All big vendors will place orders some distance into the future. Lenovo does it, too.
You can't lock in prices forever, though. The more volume and stability you have, the more a vendor will be willing to enter long-term agreements with you. Lenovo has less volume than Apple and is not in as great of a financial position, so they don't have as much leverage.
The bigger factor is that Apple already had more margin in their products. The price premium for RAM upgrades on Apple laptops is large, as everyone knows. They could absorb more RAM price increases without being forced to raise retail prices.
I really don't understand why more companies don't emulate Apple in terms of line simplicity. Look at Dell for a great example of a sprawling product mix. I can't imagine having that many product varieties helps with profitability.
In the consumer space, I recently bought a Sonicare toothbrush, and the number of models and combinations is staggering. 1000x plaque removal, 750% plaque removal, it's ridiculous.
PC makers can't count on brand loyalty. If you want a PC and your favorite brand is missing something that a competitor has, it's easy to switch. If you want a Mac and Apple is missing something, it's harder to switch. Enterprise sales are a bit stickier, but not that much stickier.
So Dell, Lenovo, et Al end up trying to address every niche except the focused product catalog niche.
If you want a PC and your favorite brand
is missing something that a competitor has,
it's easy to switch
Yeah. Although, there's no "logical" reason for their for their psychedelically large laptop lineup with 50-100 base models. It's purely psychology I guess.
Like Dell Vostro, their "small business" line. Versus Latitude, their "business" line. What on earth is uniquely needed by a "small business" versus a... regular business? Why not introduce a third "large business" line? Maybe a "sole proprietor" line too?
It can only be explained as a psychology play. The dizzying array of options is designed to, I suppose, make you feel like Dell surely has the exact right laptop for you, even if that is bullshit.
It doesn't entirely make sense to me from a psyche standpoint either -- I have no idea why purchasers would possibly feel anything other than anxiety and analysis paralysis. But whatever!
> Like Dell Vostro, their "small business" line. Versus Latitude, their "business" line. What on earth is uniquely needed by a "small business" versus a... regular business? Why not introduce a third "large business" line? Maybe a "sole proprietor" line too?
My vague recollection is that Latitude were nice business laptops; coming with all the enterprise goodies, replaceable parts, service manual, next-day onsite support available and also the enterprise usual costs, lack of sexy displays, and slow model turnover.
Vostro was a lot closer to the Inspirons (sold for personal use); I think just badge engineering a couple selected Inspirons to have a bit longer of a product cycle and better parts availability.
Re: analysis paralysis, that's a real issue. I try to find some feature that really narrows the field and then it becomes easier to decide. If I required a wired ethernet port, memory slot(s), and a specific cpu family, it narrows the field a lot; then I can figure out from what's left. For laptops, off-lease entrerprise refurbs are pretty price competitive with new models targetted for personal use; then it's really a matter of what's available, and how they differ ... and then looking at the units with specific damage/defects to see if the compensating price drop makes sense; personally, I'd take several dead pixels for $100 off, cause I don't do pixel peeping work anyway.
It's the old General Motors product philosophy of "A Car for Every Purse and Purpose". That market segmentation and badge engineering approach worked great for decades and allowed them to earn huge profits. But eventually customers figured out that there was no actual difference between a Buick versus a Pontiac, and more focused competitors ate their lunch.
Many moons ago, we used to buy Dell Dimension desktops at work. They were fine. They were very quiet, robustly-built, and were expandable to fit individual users' requirements as things changed. They were usually easy to work on when that was necessary.
Dell also had the Precision line, which was very posh. These cost a lot more.
The Vostro line eventually showed up. They were noisier, and lighter/flimsier, less-expandable, and harder to work on. But they did cost less to buy.
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I would never buy a Vostro computer for myself. I think that buying cheapness as a primary feature is dumb. Given a choice between good/better/best, I tend to pick "better." I like being able to get what I think is a better design, even though it generally costs somewhat more. I don't want the cheapest car tires, the cheapest hand tools, or the cheapest PC.
But the company chose to operate as cheap-at-every-expense. The Vostro line was a perfect fit for their buying proclivities, so that's what they started buying. (I didn't like that, but those decisions were above of my paygrade.)
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Was Dell wrong for offering several different classes of computer back then?
Are they wrong for doing so today?
Why? Why not?
(Remember: In the insatiable quest for the bottom dollar, the company kept buying Dell computers. We could have began giving those dollars to one of their competitors instead, but we did not do so. This suggests that the model is not bullshit at all: After all, they are in the business of selling computers, and we kept buying them.)
Apple has a unique market position due to their OS. A buyer shopping for a Mac can't visit multiple vendors and compare models.
Dell and Sonicare do not have that luxury. They are competing with other PC vendors and other toothbrush vendors.
The strategy is to produce so many models that you appear to serve every price point and need without requiring the user to shop around. You can find something in their lineup that fits your budget or requirements if you look long enough and you don't feel like you need to go looking around at competing vendors as much.
Having may models isn't a high cost because they share so many parts. I bet if you opened multiple Sonicare toothbrushes they'd share many main components like batteries or motors. Dell has a few laptop and desktop lines but they're different combinations of parts within a shared chassis.
