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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?"
But not because of iPod. Really, a nice desktop, integrated desktop apps, plus the joy of a UNIX cli under it all. Beat the pants of Linux for me.
-- John
What's interesting about this is that in some sense, an iPod user has the least reason to switch, as Apple has done such a good job of making iTunes work as well as it could possibly be expect to on both the Mac and the PC. Is it just a design thing?
I'm all for the trend, though, whatever the reason.
More marketshare means more income to spend on R&D. With what Apple puts out already, I can only imagine what they'll start putting out with more marketshare (compare to Microsoft's $10 billion a year R&D, and all they can put out are picture-viewing smartphones and media center TVs). At some point, there's a threshold where growth begins to fuel itself through momentum (maybe ~10% or so). With Longhorn not due out until 2006, Apple has the opportunity to grow a few more points next year as well.
Open OS. Very open OS in fact.
Closed desktop environment. Free IDE.
Tell me why you're not happy about this again? You could always run X11 and use KDE or Gnome or whatever. I personally feel that Aqua is worth every penny.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Apple makes a great product, but I seriously doubt it will see double-digit market share any time soon.
Go ahead Apple zealots, mod me into oblivion for speaking heresy.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
that is, of course, assuming, people only buy computers to play games.
whilst certainly a concearn to some, one could look at what is available, and determine if that will be enough to satiate their needs.
maybe though, the 20% have already taken the games and whatever into account, and still plan on switching, whereas the 80% decided they couldn't do without them, or the ones which are available.
of course its probably neither.
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I think you're asking the wrong crowd. What I mean is, for myself, I enjoy "building" computers. I do it at work, and I enjoy putting together slick systems for myself and others I know. If I could install Mac OS X on these machines, I would in a heartbeat. I do use Linux in some cases, but Windows ends up being the defacto standard because people know it more than Linux. I'm willing to bet many slashdotters, besides the current Apple users, probably like building computers as well. If I could get an IBM PPC chip on a stock motherboard I could buy online and build myself a Mac clone, I might do it.... but what I know for sure is that AMD 64 chips are amazingly fast, fairly cool, and cheaper than most alternatives on the market right now. So, what I REALLY want, is Mac OS X ported for x86. Then I would definitely switch, and possibly a large number of other slashdotters would give it a try as well. But, I know Apple makes cash off of very expensive hardware, and they would never give that up. So, what I'm trying to say is, it would take a hell of a lot more than a fancy MP3 player (that works fine with Windows BTW) to switch both software and hardware for me. I'm not saying I'm the average slashdotter, but I'm willing to bet many people share some of the same preferences I do (even though there is no question somebody will violently disagree with this post like always).
The time to buy Apple stock was 7 years ago at $12.00 before the split :P
Apple stock has split three times total with the last two being last February 28th and June 21st 2000. The first split was back in 1987, so in terms of stock splits it has not been the best investment. However, I am quite happy with the investments and additional purchases I made a couple of years ago with Apple. The iPod and iTunes have certainly been a driving force for the increase in stock value as well as the halo effect that everybody is talking about. However, I see another big spike in the number of Mac users as they get out of universities. Specifically, Apple has been making huge strides in getting higher education users back into the Apple fold with many folks making the switch. From my perspective, I know that there have been at least a dozen folks who have started using Macintosh computers after coming through our lab in the last two years who previously were Windows users.
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The irony is that an X-Box was the final factor in my decision, since I found myself spending most of my gameplaying time on the console, I do not need a PC around to run games.
I would go further and say that there may be a great deal of overlap between the people that switch to Macs and the people that primarily use consoles for gaming - total end users that like the simplicity of hooking a console to a TV, shoving in a game, and having it just work, and similarly like the simplicity of plopping down in front of their Mac and having it "just work."
The big question is whether the Mac's software library is up to the task. It has respectable Internet software available and there is Mac Office (IMHO the single most important application to the Mac platform).
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I am calling Shenanigans!
Ipod sales are predicted at 13.3 millioin units for 2005, but I find it hard to believe that one out of five (2.66 million) will convert soley due to their experience with the ipod (sure there is windows based frustration).
It would make sense that many people would say they plan to switch to the platform, but how many really follow through with that is going to be lower once they find the sticker shock on their standard systems. If they can gain a market foothold with the mac mini will may work. There is also the question of being retrained on a new system. There certainly is something to be said for the status quo.
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
That's why I have a Gamecube.
I hear PC gamers fretting all the time about whether their graphics cards are up to snuff, whether they're going to be able to run the hot new game coming out in two weeks... I never have to worry about any of that. My computer can't run any games at all (except World of Warcraft, which I don't really want), but I know I can go down to walmart and there's more games there than I've got money to buy or time to play, and all I have to do is put a disc in a machine and switch it on. I don't even have to sign off AIM or Skype.
