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If you look for displays at apple.com you now will find only two displays in the online store: the new 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display and the old 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display. The 20-inch model was quietly pulled, sharing the fate of the 23-inch model. That leaves the 30-inch model as the only matte-finish monitor left in the lineup as the LED Cinema displays all have a high-gloss finish. A matte finish is favored by designers and photographers — the creative professionals that formed the early core of Apple’s business customer base.

The differences between the newer LED displays and the older displays does not begin and end with finish. The new displays do not include Firewire ports and they only connect to newer laptops that use the Mini DisplayPort connector. If you use anything but a laptop from the new Macbook family the 30-inch Cinema Display is now the only Apple display you can purchase.

If you plan on adding or replacing a Cinema Display in the near future we suggest you call us soon, we can’t predict how long the 30-inch model will be around.

We expect a number of announcements from Apple at Macworld 2009. Much of the speculation leading up to the event has been around consumer products, particularly the iPhone, and Apple’s announcement that it will no longer take part in Macworld. We are in San Francisco this week attending Macworld and meetings with Apple leadership. We will share in the coming days our perspective on how news and events from the conference impact business customers.

The recent glut of articles debating Apple’s interest in the enterprise space has been interesting to watch. The feeding frenzy peaked with rumors, and then validation, that Apple vice president of enterprise Al Shipp was leaving the company and Apple was not going to replace him. The tone of coverage varied from doom and gloom to euphoria. Headlines on the apocalyptic side included Apple in the Enterprise rudderless?, Apple’s Taking a Pass on the Enterprise Prize, and Steve Jobs Still Doesn’t Get Business Customers. On the positive side we have How Apple Is Secretly Eclipsing Windows in the Enterprise, Next stop for Apple marketing? The enterprise., and our favorite Snow Leopard Endangers Vista.

So Apple is walking away from the enterprise market and Snow Leopard will be the death blow to Vista? How can we have such dramatically divergent views on the same subject over a 30-day period of time? In part it is because Apple remains an emotional topic, representing one of the true information te4chnology culture wars. This story line is not new, this is not the first time people have raised warning flags about Apple’s interest in business customers. Things are different this time around because the iPod and the iPhone have been tremendous retail successes and Apple’s financial situation is stronger than it has ever been. Apple is selling one in every five retail computers, with an  even larger share in notebooks. Some see this as evidence that Apple does not need, and therefore will no longer pursue the enterprise space.

We see no evidence that Apple has changed its approach to the enterprise market. Apple has never competed for the bulk of the enterprise market, the low-powered PC that most knowledge workers use for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. That is a high-volume, low margin business. Slap a $500 machine and $500 worth of software on someone’ desk and they can email all day long. Apple’s niche has always been power-users; businesses that load up high-performance machines with more complicated software and spend five to 10 times per employee. Those customers are much higher-margin customers, but they have traditionally been a small segment of the marketplace.

If you look back 10 years and consider that print design and printing represented the bulk of Apple’s business audience, you would wonder how Apple survived at all. Then came the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and retail customers became the Apple story. But that view is too limited. Apple continues to sell to business customers, and over that time they have expanded the businesses they serve. Apple’s business sales have increased 25 percent year-over-year.  Web development has been a big driver, more than compensating for the decline in print. And then there is video. Apple’s release of Final Cut Pro was incredibly disruptive to the professional video market. A market once dominated by Avid running on Windows is now saturated with Final Cut Pro running on Mac OS. Just look at Avid’s market share and you can get a sense of how disruptive Final Cut Pro has been. To a lesser extent professional audio is also succumbing. The differentiator for Apple have always been the combination of power and quality. There are plenty of powerful PCs, but if you care what something looks like on screen, or when it is printed or rendered, you need to work on a Mac. The user experience — ease of use — has always been the go-to market message for retail and education, but it is the combination of power and quality that drives Apple’s enterprise market. That is why you see more and more Macs in research, product development, and health care environments, supporting users working with complex imaging and 3D modeling.

Now let’s consider some broad market trends. High-speed broadband has driven the growth of video and audio, and of course web-development. Not only are these markets that Apple dominates, they are expanding from creative to the broader enterprise market. So Apple dominates markets that are expanding, not a bad position to be in. And as we noted in an earlier post, the iPod and the iPhone are creating inroads into the traditional enterprise IT space.

Still, what about the enterprise announcement? Is Apple, flush with retail success, abandoning its enterprise customers? Not replacing the enterprise lead. Killing the Xserve Raid. Abandoning FireWire for USB 2.0. Replacing the beautiful, and creative pro-friendly matte monitors with consumer-friendly glossy monitors. Isn’t the evidence there?

