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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?"
Is not the new MAC OS basicly Linux?
That's really great. "5 down, 95 to go! ... still."
Moof.
I actually am the only person I've ever talked to in engineering who switched FROM PC to Apple but then switched back to Windows.
Why?
- World domination: Microsoft owns the market. I don't care what number you want to quote, but when it comes to writing shareware/freeware for a living like I do, you have to do it in Windows or else you won't be eating very long.
- Top-notch developer tools: Visual Studio, C#, etc. all make coding incredibly easy. Going back to writing Object Oriented C or AppleScript from within Vi on a Mac OS X box just seems... well, archaic.
- Price: Windows for me is cheaper. I get a new Dell box for $599 every 6 months which lets me build faster.
- Devices: My Windows mp3 player was half the price of iPods of equivalent storage. Why pay twice as much for half-the functionality??
You know, "Wine Is Not An Emulator" WINE? Copy over a few of the files off an old Windows 98 CD + some fonts 'n' libraries and you can be playing "World of Warcraft", "Half-Life 2", "GTA: San Andreas", or whatever else you'd like. And if that fails, just get Cedega for $5. They're for linux, but they work just as well on a Mac. I know, I've tried.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
Surveys show that approximately 10% of the population is homosexual.
Have a GameCube and PS2 haven't played a PC game in 2+ years and haven't missed it. I plan on getting a Mac Mini.. Great OS underneath, pretty UI on top and all my favorite Open source apps will run on X-windows if nothing else.
What in the world do I winders for?? Oh thats right so I can get all those viruses, Malware and zero security Active X controls.. No thanks.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
- Get a Mac
- Download OpenOffice.org
- Get Virtual PC if you still need to run Windoze apps
You'll never look back.Currently bidding on sig
The iPod is a fashion statement, that's all. I've used one, and listened to one, and I can hear how weak it is reproducing bass.
Frankly, it's not very good at it's primary function. I don't why "geeks" care about it. I fully understand it's appeal to hipsters, and how it might get them to buy a mac to be "even cooler", but I dont see how it can impress anyone who's into audio or computers.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
When did they start letting people buy shares in lots less than 100? Peasants have started speculating in the stock market? It's time to sell ALL your stocks and invest in other things. Peasant's owning shares of corporations... what is the world coming to?
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
> Playgirl editor Michele Zipp was recently fired for being Republican.
And using her supervisorial capacity as authority to wax vociferously on it in the workplace with impunity, creating a hostile working environment. Good for the magazine. Lesson is, don't bludgeon your underlings with your fucking politics. What a fucking martyr.
The mac mini is obsolete. My 3 year old computer is on par with it on performance. It's not worth $500 unless you need the small form factor.
Vote for Pedro
All you potential switchers know that you're going to have to reformat your iPod (read: wipe your music) if you want to plug it into your Mac, right..?
What's your point?
The parent makes a sensible argument. 256 megs ram, and what, a 1.2 or 1.4ghz processor? Even with the 512 meg made-to-order option, that's not enough for me.
I'd really love to be able to switch to a mac mini, because that would mean all I did all day was surf the 'net and write email. Unfortunately in my world, it just won't cut it.
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.
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"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Well, I'd consider it for a fun home machine, but Macs are still pretty useless in most business environments. Poor hardware support (no serial or parallel port), and many, many fewer customer business apps make it impossible for me to consider switching my business. Also, I'm not really a fan of hardware lock-in. They're cute and fun, but not nearly as functional as a boring, generic PC if you're doing almost anything other than web browsing and writing email. Also, the upgrade cycle is insane. I'm simply not buying a new OS every 6 months just to maintain compatibility with current versions of software. My copes of Windows 2000 are still 100% compatible with all of my software, and probably will be for a long, long time, especially if I install the bolt-on .Net stuff.
I don't respond to AC's.
I don't know where you get your data on universities. I work at an Ivy League university and am a member of several higher ed associations where we trade operational info. Everyone I know has ditched Apple. Three years ago, we were 90% Apple, now the university is probably 80% Windows based. They made a conscious decision to go with the system that's used in the real world. There are departments that tenaciously cling to Apple - they are generally looked down on as averse to change.
laugh hard, it's a long way to the bank
You are the reason Macs survive: idiots.
"Mac OS is reliable, and I have yet to meet anybody who has used it that will refute that."
Well I can do that for you! At my work we have 10 macs that dual boot OS9 and OSX. About 20% of the time we turn them on, the macs FAIL TO BOOT, they just sit with a blank blue screen and the spinny beachball of death. We even left one of the machines on overnight in this state and nothing changed.
To top that off, we had two of those systems experience total filesystem meltdown today. We turned them on this morning and they crashed to a half blue / half black screen covered in text garbage. Upon booting from CD we were able to repair the filesystems, but only one or two folders were recovered. These systems have brand-new hard drives that have been tested OK.
In my experience with Mac OSX over the past month, I have to say that it is vastly less stable than even windows 2000. We have over 50 windows 2000 machines and virtually never have problems with them.
Sad.