re SuperDrives
Aside from a desire to defend your assertion, it stikes me as odd you're fighting so hard to deny the basic existence of SuperDrive as a basic component of any full-featured, midlevel, $1,200 laptop.
For my part, I appreciate it may be standard, but as I have never burned a DVD in my life -- despite actually buying the media on which to do it -- I can appreciate at least offering people a choice not to buy it. The only reason I can think not to offer people a choice to buy it would be to create market segmentation (force those who need the feature into an upsale situation), and though as a consumer it bugs me to receive that treatment it makes complete sense they'd try stuff like this to separate people with money to spend from said money. Capturing the economic surplus, as they say.
Now that the CPUs, bus speeds, network ports, etc. are identical between the pro and consumer lines, Apple is probably scrambling to find differentiators. The fact is, with spanning supported out of the box on the MB, it's looking frankly attractive compared to the pro models; I have a keyboard, any LCD I buy I can use with any future machine, and the polycarboate and smallness will probably work well for a traveling presentation machine. I'm not even slightly surprised Apple waited a while releasing it. Sure, there are gamers who'd not consider it, but most people using a machine for work or study aren't concerned with graphics except that it can take care of the QE requirements for the modern UI. If it makes smooth-looking Keynote transitions, it probably does what most people need.
Segmenting the market to keep margins up is a trick Apple needs to be able to keep up in order to maintain margins. The question is, what will Apple do to make people perceive value in exchange for the price leaps? Well, other than the monitors ....
.... Anyone got a take on the glossy monitors? I've seen 'em on the PC side but not really used 'em. Reports?
Take care,
--Tex.
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