This started out as a blurb to go next to a news article in my Google Reader feed but it already looks too lengthy for that, so I share it here with the world rather than with the eight people who would otherwise see it*.

There’s a story over on BetaNews about Apple’s market share of the “premium computer” market – computers that cost more than $1000. I’ll save you clicking the link – their market share is 91%, which is pretty fucking high. Their overall market share is below 10%, since most computers now cost considerably less than that.

Incidentally, I can remember when computers cost in the region of £2000 (roughly $3300). Of course, back then in 1999 all home computers could arguably have been considered premium products, but it’s still jarring to see that something that ten years ago cost the same as a cheap second hand car or a nice Rolex is now considered pricey at over £600. Cars and gorgeous watches, of course, still cost the same today as they did then.

Enough showing my age – what’s interesting here is when you consider this news coupled with Apple’s drive to make software run quicker on the same hardware. Snow Leopard especially, and the last couple of OS X releases in particular are all about running faster on a given machine than the big cat that came before. Well, faster on the same reasonably-new machine, anyway. Meanwhile Steve Jobs is often quoted, and I’m paraphrasing, that the reason Apple doesn’t make netbooks is because they don’t know how to make a good computer for $500. Apple make $1000 machines because they don’t know how to make a Mac for anything less… yet.

But what about when it becomes possible to make that good computer for $500? What happens when the chips needed become smaller and faster? More importantly, what happens as the software undergoes successive obsessive performance tuning? When it’s possible to make a good mac for $500, will it be possible to make a usable PC for $250? (ignoring, of course, that it’s already possible to make a crappy PC for $250) Will the market slide ever downwards until people use Windows PCs that came free with cereal rather than pay $50 for a Mac?

I don’t think it will. I suspect that Apple’s push to streamline their desktop OS is indicative of a drive to bring the cost of building (and, hopefully, of buying) a mac down faster than Moore’s Law affords. Perhaps by the time you can buy a MacBook for $500, the Windows laptop on the shelf next to it** will not be so far beneath.

* Yes, those same eight people are probably still the only ones who will read it. Shut up.

** No, I’ve never seen Macs and Windows PCs on neighbouring shelves either.