Daring Fireball: “Listen to Tim Cook”

Jon Gruber encourages us all to listen to Tim Cook, concerning Apple’s pricing:

Other PC makers fight viciously over pricing because it’s the only factor on which they can differentiate. Few of them bother trying to make better computers — most just build bland, junky wrappers around Intel’s reference chipsets. (Notable exceptions in the laptop space include Sony and Lenovo.) None can offer better software because they all ship the same version of Windows. They’re stuck with Vista. They all seem, for whatever reason, incapable of producing Apple-level marketing and advertising. And none of them who’ve tried have been able to do their own retail stores successfully. Price is all they have.

Cook then showed two pie charts. One showing the Mac’s unit share in the U.S. retail market at 18 percent, up from “a single digit number, just a few years ago”. Cook then drops the kicker, the single key point you need to grasp to understand Apple’s Macintosh business: “And what’s more impressive than this is if you look at revenue share. Because we focus on fully-features systems, and we don’t compromise on quality, our revenue share is over 31 percent. That means that one out of every three dollars that’s spent on computers in U.S. retail is spent on the Macintosh. What a difference a few years makes.”