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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'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?"
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.
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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
Is not the new MAC OS basicly Linux?
No. It's basically BSD, which is, of course, dying .
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
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.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Why?
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.
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