Attention Apple Fans

A must read from Bloomberg Business*.

How Apple plays the pricing game

Insightful stuff.

I am not an Apple fan myself, although I've contributed to Steve Job's compensation via the purchase of several IPod generations over the years for my daughters. 

What don't I like about Apple?  Well part is it is a style vs. substance argument.  Apple's products have a lot of style, but I don't always see the substance.  Two examples:

• Try plugging-in a flash drive into an IPad
• What happens when the battery in your MacBook Air degrades?

Pound for pound I think Sony, for example, has much better hardware (exploding Vaio batteries noted).  I do give Apple some credit in the software department, but even then there is a catch:  they benefit from being the little guy, so their software OS is almost never a target for malicious code.

All in all, Apple has created a nice little empire for itself, and has benefited greatly from the mistakes of others (most notably Microsoft).  I'm interested to see what happens when Google gets serious about using its operating system in hardware other than phones.  Mate Andriod with a decent tablet package (that has USB ports, a forward facing camera, support for Flash) and the IPad may very well go the way of the Newton.


(*) Bloomberg Businessweek is, page for page, the best business periodical on the market today, bar none.  If information were calories, Businessweek would be the equivalent of a Double Whopper with Cheese.