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Comment by themstheones | Hacker News Reader

I see it going the other way. Apple needs a bridge product between the iPad and the iMac. They are also getting clobbered by PCs in the business market. I suspect the big announcement will be a mid-range line of macs aimed for large scale roll-outs to corporations and governments. I read an article backing up this viewpoint in Business Week a while back, but alas it was only in the print edition.

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I don't see that happening.

Apple products are luxury items with high margins. They don't need to or want to chase that mass PC money.

> Apple products are luxury items with high margins. They don't need to or want to chase that mass PC money.

This reality gets less true every day. It's the same argument people repeated to insist that the iPad Mini would never happen. Or the Mac Mini. Or $0-after-subsidy 8GB iPhones.

I don't think it would be surprising at all to see Apple look at business computing as money they no longer wish to leave on the table.

Oops, but why I always feel that even Mac mini has a substantial margin compared with its Windows counterparts?

Apple already sell a relatively cheap desktop computer in the mac mini. I don't think they could make anything much cheaper without digging into their margins.

Microsoft's value in the business market is their suite of server desktop & cloud products and the integration between those. Adding all of that stuff to OS X would be a big undertaking and would probably take away a lot of the simplicity of the Mac.

I doubt that will happen. The kinds of companies that are willing to give Macs to employees are issuing laptops. The big companies and governments that need desktops (think call centers, account, etc) are just not the market for Macs. They generally have a bunch of applications that only run on Windows, and the cost to switch is just too high.

Business has been switching away from desktop applications for years, outside of Office I don't see this as an issue.

Well, they just announced an i3 version iMac for education - they might extend that to large enterprise orders.

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