L
et me get this out of the way first. I think John Dvorak is great. I love his Macintosh articles the most because they tend to piss everyone off. I also like them because they make me think a lot more than articles written by apologists. However, as often as I enjoy his articles, I also find myself disagreeing with some of their content — content I suspect is there to incite thought and reaction more than confidence in their propriety. So in that spirit, I greatly enjoyed his latest editorial. In that piece, he lays out what he thinks will be the time table for Apple moving Mac OS X to Intel, as well as how he thinks it will affect the market.
As is the norm with his writing, it got me to thinking. In this case, how realistic is a move to OS X on Intel hardware by way of licensing to clone makers? So I fired up a spreadsheet and did some napkin math to see what it would take. Here are the results:
Net Sales (2002) | $5,742,000,000.00 |
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Cost of Sales | $4,139,000,000.00 |
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Gross Margin | $1,603,000,000.00 |
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Mac Units | 3,101,000 |
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Per Unit Margin | $516.93 |
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Market Share % | 2.40% |
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Per Unit Margin | # Units Required to | Market Share Required |
$25 | 64,120,000.00 | 49.63% |
$50 | 32,060,000.00 | 24.81% |
$75 | 21,373,333.33 | 16.54% |
$100 | 16,030,000.00 | 12.41% |