One thing that drives me crazy is how each competitor focuses on one or two things, usually hardware specs, and use those things to extol its superiority over Apple's offerings. That's like a car maker homing in on horsepower or number of cup-holders to sell a car.
If I were to run a tech company competing in this space, I would do the following:
1) Get rid of the nonsensical names. There's a good reason why car makers give their flagship cars a specific name and stick with it through the years e.g. Toyota Camry, Honda Accord. I don't know why these highly-paid marketers insist on giving their products a new name every quarter.
2) Show how sensible and easy it is to migrate away from a desktop-bound, expensive, heavy and loud computer. Show the customers how losing one's device doesn't mean the end of the world (cloud-backed storage etc), and how easy it is to migrate to a new device should the need ever arise.
3) Start a retail channel where my products can be experienced at the customer's own pace. Best Buy and all those stores are not the same thing because they are electronics retailers primarily interested in moving product and I cannot count on them to build a lasting relationship with my customer.
The naming thing is such a big issue and I don't see why everyone just keeps on getting it so wrong.
For an example, I bought a Sony Vaio laptop a few months ago. Great piece of kit and I love it, but trying to work out what to get was bewildering - there's 7 or 8 categories with single letter names - 'S-series, Y-series, Z-series, F-series' etc.
What do they mean? Which should I be looking at? I had to scour through comparing until I realised which one I should be looking at.
Compare that to Macbooks - you've got:
Macbook (the standard, economical)
Macbook Pro (high performance)
Macbook Air (portable)
It's pretty clear to most people interested in buying a Macbook which one they should look at. Also relevant is the fact that Apple don't put too many versions out keeping things in well defined clusters.
I'm not sure about Sony's Vaio line but a lot of computing/electronic manufacturers will build specific models for various chain stores, not sure why they do this but I guess it's to head off comparison shopping by consumers.
Apple, of course, refuses to play by the rules of its retailing partners.
It's easy to offer a 110% guaranteed price match guarantee when you know most of your products can only be purchased at your store (never mind that the same model but for a different screw type can be purchased down the street for $100 less, it's got a different SKU).
True, but I think the model differentiation is more apparent from immediate visual inspection: for example, a shopper may not know any meaning behind BMW's 3 series, 5 series and 7 series, but it's obvious upon looking at it that 5 is a bigger car than the 3 and the 7 even more so.
Whereas computers are much more mysterious -- it's not always easy to tell which is better based on looking at it.
Also, cars are much more expensive, so a consumer is more willing to invest time in figuring out odd naming practices.
Still, I have to wonder whether even luxury auto makers would be better off with better naming.
If I were to run a tech company competing in this space, I would do the following:
1) Get rid of the nonsensical names. There's a good reason why car makers give their flagship cars a specific name and stick with it through the years e.g. Toyota Camry, Honda Accord. I don't know why these highly-paid marketers insist on giving their products a new name every quarter.
2) Show how sensible and easy it is to migrate away from a desktop-bound, expensive, heavy and loud computer. Show the customers how losing one's device doesn't mean the end of the world (cloud-backed storage etc), and how easy it is to migrate to a new device should the need ever arise.
3) Start a retail channel where my products can be experienced at the customer's own pace. Best Buy and all those stores are not the same thing because they are electronics retailers primarily interested in moving product and I cannot count on them to build a lasting relationship with my customer.