The war for laptops......

I have some thoughts after reading my housemate's post about the competitionfor "Mr laptop".

Jason's Post

I am sorry for posting a series of computer related stuffs but that's the area I am really interested and I believe that I can make better comments and insights about the existing marketing phenomena in this industry.

Jason listed 3 middle class laptops(Vaio E series which I have mentioned earlier in my blog, the mac book pro and the new dell XPS series) which includes rather similar prices which deviates at most 200 dollars.

The macbook pro is probably well known to every single student. It's still deemed as a luxurious product under Apple even though its price has dropped tremeduously from around 3000 to 1299. The highly positive brand impression it has created is its most appreciated value by its consumers. Just as what I have mentioned in the previous post, Mac book is inferior in every aspects of its hardware specification other than its Operating system and battery life. MacBook Air is well known for its portability, but there are still many substitutes available such as sony's X13 series which is also amazingly designed and highly portable as shown below:

I keep on wondering what really contributes to success of Apple's productions. No matter what it launches, it will be destined to be a craze or a fasion for the year.
I was rather surprised by the amount of Apple users in north americans. Apple is indeed deemed as a "cool" brand in South East Aisa as well as eastern Asia(China Korea Japan etc). However, the asians are not as crazy over the apple products as the western people. The cultural difference made Apple not as competitive in many Asian countries. Most of the Asian countries are still considered as "Developing Nations", so the prices of apple products actually take up a fairly big portion of their income. This makes the demand for its products elastic. It's impossible to target the consumers in Asia that most of whom stick to the rule of "good value-to-price ratio" strategy when making a purchasing decision. They perceived the extra value of better "self-esteem" when using the products to be ridiculous when such intangible features might actually cost them half a year's salary.

In this case, I believe in short-term, apple will never be able to capture those low-end markets especially in the developing nations. That actually makes the other laptop or electronic device producers to be able to find many segments which Apple isn't able to penetrate.