From the NYT

"But the company’s stock fell about 10 percent on Monday in after-hours trading as Apple executives hinted during a conference call about Apple’s third-quarter financial statement that they would price products more aggressively in the future. It planned on taking away what Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s chief financial officer, called an “umbrella for our competitors.”

The company also told Wall Street analysts to expect lower gross margins and made a conservative sales estimate for the final quarter of the 2008 fiscal year. Executives sketched out a series of reasons for the profit margin decline, including educational discounts, component price adjustments and a new product line that is widely rumored to include redesigned laptop computers

Sounds like a good way to get some Desktop/Laptop sales off the back of the iPhone hype to me!

Any news from the computer front is great. Frankly I'm abit sick of all the iPhone hype and just imagine the amount of switchers they'd be if SJ gave that much attention to his computers.

Sounds good to me. Even though i love apple, I think there prices are holding them back.

The price was one of the things that stopped me from going Mac earlier, I just couldn't justify the cost. Now that I am a Mac user, and can see the benefits of using the platform, it becomes a lot easier to justify the cost, but yes, any dip in the price will certainly make it even more attractive!

Just as long as this isn't the Apple equivalent of Porsche's 924 - a psuedo Porsche designed mostly by Volkswagon and Audi that sold for less than $10,000 US on release, but probably did more harm to the Porsche brand than the money it brought in.

I am concerned that if they go too far, quality will slip.

It really is something dear to me, that Apple strikes a good balance.

I bet it's going to be yet another netbook in the already overcrowded netboook market.

True enough, quality needs to remain high, however with the implementation of the Intel platform, the components should be cheaper. Fair enough Apple have the motherboards custom made to fit into their case designs, but essentially, on the order quantities that Apple would put through, that really shouldn't equate to being that much more than a standard high quality motherboard (and other components). Anyway, here's hoping!

I don't think that the current (and the past few years) of Macs have been of a higher standard, build & hardware wise than other manufacturers. Some of the Lenovo & HP notebooks are cheap but still well made.

They all come out of the same 3-4 factories at the end of the day don't they?

Don't they all come out of the factory of the lowest bidder for that particular batch?

I agree. I would like to see the prices of the mac line, to come in line of the pc pricing. Which i think they did would really give pc's a run for there money.

Do we really want the Apple product line to become a commodity item like standard PC Desktop and Laptops have become? They are such a throw away item, and I would hate to see that happen to Mac's as well. One of the beauties of Mac's is that they hold their value so well, this is a combination of a number of things, but the high price is just one of those things. The other thing is that if Mac's get *too* popular, then I can only see support going down hill as more and more people (most of whom have no need to own a computer in the first place) buy them and then bitch/moan/complain about something and everything...

No matter how the pricing gose with mac. There still going to be the mac pc battle. Just like ford and holden.

Personally, I doubt that lower prices will come to the current range of Apple products. I think that this refers specifically to a new product that Apple are going to introduce.

Something that traditionally has tight margins that Apple thinks that it can undercut.