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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?"
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.
I'm going to buy a Mac, but not attach a screen to it!
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
Well, not a total switch, I think only a few slashdot readers are capable of switching.
Did you mean, "Add to your collection?"
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.
Uh, No. The time to buy Apple stock was last year before it went up over 500%.
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.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
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.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
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).
What was that? Rumors of Apple's imminent *survival*?
I give Apple six months before Jobs shuts the place down just to spite us all.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
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.
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
Is not the new MAC OS basicly Linux?
No. It's basically BSD, which is, of course, dying .
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.
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).
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.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
A few years ago everyone told me not to touch a mac. Then in 2004 I got a 20 GB ipod and realized the potential. I can listen to almost all my music in the car using an aux input on my deck and I can portably listen to music on my way to class or anywhere I feel like. I even sometimes carry around an RCA cable and jack to RCA convertor so I can use it on most people's stereos. At the time I still had a thinkpad which was running linux (I was switching distros often) and I was not satsified. Don't get me wrong, I love linux but I realized that until the wireless drivers are improved, its not a great laptop distribution (I had a discussion about this with one of the PHLAK developers who was also irritated about this situation). So what did I do? I bought a Powerbook G4. OH NO some people are thinking. Its memory is lower quality and its processor isn't 3 Ghz. Yet ultimately the processor is powerful enough to do everything that a laptop should do and the software is seemless. I can compile most programs I want from linux and it accomplishes my needs with perfect wireless support and allows me to still have an easy setup to use gcc during my Computer Science classes. It beats Windows and if you ever have doubts just run a PowerPC distro on it. Yet I think some people will be impressed with how far MacOS has gone in the last few years.
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?
Schnapple
I bought Apple stock a while ago at $14. I thought I was being smart by selling it at $30. I was wrong :(
Course we are only talking about five shares.
Finkployd
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
...but it wasn't an iPod that convinced me, it was having a cheap 400mhz iMac to use as a server/living room stereo for a couple years.
Not only was it great for some simple hosting, utter silence and low power consumption, but I found that I even preferred to do casual browsing on it -- despite being so remarkably slow (OS X - Quartz Extreme = Windows on a 486). It's just so comfortable.
As others have pointed out in this thread, there won't be as many Slashdot "switchers" as there will be "adders," and that probably counts for the larger population as well (why throw out the old computer when you can keep it for the dog to use?). But I bet many will follow the cheap Mac they bought on a lark to a shiny new Powerbook, just like I did.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
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).
The coolest voice ever.
I switched last year. Bought a nice, shiny dual 1.8GHz G5 Powermac and have never been happier. Yeah, it's not perfect and I do keep my old secondary PC around for games (along with my XBox, PSX and Dreamcast) but the crap I no longer have to put up with is worth it.
For me it wasn't the iPod. It was iTunes. I was using iTuines for six months before I got my iPod and it was my experience with iTunes that made me look at the Mac for the first time in five years. I had not liked OS 9 and below and I used to consider Macs to be a joke back when they first came out.
And yes, I did give Linux a try. Several, as a matter of fact, starting with SLS 1.0 back in 1993/1994 and the last time with Suse 9 last year. I never got along with Linux very well. I figured that if I tried it out seven times in ten years and never got comfortable with it it probably wasn't for me. But I did give it an honest try.
The Mac, well, OS X, I got along with from Day One and am quite happy with. A++ Would do it again.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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.
I'd stuck it out with Linux since making the trek to my University with a bag full of floppies and downloading Slackware 0.97 or something like that, years and years ago. I trashed Windows to install a real operating system and scoffed at the Mac.
... oh ... 10 years in front of Gnome and 5 years ahead of KDE.
But recently, I got tired of Linux. The endless quest for a better desktop or a more compatible distribution. You've just upgraded? Congratulations, now go and recompile all your multi-media apps (like DVD playing). Want to plug in a device that's been on the market for a couple of years but no one in kernel land has? Good luck and plug it into your partner's mac to use instead.
For me the final straw was buying a G4 iPod, and deliberately setting up a Windows machine so that I could make sure it was formatted VFAT rather than HFS so that it would definitely be able to be used with my Linux system. And viola, it too didn't work! So, goodbye Linux, hello Mac. Sold my Linux custom-built workstation for $500 AU, bought an eMac, and have never looked back. I'm more productive, significantly more compatible with any device I want to buy and the interface is about
I still use Linux, I think it's a great server platform, but for the desktop, nah. I'm even going to be buying myself a bright shiny new 17" PowerBook soon out of my own money rather than continue to use Linux as my laptop OS for work.
Mac OS X - what Linux could have been, and what Solaris should have been.
I'm not paranoid - everyone really is out to get me.
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.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
I was a happy iPod owner for around a year.
I got a Mac Mini last week, and from my experiences so far - I'll never go back to Windows on my personal computer.
Bought an iPod July 2003. Bought an iMac February 2004. Bought two more iPods. Buying a Powerbook any week now.
So yes, it works.
--- witty signature
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.
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).
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.
I always get my stock advice from Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot.
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...
All this suggests the question ... how many iPod-touting Slashdotters are thinking of switching?
Switching? Slashdotters don't switch hardware. We aggregate and incorporate. Why would I ever dispose of anything that could generate a couple more SETI@home points per month, while also filling in as my firewall, e-mail, and/or MAME and streaming media server? And that's just my 8088! You hipsters with your disposable hardware. Makes me sick.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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.
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!
I like the look of OSX. No, I LOVE the look. Everything is so refreshingly appealing to the eye. I like the built-in capability of 128px icons. I like the dock. However, I can get icon sets and other nice, colorful, appeasing items for XP Prof. Hell, I can get OSX imitation themes for it.
I work with a bunch of designers (I'm a devloper), and I am on a Mac probably 2 times a week for a few hours. I don't feel overwhelmed enough by OSX to actually switch to Apple. I use an XP Prof. machine, and I NEVER have any problems with it. It has failed on me maybe 1 time in the past 6 months. Maybe. My coworker has a Mac, and it freezes on him probably 2 times a week. Freezes in a manner than doesn't allow him to do anything besides restart. I just sorta laugh to myself, and continue working.
Maybe I'll switch in the future, but I just couldn't bring myself to spend 2500 on a 15" Powerbook when the only thing that I admire about OSX is the "prettiness". I spent 1700 on a HP zt3000, and got pretty much all of the same features for, oh, about 800 less.
Just my 2 cents. I really don't have anything against Apple, and I'm glad that they're taking market share from Microsoft. But when I have a perfectly good AND CLEAN XP OS, I can't bring myself to fork over the extra "style" money required to use an Apple.
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
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.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Apple has this wonderful mode you can use your mac in called FireWire target disk mode. Simply start up the machine while holding down the T key and your mac's internal hard drive(s) become firewire disks. Essentially your mac becomes a very expensive firewire enclosure. Has saved me much time backing up, makes me love my Powerbook like the child I'll never have :)
Rule of the open mind
People who are resistant to change cannot resist change for the worst.