Okay, if your conception of "games" is "first person shooters" then the PC is where it's at and what I'm saying is worthless, but as far as I'm concerned, my lifetime needs as far as first person shooters go was sated completely in 1998. And if first person shooters aren't your thing then commercial PC gaming probably isn't going to do much at all for you right now. There's some interesting stuff coming out of the PC shareware game community, but when was the last commercial PC gaming got a game like Katamari Damacy, or Wario Ware? There was a time in the past where the pc games lineup made being a mac user a bit depressing but at this point, pc gaming seems like it wouldn't be worth the bother even if my computer could run it. I've got all the games I want and then some.
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First, if a game is decent, chances are, it exists for the Mac. Nearly all major games (Warcraft (I-WoW), Call to Duty, NWN, SW KotOR, Sims, etc.) have Mac versions that equal their Windows counterparts (not emulation). Second, who is running away from Linux because of the lack of games?
In all fairness to people buying these computers, it is about user experience. If the Macintosh delivers a better user experience, people will switch. The halo effect of the iPod is to show people what a well-designed machine feels like. Since (IMHO) the Macintosh has a much better experience, along with all of the accoutrements of a *nix under the hood, I had very little heartburn over switching.
Incidentally, the main use of my Mac is collision modelling in FORTRAN. Thank goodness for gfortran. The POSIX-compliant version is much more stable than its Windows counterpart and neither it nor g95 require MinGW on Darwin (obviously).
Finally, Darwin has the ability to compile the *nix OSS that we have all come to love. I keep a recent build of Apple's X11 on my machine and have yet to run into a tgz that didn't compile cleanly or with minimum tweaking. For those who love their OSS but don't like to work their own code, there are a couple decent package managers for the Mac as well (i-Installer, Fink, etc).
You're missing the point.
Look at how Apple is marketing the mini. What they're pushing more than anything else is the software bundle, and what regular users can do with it. It's almost as if the hardware is irrelevant. That explains why the small size is significant, but at the same time, not really the point of the thing; a small, unobtrusive device is a sort of physical representation of the fact that hardware is fading into the background.
Even the tiny box the Mac mini ships in is sort of reminiscent of software packaging. It's almost as if Apple is selling a really slick bundle of software that just, you know, happens to run itself without any need for the user to supply a computer separately. And at this price point, a lot of consumers who want to get into digital media might consider buying the thing basically as a media creation appliance, with the intention of keeping their existing computers for "computer stuff."
Basically, everything has gotten fast enough now that for most users in the consumer market, hardware performance just doesn't matter anymore. Design, quiet operating, operating system and software bundle are much more important, and Apple gets that, even if some performance-enthusiast tech-heads don't.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
I've been using Athlons for me and all the people I've been building custom Linux PCs for. I remeber a few years ago when AMD had one socket and Intel had 7. That was a major reason to use AMD.
Now AMD has something like 3 (or more) adding up to 9 or 10 different PC CPU sockets. Add in the bazillion variants of RAM clockings, HDD (SATA, EIDE (3 different speeds), SCSI (god know how many different types, etc.) conection standards etc. and even for a hardwarefreak like me things are getting very confusing.
I don't have the time for this anymore. And since configuring a PC with good hardware and a good OS (Linux) takes lots of time, in the end a Mac is cheaper. Much cheaper.
Linux will be the future workhorse OS, OS X will be the appliance OS.
Apple has gotten things just right for quite some time now, they deserve the market share they are just gaining.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Its not just a faster processor. Its a MUCH faster processor than a 1.2GHz G4. It takes many more types of video cards, drives and NICs etc.
I like the whole idea of a cocoa GUI over FreeBSD + microkernel, tried OSX and loved it. Being Apple, it has much better application support than FreeBSD alone commanded.
But for a general purpose machine, both the much faster CPU, and bigger application market are good leverages, makes decisions tough. Thus the 3% of Apple. Otherwise goto any Apple show thousands of people walk around looking and lusting for the machines, and not buying them. Everyone knows Apple macintosh, many swear by it. Others would love to join, if it weren't for the very annoying application lackage. This is a serious problem when youre a gamer.
Mac lovers have told me to just buy a mac and just not deal with software that arent available for the mac. Now thats not so easy, given some of the biggest titles out there are PC-exclusive, heck not even a Linux version (and Linux's market is weaker for the same reason). Should any desktop OS gain the threshold market percentage, about 20% I'd say, software developers will take notice, and the application problem will be less acute. We're just not there yet, better hardware or not, better OS or not.
Hmm... someone might come up with a computer based on an unknown CPU, that runs awesome at 5GHz, beats the pants off Opterons, and the whole thing costs $100. Given not even netbsd runs on it, will you buy it?
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