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PC Users Switch to Apple
JHromadka writes "Apple has setup a special website with real users explaining why they switched from the PC to the Mac. There's a full compliment of commercials, Mac OS X reviews, the works. Now we know why they didn't renew that agreement with Microsoft. :)" I like the commercials, they're funny, though probably not so much intentionally. Apparently the commercials begin airing this week.
Does my software work on the Mac?
Speaking as a mac-convert within the past year, this point holds a lot of people back. Not will software run on the Mac, but will software I have previously purchased work on the Mac? If Apple had some service where they and the vendors had a PC for Mac trade-in program (and some do, like Adobe), it would get more people over the hump to switch.
My office is in the middle of consolidating from one floor of our office building to one, necessitating a great deal of shifting about for almost everyone.
One of my co-workers was annoyed that she'd be without music while she was re-assembling her office, so I loaned her my iPod for a couple of hours with a pair of speakers that was lying around.
I was simply amazed at how ecstatic she was over this little device. She had no trouble figuring out how to use it.
She was so smitten that she is now planning to purchase an iBook, Microsoft Office, more RAM, 3 years worth of AppleCare (due to one of Apple's promotions, buying the AppleCare and MS Office at the Apple Store with the iBook is actually $11 less than without AppleCare) and, of course, the iPod.
She wouldn't hear of waiting for someone to finish a program to interface the iPod with a PC. She was already contemplating a new laptop, and she's very excited with the features of the iBook.
I was never sure that I truly believed the stories of people buying Macs just to use an iPod, but that's exactly what she's planning!
Quite honestly, I love Linux. I use it as a destop and a server on several PCs.
Laptops are another story...
I've owned 3 PC laptops in the last 5 years, and never had Linux working 100% on any of them.
Power management has never worked 100% properly for me. Even though I can get hardware video acceleration, switching to a tty, then back, breaks XFree and freezes my machine. etc... Basically the Open Source community can't keep up with the proprietary innovations going into new laptops.
Enter OSX. Now I know I can get a cutting edge Laptop, who's hardware is 100% supported by a UNIX based OS, at a reasonable price. I don't remember an opportuinity like this existing before.
I'm trading my (almost) new PC laptop for an (almost) new iBook this week.
-... ---
but for things that actually matter to me like kernel compiles, mp3 encoding, or gaming
Under OS X kernel compiles are a non-issue unless you're hacking around inside the Darwin kernel. MP3 encoding is pretty quick. I believe the MP3 encoding routine used by iTunes is Altivec optimized so it encodes as fast as it suck the music off the cd. Gaming is the only thing on your list that would be difficult for anyone to argue..
Mononoke writes:
;)
> Hint to Apple marketing: If you create an image of
> the typical Mac user as lonely geeky loser, no one
> will want a Mac!
They didn't strike me as lonely, geeky, or losers. They looked like real people. Which is a refreshing change from "dudes", cows, and supermodels.
> That Dell Dude is cooler than any of the Mac
> users in these ads.
Well, he certainly explains why Apple unseated Dell as market leader in the education field.
> Even that Gateway CEO and his cow are cooler.
Closing stores and worrying about chapter 11, but still cooler. Whereas Apple is opening stores, has 4 billion in the bank, and Steve Jobs' muse is a famous moth goddess instead of a cow.
> In one ad, the "chick"
Suddenly I see why you favor the "Dell Dude".
> notes that she didn't like her PC because it
> "wasn't attractive."
You know, I think she's right. Especially that blue screen of death thing. That's real ugly.
> Haven't Mac users been trying to get past the
> "You only bought it because it's pretty" stigma
> ever since the first iMac? I know I have.
Stigma? If someone says "You only bought it because it's pretty" to me, I say "Yeah, isn't it gorgeous. And look, it can do this, this, and this..." That's not a stigma, it's an opening for some serious advocacy. When your friends pick their jaws off the ground, you then help them pick out a Mac of their very own.
> Marketing 101, guys.
That's the marketing technique all the PC makers use. That's why, in the middle of a decimated desktop industry, Apple sold the hottest selling computer in Amazon's history (the new G4 iMac). That's why Apple had to give in to users clamoring for a machine that Apple intended only for the educational market. That's why Apple has four billion in the bank and is opening stores all over while Compaq no longer exists and Gateway is troubled.
Apple's marketing works, and works well. If it worked too much better, if Apple grew too fast, Apple would be in trouble. Growing a company too fast can endanger or kill the company. They have to keep their manufacturing up with what they sell and keep their growth healthy.
The TV advertising is only part of what Apple does. They have a print advertising campaign that is highly focused depending on a magazine's target audience that lets them do more selling of products to a specific audience. The TV ads tend to be more branding style ads.
> No more "I was too dumb to run a PC, so I bought
> a Mac" ads, please!
You would be surprised by the amount of ordinary people in business that find the simplest task in a GUI to be daunting. They are not dumb people, they are simply busy people with a job to do that do not have time to take classes in mousing or file management. Any computer that makes those tasks simpler for them, saves them time, and thus is very valuable to them. That makes ease of use a very big selling point for the Mac for a lot of people.
On December 14, 1996, Mothra resurrected a charred Apple sapling ("Mosura" 1996).
On December 14, 2001, Mothra returned to see its fruit ("Gojira, Mosura, Kingu Ghidora: Daikaiju Soukougeki").
