I pulled this interesting tidbit this morning from CNN Money.
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, said on a conference call with analysts that the company’s profit margins will be pressured in part by a “future product transition” that he said he was not at liberty to discuss at the present time.
Apple says it’s profit margins may shrink to 30% because of this “future product transition”. What product has the capability to do something like this? It can not be the iPhone becoming open to all carriers, this would only make the phone more available and push more units for them. Over the years though we have seen more and more profits come from outside the computer side of Apple from iTunes, iPods, and iPhones. The profits are good from the “Mac” side of the house, but it’s never been as great and the products that have been replacing and growing revenues for Apple.
What I think my happen next year is that Apple will release OS X for PC’s next year. This may happen with a “Reference Design” which means Apple will publish an extensive list of supported vendors so computer makers can build with compatible hardware. Imagine Dell finally being able to ship computers with OS X installed. I would not be surprised that they would highly push that over Linux any day, and I believe that Dell has in the past publicly stated they would love to be able to ship Dells with OS X as the OS.
As a tortured soul who’s extended family use Windows PC’s my support nightmare could finally vanish, if I could put OS X on their stinking Dells. I for one welcome our new OS X overlords should they come.