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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

> It's sad, but Apple has completely lost it at the low end.

When was Apple ever targeting (or winning) the low end? Apple was never the "value proposition" for affordable devices.

These Apple web pages from 1998/99, just around the introduction of the original iMac, show that around the time they were making quite an effort to regain their leading position as suppliers of schools and universities.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980509035831/http://www.apple....

https://web.archive.org/web/19990826061209/http://apple.com/...

I seem to remember them flooding schools with low cost grey iMacs called eMacs (though you might have some trouble googling that).

eMacs were low cost for Macs, but not necessarily compared to PCs.

The real big shift that is killing Apple in schools is the shift from "a few computers in the computer lab" to "issue every child a laptop."

When it's just a few computers for all students to share, buying nicer computers doesn't have a huge aggregate impact. When you're buying thousands at a time, even small price differences add up.

This is in part why Apple has focused on $500 iPads for education. They know they have no chance of selling $1000 MacBook Airs in lots of thousands to many school districts.

Not so hard: https://www.google.de/search?q=emac

The iBook was solid quality at a competitive price especially if you got their student discounts.

So over a decade ago before they even switched to Intel?

I actually don't recall them actually being competitive with Windows devices even then, but I wasn't looking very closely at them either.

The iBook was more expensive and less powerful than the 13" MacBook Air, which starts at $999 today before student discount.

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