late 2003, but the long-awaited G4 iBooks disappointed. There were two big problems. First, Apple deliberately hobbled the performance of the iBook G4 by using low-end G4 chips and adding no L3 cache. And second, you can only get the slowest processor with the 12-inch iBook, and I'd have opted for the faster chip if I could have. Overal, the iBook G4 has been a huge disappointment. Grade: C iPod (3rd generation). As the owner of both a 1st generation (5 GB) iPod and a 2nd generation (30 GB, dock-based) iPod, I feel uniquely qualified to compare them adequately. The new iPods are beautiful, as expected, but lack the battery life and less-touchy scroll wheel that graced the earlier models. More egregiously, Apple still locks its customers into their proprietary music store and crappy AAC format. To shame: The iPod is so close to perfect. Grade: B iTunes Music Store. I've complained about the AAC format, but let's be serious: None of Apple's competitors have come close to the experience of the iTunes Music Store, and the improvements Apple made in the October refresh addressed most of my other complaints. I purchased over 200 songs from the iTunes Music Store. Bravo. Grade: A AirPort Extreme. Apple jumped the gun on 802.11g six months before the standard was ratified with the release of AirPort Extreme, putting hundreds of thousands of potential customers at risk. Fortunately, Apple got lucky, and the 802.11g standard didn't change enough to warrant anything other than a simple firmware upgrade. But Apple still offers the simplest wireless networking, and they deserve some credit for that. Grade: B PowerMac G5. Apple's claim that the PowerMac G5 was the "fastest PC on earth" was proven wrong so quickly and so often that the company should be sued for misrepresentation. But the biggest gaff of 2003 shouldn't betray a simple truth: Though they are still overpriced compared to PCs, the high-end, dual-processor 2.0 GHz G5s do indeed give mainstream PCs a run for their money. And seriously, when you consider how far behind the G4 was, this is huge: I have Pentium III notebooks that outperform my 1 GHz G4 iMac. Grade: B Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther". Panther is a decent upgrade, but it should be free or cheap to existing OS X customers, and not $129. That's atrocious, and if it wasn't for the G5 debacle, it would have been Apple's most embarassing move of 2003. That said, Panther is a decent refinement to OS X, sort of like Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) was to XP. Grade: B iApps suite (iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie). Apple's iApps get a great A rating from me, but what the heck? They were barely updated in 2003 at all. Apple added support for the iTunes Music Store and remote music sharing to iTunes and ... huh. That's about it. What gives? Grade: C Safari. Safari is my favorite Web browser on any platform, and if I could run it on Windows, I would. I love Safari. Grade: A Keynote. Unlike Safari, no one was clamoring for a good presentation package on OS X (and besides, PowerPoint X was fine). Keynote is nothing more than Egoware for Steve Jobs: Unnecessary, unwanted, unneeded. Grade: C Retail stores. Apple opened 25 new retail stores in 2003, for a total of 65. The company lost $5 million on these stores in 2003 (compared to a $22 million loss in 2002) but the GAP-like establishments are an important way to push the Apple brand on customers who might otherwise never have a chance to see Apple's products. Grade: B Overall. So that's where we stand. Not bad for a supposed Apple hater, eh? Overall grade: B- [ Posted at 9:00 PM | Permalink ]
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