John Welch at Macworld strikes an appropriate tone in his post entitled Apple’s enterprise strategy the same as it ever was: Why Apple’s failure to replace a retiring executive isn’t the end of anything. But Welch argues that Apple never had an enterprise strategy, never wanted to sell into the enterprise space. We don’t see it that way. What has been missing from the the recent buzz is an understanding of the reseller’s role in the Apple sales model. Business customers have always relied on Apple resellers to provide the knowledge, integration, and customer support that business customers require. Not that the head of enterprise-marketing has always been an empty seat, but we don’t expect to see negative consequences from this move. If anything, we are hoping to see more attention paid to the critical role resellers in the enterprise channel. The bigger move for resellers and business customers was the decision to have the previously independent direct channel report into the head of channel marketing. This received less attention but is actually more important as it may signal an end to Apple’s efforts to compete with their own business resellers. Apple’s direct channel was able to build direct sales, but it had to do so by sacrificing margin and service quality. So while the buzz is that Apple is abandoning the enterprise, we think the inside scoop may just be that Apple is realigning to better serve the enterprise market.

Apple has started taking orders for the new 24-inch LED Cinema Display. The new monitor was designed as a companion to the new MacBook and MacBook Pro, and share their styling and feature sets. These include a glossy, back-lit screen with black trim, USB 2.0 ports, an iSight video camera, a microphone, speakers, the new Mini DisplayPort connector. The monitor also has a MagSafe charger allowing users to charge their notebook via the monitor. The addition of the charger makes the monitor a one-stop docking station.

The 24-inch LED Cinema Display lives up to Apple’s legacy of beautifully designed monitors, but it also moves that legacy forward with environmentally-friendly design. As Apple says, what “makes the LED Cinema Display so remarkable is what it lacks.” It is mercury-free, arsenic-free, brominated flame retardant-free, and polyvinyl chloride-free. The aluminum and glass enclosure is also highly recyclable. Those are very big steps forward, so much so that that the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which ranks the performance of a product throughout its lifecycle according to its environmental attributes, gave the display the highest rating of EPEAT Gold.

As we noted last week, Apple has discontinued the 23-inch LCD monitor. Pro users have counted on the 23-inch LCD for years as a color-accurate workhorse. The new monitors represent a step-forward in many areas, but the switch from a matte to a glossy screen may not be well received by pros, and the lack of Firewire ports will be a disappointment. As of now Apple is still taking orders for the 20-inch and 30-inch LCD Cinema Displays but we do not know their future plans for these models.

More on the movement of Apple in the enterprise: Barron’s quotes a Bernstein Research report that companies planning to either issuing iPhones to employees or support them in the next 12 months has risen from 2% of CIOs in May to 12% in the most recent survey. The rest of the survey is less positive: it found only 3% of CIOs planning to deploy or expand deploying Macs in their firms.

But, I would offer this as a predictor of Mac penetration into the enterprise. Clearly, most companies are not looking to make the switch to new computers running a new operating system, but the breathtaking acceptance of the iPhone is wedging open a door Apple has been pounding on for more than two decades. Most of its greatest success will likely be driven from the bottom up by consumers rather than the top down by corporate contracts.

Keep an eye on this one.

High-quality monitors and professional-grade color reproduction have long been a point of differentiation for Apple. Apple monitors are not only designed better, they perform better. Professionals who care about color and image details, including researchers, scientists, designers, publishers, and commercial printers have to come to rely on the Apple 23-inch Cinema HD Display. The Cinema HD is ideal for color-critical work, reliably reproducing color at resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 pixels. The DVI connection allows for a direct pure-digital connection with the DVI port that has been standard on all Macs. The monitor conveniently housed two FireWire 400 ports and two USB 2.0 ports, making attachment of desktop peripherals easy and creating more ports for laptop users.

As of today you can no longer order the Cinema Display from Apple’s site. The product is still in the online catalog, but it is listed as discontinued. The replacement for the Cinema Display, the 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display, is not yet shipping. It sports the same resolution as the 23-inch, but the FireWire ports are gone. It does add a MagSafe connection to charge your laptop, which is nice, and has built-in iSight camera. The DVI connector is replaced by a Mini DisplayPort connector, which means older Macs will need an adapter to connect to it. You cannot tell from the photos if the screen retains a clean, non-glare matte finish or if it adopts the gloss finish of some iMac models.

The gap leaves business customers in a wait and see situation, and possibly hoarding the older displays, buying them outright as they come off lease. That said, Apple has gotten monitors right for years, and the new LED Cinema Display may be both a work of art and a color workhorse.