COULD IT BE A NEW IPHONE? A PIECE OF CORN ON THE COB? A DANCING FISH? A NICE KUGEL? WHAT IS IT!
UPDATE – Could be a 2TB Time Capsule. OR A HOUSE ELF LIKE DOBBY!
UPDATE 2 – It’s new Xserves. The servers now come packing with Core i7 Nehalem CPUs, more memory, and larger hard drives at similar price points as the older ones.
While some of us may remember the XServe and basically say “didn’t Apple already go enterprise? And fail?” this rumor is different. Basically folks are saying that thanks to the iPhone SDK, ActiveSync/Exchange support, and sheer force of will on Steve’s part Apple will become a fully-fledged enterprise player, offering synced iPhones and Mac hardware to hungry, hungry cubicle dwellers.
Nah.
The enterprise market, like the PC market, is commoditized. Sure, you get the outliers but on the whole the PC on your desk at work probably cost $200 and a bag of Cheetos. This price probably doesn’t sit well with Apple, who knows that making a good, expensive product is better than making a lot of crappy products (Coby vs. Sony, for example). Coby has probably a single digit profit margin while Sony and Apple have perhaps in the low 20s on some things. Sure, there’s R&D and Sir Howard Stringer’s fleet personal ladyboy masseuses to pay for, but generally the big money is in making products the Apple way, especially for a company the size of Apple.
I could see a sub-$500 Mac Mini sitting on desks but not at huge enterprise customers. Maybe at a mid-sized business? Maybe at a chain of retail shops? But I doubt Exxon or Citibank is in line for some sexy hardware. If they could pay $45 for each desk, they definitely would.
A prelude of things to come next week at MacWorld?
Apple speed bumped the Mac Pro and Xserve today; both now use Intel’s recently-released Penryn processor. The revised Mac Pro, what every little Mac Head wish he had the money for, has:
- two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses;
- 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
- ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory;
- 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
- 16x SuperDrive(TM) with double-layer support (DVD+/-R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW);
- two PCI Express 2.0 slots and two PCI Express slots;
- Bluetooth 2.0+EDR; and
- ships with Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse.
That’ll set you back $2,799.
As for the $2,999 Xserve…
In case you weren’t one of the lucky few that made it to WWDC, this is what Apple’s new Xserve looks like. Most of us won’t have any need for it, but for our IT drone readers that happen to work with Xserves, take a good look.
Apple’s new server [CNET]
