Forbes Predicts 5% Desktop Share for Apple in 2005

sebFlyte writes "Spurred on by the iPod, Apple's share of the desktop computer market will grow to five percent (from three percent) this year, according to research from Morgan Stanley. Apparrently nearly 20% of iPod users surveyed are planning to switch to Macs, and the sales figures for the last few quarters are backing up the theory of the iPod Halo Effect. All this suggests the question ... how many iPod-touting Slashdotters are thinking of switching?"

Comments

Re:Stock

[ravenspear]

Uh, No. The time to buy Apple stock was last year before it went up over 500%.

Re:Apple = Proprietary

[lagnat]

I can't quote percentages, but a "large" portion of MacOS X is available in source form from Apple. So it's not as open as Linux, but it's far from Windows when it comes to proprietary.

Because they are not

[WindBourne]

Apple has a partical closed/partial open. Their foundation is actually opened based on BSD API. From there, they added in their old stuff with enhancements.

In addition, Apple does not typically use their system to try and lock out competitors. The IPOD is new behavior for them. Hopefully, they will consider how to approach things. The reason why OSS software is popping up around ipod is because Apple has not ported to Linux/BSD. Once they do (even closed), I suspect that we will see a lot fewer attempts to circumvent them.

OTH, MS uses their OS and Office as a way of controlling the end user WRT everything. If it was not for OSS, I have no doubt that MS would have been far worse than they are today.

Let's take a look at the list

[bonch]

No games, huh?

Quake 3
Doom 3
Black & White
The Sims
The Sims 2
SimCity 4
All the Myst games
All the Warcraft games
All the Diablo games
RTCW
All the Unreal Tournaments

I could go on and on here. Not to mention, I use emulators anyway, so there are all those games too.

Re:Let's take a look at the list

[EulerX07]

Parent fails to include release dates of the game. This relevant because I was reading Blue's News and Aspyr announced TODAY that Doom 3 had been released.

It was out on pc when? Last august? Same for the other games, they are older and were released on mac a few months (at the very least) after the pc version. Take a look at the top 10 upcoming games for pc at gamespot , and tell how many of those will be available for macs. 2 out of 10? 3 out of 10? Even 5 out of 10 wouldn't be enough.

Not good enough for even a mild cored gamer. And for the record, I wish 10/10 of these games were playable on linux, so I wouldn't have to send one cent to either MS or apple to play the games I want.

Re:I'll be one of the converts

[b1t r0t]

Just be sure to either get it with 512M as a build-to-order option or have a plan to add your own 512M or 1G PC2700 stick when you get it. Your mom or grandma might be able to live with 256M, but if you're like most slashdotters, you really need the 512M minimum.

Re:Why this is big

[Frohboy]

Actually, Microsoft does produce some pretty fantastic research.

http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/defaul t.aspx/

(I believe that list may only include the papers which Microsoft has copyright to freely distribute, as opposed to papers in refereed journals, of which Microsoft employees have many.)

They may be the "evil empire", but they do have a lot of smart people working for them.

I did it backwards...

[stumpyrider]

I got an iMac G5 20" last month and I am absolutely loving it. I do my coding at work, I want to turn on my computer, surf, do a little photo and music work at home. The iMac is great for that. And my wife hated our pc, she loves the mac. I used linux for a while but I got tired of having to spend hours recompiling software for smoother fonts etc. I'm getting old and tired of hacking at my computer, I want to turn it on, compute and thats it. If I want to game, I have my PS2. I loved the iMac and iTunes so much I just got an iPod shuffle. Great, simple piece of equipment. The wife wants one too. I guess the word is simplicity, with power still available. I'm not going back...

Re:Bad troll. No cookie.

[HerbieTMac]

Good job. You succeeding in translating zealot-speak into zealot(prime)-speak. Your comment is unfortunately uninformed.

Darwin maintains BSD compatibility but impliments a number of different approachs to core systems. For instance, the driver subsystem in Darwin is IOKit, an object-oriented system that allows for dynamic loading and unloading of device drivers (indeed, whole classes of drivers). BSD currently lacks this ability. Try coding a new driver for BSD and you will find yourself re-coding whole sections of pre-existant code that must then be loaded into the kernel side-by-side, increasing memory usage unnecessarily.

Consider as well that Darwin is not a pure microkernel system. A number of subsystems are loaded into Mach, which allows for faster communication between the components.

I would not claim that one system is arbitrarily better than the other but to claim that they are the same is pure garbage. You appear to just be quoting some equally uninformed /. poster.

Re:I'll be one of the converts

[Rasta Prefect]

I had to do a major upgrade to a 25 gig database last week. The server was aging, and had no free space to pull it off, so I had to migrate it all to my laptop, with a 160 gig external drive, and do it there. Even though it has a gig of ram, it still choked (created 7 gigs of swap) and took 2 days to pull it off. I left it sitting on the hotel air conditioner overnight, for fear of the poor little guy melting.

So what you're saying is "I need a very high end machine, so anything else is obsolete". Never mind that the Mac Mini undoubtably cost far less than your uberlaptop with external drive.

Yeah, I'd love to be able to pull off the "switch", mainly because I hate working 16 hour days on the road and would love to be able to shrug clients off and say "my computer doesn't do computer stuff, you can only buy music with it"

This is frankly just stupid. OS X is a full featured Unix. Outside of the very high end environment its capable of doing pretty much anything that another unix based os such as linux is. I do systems administration work on a Powerbook G4, and it's frankly far more up to the task than a PC. If you'd had a Powerbook you could have just put it in target disk mode and copied your DB over, no need for the external drive at all. :) Or booted off of it. I've yet to see a PC do anything nearly that useful.

USB: Universal SERIAL Bus

[Pr0Hak]

Well, every mac made since they got rid of the DIN-9 style serial ports has had at least one USB port. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. It's a serial port!

If you need to interface with legacy serial ports using something like RS-232 with DB9 connectors, you can pick up a cheap Keyspan adapter. I use one of these things *all the time* with my Powerbook to console into routers, switches, and servers. Works like a charm!

Re:I won't convert

[bnenning]

I don't know if a third party monitor will work with an Apple-approved video card

It will. Any VGA or DVI monitor will work fine.

The Apple web site does describe the ATI and nvidia video card options for each model of G5, and the prices for them.

Also ATI sells Mac 9800 and X800XT cards as upgrades.