OS X: the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.
I don't think it's any more deceptive than any of the marketing proclaiming the stability of Windows over the years. They may have finally gotten it right, but they made assertions in the past that weren't backed up in reality.
As for OS X, my Titanium PowerBook G4 has functioned without needing a reboot for over five weeks at a time as a shuttle it to and from work, from my wireless network at home to my LAN at work. I put it to sleep with impunity -- something the people at my office using Dell laptops won't trust, because suspend always causes them troubles.
No, it's not infallible. I don't think any consumer operating system really is, because there's software out there that won't follow the rules. (For instance, the only thing that crashes my computer is having Diablo II as the foreground app when I put it to sleep. I've forgotton twice in the past couple of months.)
By the way, Google returns 80,200 hits on "Windows XP Crash".
the term "linux crash" brings up about 445,000 hits. Your point?
I hate when people fall back on Google hit statistics. They are absolutely useless! Google is an unthinking search engine that will return any document with the terms you ask for, regardless of their context. You're bound to get all kinds of documents included in your results that have no place in your argument whatsoever. For example, you might get the weblog of a guy who says "My friend was in a car crash." and later says "I tried out OSX."
Please don't use Google this way. It does nothing to prove your point.
When I learned that 1) NEXTSTEP was the basis for Apple's new OS and 2) new Pro towers were forthcoming, I decided to go Mac (from PC), and did in Jan '99 w/ a G3 400. I've since upgraded to a dual G4 800 PowerMac for just shy of a year now, running OS X exclusively. I have had two kernel panics. (One stemming from plugging in an unsupported USB device.) When I had the other kernel panic, I was horrified. I powered the machine off and started recalling the memory upgrade I performed a few months earlier--wondering if it could be the culprit. I checked the LED clock at my side to see if there had been a brownout. I felt the FireWire connection to my external 160GB drive to make sure it had not come-aloos and somehow caused the problem...
Oh...I just picked up an iBook 700. I have no practical need for this, as I am behind a machine all day at work (developer) and my G4 is there when I get home. I simply wanted to be able to bring OS X with me. On a whim, I can make use of it. It's that good. It is truly a shame what so many people are missing.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
"the way it works is like the way your brain is supposed to work"
So that's why I keep seeing gray stripes everywhere.
People who read charts like that should stay away from Macs. You're missing the point entirely. What the chart fails to mention is which one runs Photoshop and Excel. Which one requires the fewest steps to encode a CD to MP3. Which one has a flat panel display you can just nudge up out of your way. Which one is fastest from pulling it out of the box to editing your home videos. Which one has the best color synchronization. Really, do you really think that the people in the Apple ads care about local communication latencies in microseconds, or memory latencies in nanoseconds. If you care about this stuff, please run Linux, and stop bringing up irrelevant facts to argue against the Mac's most important merit: useability. Above all else - speed, price, variety of software titles etc., which system makes your life easier, as opposed to which is better as an end unto itself.
Whenever I have a relative or non-geek friend who wants to have a computer, for pretty much any reason other than gaming, I always encourage them to buy Macs, for the very selfish reason that I don't want to spend my free time as their personal tech support hot-line. The few times in the past that I had helped a people buy a Windows PC's, they ended up needing constant assistance and complaining of baffling glitches. With those who bought Macs, all I did was spend a couple hours showing them the basics, and told them to "guess" whenever they are unsure of how to do something. In spite of being total newbies, and not very tech-inclined, they get by fine without my help after that, and often derrive enough pleasure from working with their Macs to want to learn more, and become experts.
As for myself, I'm with you. I like having lots of systems running lots of OS's. These ads are not targetting me, either.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You must be too young to remember the "Pepsi Challenge" commercials of the 80's.
You see, if you just drink small sips of each pop in a double-blind taste test, the sweeter taste of Pepsi (Coke has a more bitter bite to it) leads the vast majority of people to say they like Pepsi's taste better. (2 out of 3, according the the marketroids who ran the test.)
With this knowledge in hand, Pepsi held taste tests of this sort in Supermarkets all over the country, and ran TV ads showing "real people" (including many lifetime Coke drinkers) express their astonishment at having chosen Pepsi.
The campaign was so wildly successful that it lead to a panic-inspired decision by the Coca-Cola company... when the patent on the formula for the original Coke ended they abandoned their well-known flavor and introduced "New Coke", a formula that tasted almost exactly like Pepsi. We all know what a disaster that turned out to be. Pepsi drinkers did not really feel any particular desire to switch to the new Coke, and Coke drinkers just wanted "the old Coke" back (and eventually got it, as "Coca-Cola Classic"). See, the thing is, people who drink a lot of Cola on a regular basis don't like the heavy, sticky sweetness of Pepsi. They like the crisp bitterness of Coke. So even when Pepsi more customers, Coke customers consume more product, which is why Coke has mostly remained the #1 seller (by a narrow margin) all these years.
Still, nobody can argue that the Pepsi Challenge ads were anything short of a triumph. In an industry where most people just drink whatever is loaded in their local bar's tap, and everybody else sticks with their favorite brand like a religion, the vast majoirty of Cola ads are for brand image alone. The ads don't sell cola, they keep stock values up. The Pepsi Challenge campaign, by putting "regular people" on TV stands alone as the only cola TV ads that actually got a few people to switch brands.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.