March 06, 2009, 5:11 PM — Well, here's some shocking news: it appears that when you offer a radically cheaper version of your product, people with less money tend to go for that version of your product. Thus, the major PC makers are all finding that, with the rise of the netbook over the last year or so, the price of their average unit sold has collapsed -- with the exception, of course, being Apple, which has so far played coy in the market.
Now, the reason that everyone says that Apple "has" to offer a netbook, despite the company being able to smugly point to that per-unit number, is that per-unit numbers aren't everything if you can't move enough units. And a JP Morgan analyst announced today that his sources imply that Apple's overall numbers are dropping sharply, both for Macs and for iPhones, sending the company's stock price tumbling by nearly five percent. (True, five percent drops seem like nothing in this troubled market, but it was on a day when stocks as a whole went up.)
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