Apple's limitations exposed with Leopard delay

Stan Beer
Friday, 13 April 2007 20:43

Opinion and Analysis

The news that Apple has once again pushed back the release of its new operating system Mac OS X Leopard in order to meet its commitment to bring iPhone to market suggests that the company, which in January dropped Computer from its name, is now torn between product lines. It also reveals that Apple has reached the limits of its human resources.

As a Gartner research analyst pointed out in an article written in The Mercury News, Apple with 18,000 employees just does not have the resources of an HP, its Silicon Valley neighbour with almost 10 times the people power. Therefore it has had to choose between which projects takes precedence.

The question for Apple is - does it really matter?

In days gone by, there would have been no question. Apple the computer company would have put any Mac project at the top of the list.

Today, however, the realities are that Mac, although growing in market share, has about 4% of its market, while iPod has about 80%.

Now iPhone is not exactly iPod and it is going to play in a different market space, the mobile and smartphones space. However, as Steve Jobs pointed out last January, Apple only has to capture 1% of the 1 billion unit a year mobile phones market to make a killing. For those of you who aren't mathematically adept, 10 million times US$499 is nearly US$5 billion.

With that sort of revenue flowing in, Apple can afford to keep its adoring computing fans waiting a little bit longer. Let's face it, what are they going to do - defect to Windows?