Apple Inc (AAPL)

[roni]

Bill, about advertising the less expensive Macintoshes, you wrote:

The only area in which Apple would do well to advertise based on price would be to existing Mac users -- those who are sitting on a three-year-old iMac because they have no idea that they can get an eMac, which beats the crap out of what that they've got now, for a significantly lower price than they paid for their older iMac. The reluctance of these people to upgrade (based largely on the fact that the older iMacs are so capable of running most of the newer Mac stuff adquately, if not ideally), is what keeps overall sales from exploding.

There is something in here that seems counter-intuitive to me.

Who has better odds of knowing what computers Apple is selling and how much they cost? Would it be existing Mac users or people who use a) another platform, or b) have no home computer?

It seems like the intuitive answer would be that existing Mac users are far more likely to have knowledge of Apple's current computer offerings. OTOH, it seems far less likely that non-Mac users would have the same level of knowledge.

Now, it could make sense to advertise to existing Mac users to reinforce their pre-exisiting knowledge, but it seems to make more sense (unless one is talking of advertising in the Mac print media) to design something that would really hit home on the low prices of the eMac and iBooks, something that would reach both audiences but would not be targetted at existing Mac users.

That makes more sense to me.

Ron