Everybody is in Line Behind Tim Cook
Intel has pushed hard (and ponied up big bucks) to get PC makers to produce “Ultrabook” laptops competitive with Apple’s MacBook Air lineup — so far without much success. Here’s one reason why:
Supply of metal chassis for ultraportable PC notebooks remains constrained as Apple has reportedly locked up most of the capacity available from suppliers.
Taiwanese tech industry publication DigiTimes reported on Tuesday that metal chassis supply “continues to suffer from shortage.” The reason: Apple is buying most of the supply available for its unibody MacBook lineup, including the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
The two largest metal chassis manufacturers, Catcher Technology and Foxconn, have reportedly been “aggressively establishing new CNC machines.” But they are said to be unlikely to full demand until the end of 2012.
This is why it’s better to innovate than to copy.
If only there were some country with high unemployment, an educated workforce and a bounty of natural resources that could begin manufacturing the much needed chasis.
Naah – if the taxes wouldn’t kill the idea, the environmental regulations would. Nice idea, though….
“it’s better to innovate than to copy”, it’s better to be rich than to be poor, it’s better to be smart than to be stupid.
Hammy, it costs too much to manufacture in that country of an unemployed credentialled workforce. The catch-22 is: high labor cost, high product price, less demand, less profits, less growth of company, less innovations, less manufacturing. In any case, manufacturing does not need workers with college degrees in grievance studies.
Nobody told Apple to create the Air series, and nobody told Acer, Dell, et al., to copy it.
Customers have been telling Apple “lighter, faster, better” for ages, and Intel is most definitely telling Acer, Dell, etc to make something comparable.
But to return to the original reply I was going to make: Tim Cook is a ruthless master of the supply chain. He’ll lock up the supply while the competition is still trying to figure out what the next killer feature is going to be. Right now, everyone’s yelling for metal laptop chassis, once they tool up and are getting what they want, they’re going to discover that Tim has already locked up the bulk of the retina-display manufacturing capacity on the planet. When the various manufacturers tool up to produce those in volume, they’re going to discover that Tim’s already got a stranglehold on the supply of the next killer feature… (be it a physical thing, or the technical infrastructure to support a killer app like Siri).
The competition has been ripping off Apple for decades… now Tim’s going to make them work for it.