waffle

Today’s short AppleInsider report, speculating on iMac price drops:

Roughly six week later at its annual developers conference, the Cupertino-based company announced price cuts of between $100 – $300 on its 13- to 17-inch unibody aluminum notebooks, all of which are now dubbed MacBook Pros.

Let’s see:

• Every AppleInsider report must refer to Apple as “Apple”, “the [Mac, iPhone or iPod] maker” and “the Cupertino-based company“. One assumes that this is a habit acquired from fine journalism. AppleInsider might actually be high-end, and periodically unusually correct, for a rumors site. My guess is that they’re trying to fecundate this impression by making every article read as if the New York Times took the time to cover just this one story from the otherwise fetid heap. That includes using varying appellations, which in the New York Times helps add context, but in AppleInsider looks formulaic, which it is, and ridiculous, which it gets.

• “[Price] cuts of between $100 – $300″. Bzzt. “[Price] cuts of between $100 and $300″, or “price cuts of $100 — $300″. (That’s also an em dash in my correction; paging Dr. Gruber…) If you use “between”, also using a range makes it tautological.

• This one sentence references elapsed time (since a previous AppleInsider report), the venue of an announcement (WWDC), the location of the company (by appellation), the announcement itself (price cuts, the size range of the price cuts, the renaming of the MacBook) and the range of the affected products. It’s dense with information, but how much is actually relevantly connected, and how much is just newspaper-y looking text strung together? Simpler and therefore less copy is better, but this could have been extended to two or three sentences for clarity, and some detail could have been folded into a link; say, to AppleInsider’s copious coverage of the announcement. They are selling ads, after all.

But wait, there’s more!

iMacs were just recently refreshed in March but will see another update by fall, at which time they’ll also be repositioned as more affordable offerings. Apple is reportedly mulling similar 7% – 10% price reductions alongside the introduction of those models, people familiar with the company’s thinking say.

• If the relative price reduction is important, and you just listed the range of absolute price reductions on the MacBook Pro series, why not compare the putative relative price reduction (for the iMac) with the actual relative price reduction (for the MacBook Pro)? The two are different creatures, but there are obvious comparisons to be drawn and ways to analyze it.

  Off the cuff: If the MacBook Pro is a high-end product with, likely, higher margins and they slashed the price by way less than 7%, that’d invalidate the theory (or make the move more “daring”); if they slashed the price by way more than 7%, that indicates that lowering the margin to that extent is something they’re willing to do.

• Even without the big drop in price, you report this much as fact: “[the iMac line] will see another update by fall, at which time they’ll also be repositioned as more affordable offerings”. So they will seem more affordable. But if they won’t drop it by quite as much as 7% — 10% (that part’s reported as conjecture), what other lower drop could they pick? That’s not explored, even in passing, and this is supposedly the fact end of the stick.

(How’s my driving? More or less of this sort of thing?)