Apple professional customers ripe for the picking

Is there a chance for the channel to win over dissatisfied Apple customers from the digital and creative industries?

Creative and design professionals have traditionally been among Apple's biggest supporters, with many in the sector showing tremendous loyalty to the vendor.

But as Apple has refocused on the consumer marketplace with smartphones, tablets, and services, and simultaneously let its professional product lines - particularly desktops - grow long in the tooth, many customers in that field are also refocusing, towards a platform that for some 10 years ago was unthinkable.

At HP's recent workstations product launch in New York City, several HP workstation customers took the stage to tell their stories of working with the company. Many of them had been - or in some cases still were - Apple customers. But for all of them, the biggest workloads are now going to PC workstations. That has to be troubling news for Apple in the professional sphere, an area that remains very attractive, because, quite unlike many in the PC world, this is a segment where price is not such a significant factor.

"I don't really care what it costs. I shouldn't say that in front of HP, but I really don't care," says Henric Larsson, chief executive of Stockholm-based post-production house Chimney Group. "If it were double the cost, it wouldn't matter to me."

It's a matter of economics. Chimney, he says, writes down its workstation hardware over a year, typically refreshing its top producers with the new top-of-the-line as it becomes available, with the now-older models moving down to more junior workers.

Even in writing down a workstation over the course of just one year, he estimates the cost of the machine at about $6 per working hour of productivity. When the company can charge hundreds of dollars an hour for client time in a development suite with a workstation, that amounts to a rounding error.

Performance is clearly important to this power-hungry user base. But Larsson notes that while the CPU is important, it's the GPU about which his people care the most. Truly CPU-intensive work is sent out to a render farm away from the desktop, so it's mostly the real time adjustments where a top-of-the-line GPU makes all the difference.

But really it all comes down to reliability. Larsson's economic model says $6 per working hour on a workstation; downtime, though, is much more costly than uptime is profitable.

"If we have a client in the room and we have a hardware problem, we have about two minutes to fix it before the client is pissed off," Larsson said. "There's no super-duper diamond-coated support contract in the world that can solve that problem."

For Larsson and others, both performance and reliability are areas where Apple is not cutting it.

The company has let its Mac Pro get long in the tooth, and while it has promised an update later this year that will bring the performance up, there are still concerns.

Apple is opting for a cylindrical design with the next-generation Mac Pro, but while CPU performance will likely be more competitive, customers have expressed frustration with Apple's GPU roadmap and its expansion and reliability message.

The company seems to be sticking with its consumer approach of locking down the internals of its machine, and is betting the farm on the high-speed Thunderbolt connection as a way to expand. While that's fine for storage, it's less than ideal for other expansions.

"A GPU belongs inside the machine, not sitting on the floor beside it with cabling and a separate power supply," one unnamed customer has been quoted as saying.

Chimney's Larsson says he still loves the MacBook Air that sits in front of him as he meets with reporters, but it's basically only an email and web device for him these days. Any serious productivity for his company is done on a Windows-based workstation - and in the case of Chimney, that means HP.

That means new opportunities for resellers selling workstations. Apple-centric creative professionals may have been off-limits in years gone by due to their dogmatic support for Apple.

Granted, this HP event included many customers who have already moved away from Apple, but they aren't alone in their sentiments.

While customers have started to migrate, Windows-based workstations seem to be having more trouble gaining traction in the Apple channel. Ira Weiss, category business manager for workstations at HP Canada, says the company has good channel coverage for its workstation lineups but the Apple channel is proving difficult.

"I'd like to see some of those resellers who've traditionally sold that [Apple] product set start to look at our product line," Weiss says. "It would be very cool."

And if Apple's professional customers continue to move away from the vendor, it could also be necessary.

As part of our special editorial partnership, CRN is republishing this article from Channelnomics