Dell's claim to fame when they started was they could manage the complexity of a large product mix to get you want you really need. It is a lot of work, but their ability to manage that complexity it what makes them profitable.
> If lenovo is buying a billion chips a year, why can’t they lock in like Apple?
Lenovo controls less of the stack than Apple: CPUs (Intel/AMD), BIOS, operating system, etc. While ostensibly Apple and Lenovo are both selling personal computers, Lenovo is in a (sub-)segment of the market that is commoditized with Dell, HP, etc.
If you need to run Windows and associated (Windows-only) apps, what's special between Lenovo/Dell EMC/HP/etc? How much of a difference is there between Coke and Pepsi?
A lot of vendors hitched their wagon to the Wintel duopoly, and now they're all riding (or being ridden) herd.
They can lock in. However that is risky too - if prices go down they are locked into the higher prices.
More importantly, if you have a locked in price you can sell your products for more profit - or you can sell the things that you have locked in and not have to make the rest of the widget at all. Sometimes someone will give you a good deal to buy out your locked in contract.
Because people continuously underestimate just how good Apple engineering and supply chain management is. And since iPhone and portables is such a juggernaut for them, it goes downstream into every other product line that uses the same architecture. That’s why it was so critical for them to pull off the ARM MacBook transition - the only other alternative for them essentially would have been to exit the market or run mostly at a loss.
But if you read their actual financial reports they have never indicated in any way that their hardware is a loss leader. They disclose this information publicly since they are publicly traded. Yes, the services revenue is higher than Macs and iPads combined and is at a higher profit margin, but hardware also makes a lot of money.
Apple’s only structural advantage should be their custom silicon, but I don’t think that’s a cost advantage as much as it’s a performance and battery life advantage. Apple is still buying huge dies from TSMC and designing them custom themselves which is not cheap. Lenovo shares the cost of designing an Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chip with dozens of OEMs. Same deal with software: I wouldn’t be surprised if macOS costs more per unit for Apple than Windows costs for Lenovo considering all the employees Apple hires directly to develop it.
Apple in theory should be paying a pretty similar amount of money to make the rest of their systems. They don’t make camera sensors, displays, keyboards, DRAM chips, or anything else themselves.
>But if you read their actual financial reports they have never indicated in any way that their hardware is a loss leader.
Right, I'm just saying they could afford it if it came down to that. They also have enormous margins on their higher-end systems, so they've got plenty of room to lose some profitability before it comes down to that.
I'm not even looking at Lenovo's profits. I'm comparing their revenue to Apple's profit just to emphasize the difference in scale.
By the numbers, Apple is a smartphone business that has a casual side hobby of also being the #4 PC maker. Their PC sales are ~3x less than Lenovo's, but their smartphone sales are 10x their PC sales. There's plenty of commonality so the massive smartphone business surely helps with supply on the computer side of things as well.
Pretty damning. Would also be interesting to see the number of commits overlayed. The graph tells a great story about the correlation with MS's takeover, but I wonder if at the same time that uptime went to shit, MS was shifting over large numbers of enterprise contracts to github. That would be a more complete story IMO.
None of which excuses this. Can you imagine someone's reaction in 2017 if you told them that github would be below 90% uptime in 2026? It would be unimaginable.
That’s nonsense. GitHub didn’t have 100% uptime before 2020. I remember downtime back then. And Microsoft didn’t make changes that fast. The only thing that changed is the accuracy of their status page.
Also go back and look at the unofficial status page from 3 years ago. It’s regularly above 99% and has been dropping steadily since then. Then in the last 3 months has dropped to below 85%.
And immediately find that there are numerous incidents that would show up on the modern status board as an issue but are reported with 100.00000% uptime on that graph.
2018-07-16 17:32:53 - We are investigating reports of elevated error rates.
2018-07-16 17:34:27 - We are investigating reports of service unavailability.
2018-07-16 18:04:38 - We've discovered the issue causing connectivity failures and are remediating.
2018-07-16 18:26:48 - We're monitoring the site as systems recover. Some delays are expected as we process backlogged data.
2018-07-16 18:37:26 - We're continuing to monitor and work on further remediation efforts as the site recovers.
2018-07-16 18:54:21 - The site is stable. We are continuing to monitor and work through follow-up remediation efforts.
And there are other incidents with connection failures or elevated error rates during July 2018, but the linked graph shows "average uptime of all components 100.00000%" during July 2018.
Another from October (that also shows 100.0000% uptime)
2018-10-21 23:09:19 - We are investigating reports of elevated error rates.
2018-10-21 23:13:31 - We are investigating reports of service unavailability.
That doesn’t track because GitHub Enterprise Cloud has great uptime. This is all load based, vibe coded ai slop code shipped at record numbers from users who will never convert to paid. The real question is what are they doing about that?
I think the problem with prediction markets is the ease of people changing the outcome and profiting on it from others expense.
It’s worse than insider trading as it’s betting that Kyle’s mom will bomb Gaza and then making it happen.
Any societal good from knowing is outweighed by the injustice.
If there was any regulation by government or the markets themselves then it would be better. Betting in things you can’t affect like the weather or earthquakes or elections or whatever is actually pretty useful for awareness.
Things get cheaper.
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