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

I'll be one of the converts

[CarlinWithers]

I plan on getting my mac mini. I've been looking for a way to not have to use Microsoft anymore and a combination of a new mac mini and an old machine running fedora is how I'll do it.

Re:I'll be one of the converts

[Gr8Apes]

I already converted. I bought a 15" powerbook. With after market addition of a 1GB DIMM raising the price to $2100, it does everything a $2500 windows machine does with much less worries regarding a virus, and also does the sleep mode reliably. Previous experience with a Windows 2K laptop weren't near as pleasant and I've only been using it for 3 weeks.

Yes, there's some getting used to Mac ways of doing things, and some "unlearning" of bad windows habits. But, all in all, it's roughly equivalent to switching to a new Windows version as far as learning curve goes, with the additional benefit that everything just seems to work as a cohesive whole.

Now someone will come along and say - but this item works in some screwy way. I haven't found that item yet. ;)

No iPod

[nelsonal]

I do not have an iPod (and probably won't buy one), but my next system will either be a G5 iMac or a Mac Mini. 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.

Switching

[suwain_2]

I used to hate Macs; pre-OSX I was convinced they were complete garbage. My next computer will probably be a Mac. I do own an iPod, but it wasn't the iPod that convinced me to switch; it was seeing that OS X is based on UNIX, and that it looks incredibly spiffy, and that it's stable, and....

Have you ever been face-to-face with their 30" Cinema? It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen.

Linux people switching

[krgallagher]

"All this suggests the question ... how many iPod-touting Slashdotters are thinking of switching?"

I have been consulting for a large Linux shop the last few months and was surprised at the number of people running Mac laptops. The company itself provides Linux desktops for everyone, and Windows laptops for the suits, but a lot of the developers and other IT people use Mac laptops for their personal computers. I have to say I have been pretty impressed with what I have seen in terms of performance. Besides Mac just give you that extra little "Wow!" factor. Of course it is BSD under the hood, so it is a real OS. They really are slick machines. I do not think that the Ipod is the influencing factor here though.

Switch?

[Schnapple]

Why the obsession with people "switching"? Has anyone thought that perhaps their market share is going up because people are buying a Macintosh in addition to their current machine, which they keep? If people buy Macs and then use them in addition to their Windows PC then the Mac market share goes up but the actual number of people using Windows doesn't go down.

I think this is what Apple finally realized with the Mac Mini. They'll never get people en masse to go to the Mac cold turkey, but by giving them an affordable option, there's a lot of people who might try it since there's a way out (they can just write off the $500).

I guess the better question is - what percentage of Mac Mini purchasers continue to use it actively and don't eventually write it off as a bad investment? And how many of them swear off Windows?

I did it the other way around

[Mr. Cancelled]

After finally making the plunge last year to buy a Mac, I found myself giving more and more consideration to getting an ipod (something I'd previously wrote off as being overpriced, and unneccesary).

A year later, my ipod's with me daily, and serves up more than just music, via the amazing Pod2Go software. The only regret I have is not taking the plunge earlier than I did!

I went from hours and hours of tweaking, and modding my systems to behave in a somewhat intelligent manner, to just having a computer work the way I want it to. Someone in a different thread once put it best: "If I want to tweak and play, I can do so, but when I need to knuckle down and do real work, it just works, no tweaking needed". I couldn't have said it better myself.

Re:Didn't need an iPod to get me to switch

[nordicfrost]

I had the opposite experience today. I installed an ADSL moden + router + two wireless cards in two Dells. After two hours it STILL wouldn't work as planned with WPA. I felt like I was a being from space, trying to use 30th centtury tools and know-how to fix mud huts on the Congo river in the year 890 AD.

The complexity of windows is baffeling. I was amazed that something that works so easely on Mac could be so incredibly complicated on another platform. The nearest thing I had to WiFi network problems befor was my GFs iBook that had to enter a WPA-PSK password on every boot, but it was solved after some consulting on the Apple site forum.

I sweated, wept and toiled and yet I had to leave the installation half finished because I only had two hours available. Depressed and alone i reached out to grab the Old Friend that never disappoints, Jack Daniels. Suddenly, a light came on in the corner. It was my alu PowerBook, that woke up upon registering that my Bluetooth cellphone was nearby. As it changed the "away" message in Aduim to At home and available, and automatically synced the phone with adressbook, I realized. I don't need booze to drown my Windows memories. I only need the comforting white light of an Apple.

Ok, so it wasn't that bad. But the installation didn't work as planned and I have to go back tomoroow and that sucks.

I switched

[lullabud]

I know a lot of people who switched from Windows to Linux in the last year or so, dozens in fact. But Mac? Nah.

Funny you'd say that. I know a lot of people who were running Linux and switched to Mac. Most of these people had switched from Windows to Linux, or were running both on various machines, but switched to Mac because they didn't have to fiddle with sound system incompatibilities, mod dependencies for this or that hardware device, problems with apm not working with certain drivers, etc. etc.. I know that's why I switched to Mac. I was sick of closing my Inspiron 4000 to put it to sleep, then waking it back up to find that I had to reboot in order to get sound to work. I was sick of hot-plugging a pcmcia card and having my eth#'s shift. I wanted something that was *nix that worked without me having to fix it. Sure, tinkering is cool, but not when you want to get work done. Mac OS is reliable, and I have yet to meet anybody who has used it that will refute that.

As for the price difference, the laptops are very competitively priced FOR THE QUALITY OF WHAT YOU GET. Sure, there is no cheap piece-of-crap-but-it-works Apple laptop equivalent to the Office Depot Compaq special you read about in slickdeals, but we're talking internal slot-loading dvd/cdrw or dvd burners in a 12" laptop. Find me a reasonably priced Dell or Sony with those specs. And there's no comment on the Mac mini, its price competition is obvious enough.

All that said, it's all about OS X for me. I think OS X is the best desktop OS ever. I'm on my first Mac (an original 12" powerbook), I've had it for over two years, reloaded it once, and this is by far the most reliable and most consistent operating environment I've ever used.