Can Apple’s market share grow with continuing supply restraints?
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 27, 2005 at 12:43am
Reports of backorders for the new Mac mini (as well as the iPod shuffle) and an editorial in UK’s MacUser magazine (an excellent publication worth the price of an international subscription) got me to wondering: can Apple grow its market share if it can’t keep up with the demand for its products?
With the recent Mac products, it’s been the same story we’ve heard for years: Apple introduces a hot new product, it flies off the shelf and some folks have to wait weeks, even months, to get their hands on it. It happened with, among other products, the sunflower iMac G4, the iMac G5, the Power Mac G5/ dual 2.5GHz system and the iPod mini. Now it’s happening with the Mac mini and the iPod shuffle. Diehard Mac fans usually just #### it up and wait until the products finally trickle down their way. But will potential converts be willing to do the same? Or will the possible switcher hear that he can’t buy a Mac mini when he wants one and drop his cash on a Dell instead?
“The failure to meet demand not only generates enough bad publicity to cancel out the warm, fuzzy feelings brought out by the [Apple] retail stores, but it will put potential customers off for life,” Kenny Hempbill writes in MacUser. “Why wait three months for an iMac when you can have a similarly specified, and a cheaper, PC tomorrow?”
He’s writing specifically about a UK scenario in which an Apple customer who decided to buy an iMac G5 in January was told he would have to wait 12 weeks for delivery. As Hemphill points out, that’s three months or a quarter of a year or half the life-cycle of the average new Mac. Mac users may put up with the delay. Potential switchers may not.
Of course, it’s not all Apple’s fault. Certainly they would like to sell all the products they can make. The glitch in the Mac system is that IBM can’t deliver the G5 chip in sufficient quantities to satisfy Apple’s needs.
This could change in the near future. In the same MacUser, Paul Nesbitt writes that IBM’s selling of its PC division could benefit Apple in the long run.
“IBM will be free to focus on areas such as its PowerPC processor business, effectively making Apple its proxy in the PC market, now that it is no longer a direct competitor,” he notes. “Despite IBM’s publicized fabrication problems with the G5, the PowerPC is a success story. All three games consoles manufacturers – Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft – now use variations of the PowerPC processor, and IBM is determined to give Intel a run for its money. A successful and healthy Mac business is part of IBM’s new PC strategy.”
Of course, the Mac mini uses G4 processors a la the eMac, not G5 processors, and Motorola, as best I can tell, manufactures those. But if Motorola and IBM can start manufacturing enough G4 chips to meet Apple’s needs, the Mac’s position in the PC world could improve drastically. If they can’t, well, some incredible growth opportunities may go down the drain.
There used to be an ad for Lay’s potato chips that said, “Eat all you want. We’ll make more.” Hopefully, in the near future Apple will be able to say, “Buy all you want. We’ll make more.”
Thoughts? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com
There’s a new Macsimum poll below. This week we’re asking “Do you use your iPod for more than music?” (If you don’t see the poll, scroll down the page and look to your right.)
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
