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 |
|
Cost of Sales |
$4,139,000,000.00 |
|
|
|
|
Gross Margin |
$1,603,000,000.00 |
|
|
|
|
Mac Units |
3,101,000 |
|
Per Unit Margin |
$516.93 |
|
Market Share % |
2.40% |
|
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% |