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400,000 Windows Users Switch To Mac
bonch writes "Analyst Charles Wolf of Needham & Co. wrote that 400,000 Windows users have moved to Macintosh, citing factors like the fabled iPod halo effect and the desire to escape the Windows virus epidemic. Mac shipments rose 35 percent, three times the rate of the PC market, with sales expected to surpass 45 percent in the current quarter. Quote: 'Assuming that Mac shipments would have been flat year-over-year, these percentage increases imply that about 200,000 Windows users purchased Macs in both the second and third fiscal quarters.'"
I suppose there should be an important distinction made here between people who buy a Mac and have both Windows PCs and Macs, versus people who throw their Windows machine out the window (irony!) and purchase a Mac to replace it.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
"Assuming an 11 per cent switching rate, our model has these users purchasing over 1.2 million Macs in calendar 2006, about 700,000 more than in 2005."
Some year, it seems, we'll have 121% of the population using Macs. The analysis fails to take bulk business and academic purchases into account. In addition, the numbers are artificially inflated by Apple devotees' propensity for buying several machines each generation. Purchases may increase linearly, but users do not!
Could the surge in the second quarter have been caused by people who already own Macs upgrading or buying a Mac Mini as second system? Or even Windows users buying a Mini as a secondary machine? I know several Windows users who bought a Mini but still use a Windows machine.
Further more what is the plural for a Mac Mini?
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Yes. There is no contradiction there. Apple is, and since 1984, has been an Operating System provider.
They sell their OS in a metal and plastic box, rather than a cardboard one like Microsoft... but that is what they do. The ipod and the Mac are just two product lines in their core business of making operating systems.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I would love to go to the Apple if I could build my own machine instead of being locked into what they want me to have.
But that's just me...not everyone builds their computers. I do it cause it's cheaper and I just don't have the disposable income that others have. But I'll always crave a Mac.
So "they" want you to have it, but you crave it also. What is it you want out of a Mac? Why won't a cheap tower G4 work? Go to Low End Mac and browse their articles and found sales. You can get macs from less than $100 to over $10000; and you can't find something that matches your ideal?
If you only crave a mac, then you don't need it, and in that case you don't need a dual processer G5 to edit video in realtime with (or whatever). Sure you may want and crave the latest and greatest from Apple; but their older and now cheaper machines are great deals!
I have an 800 Mhz G3 iBook, and a dual 1.8Ghz G5. For day-to-day stuff (iTunes, email, web browsing, movie watching) the iBook holds up extremely well to the G5. It certainly doesn't feel limiting.
Rethink your "Mac Mini" doesn't cut it for me statement and try one out in the Apple store. Or pick up a cheap G4 if you really want customizability. But don't imply that Macs are only for the wealthy.
But that's just me...not everyone builds their computers. I do it cause it's cheaper and I just don't have the disposable income that others have. But I'll always crave a Mac.
It's only cheaper if you pirate Windows.
The true advantage of the x86 switch for Apple is being able to capture sales from windows users in two ways: 1) Dual-booting, or just selling it to the user with OS X knowing that he can fall back to windows if anything goes wrong. I bet most average joes would just keep OS X -I did. 2) VIRTUALIZATION. Being able to run Windows inside OS X at almost-native speeds would be the greatest thing that could happen to us people needing some vertical windows apps. With only an alt+tab get into a virtual-pc (or whatever), get it done and go back to OS X. I'd go for that. As for *nix, everythings working pretty nice. Wish they'd make X11 a bit more transparent, duh. OS X could be in some years THE operating system...
I think they are interpreting the figures wrong. There may have been 400,000 sales, but that does not necessarily mean that there are 400,000 new users. It could have been just one really big Windows user who switched.
... and then they built the supercollider.
How about if we all just relax, take a stress pill, and buy the computer we personally prefer?
Even the guys who sit around the TV and argue the superiority of their favorite pro wrestlers admit that it's just a pastime. How many of us are willing to admit the same about our computer advocacy?
I agree with you on all that, but there is no proof for the claim that 400k Windows users have switched. It could very well be that a lot of the buyers of new Macs are former Linux users, who finally have a system that is very good and /really\ desktop-ready.
-- Cheers!
Need more memory on an existing system? Buy more and plug it in. Can you do that on a Mac? Without being forced to buy the parts from Apple? I do not believe you can.
Well, dispite your beliefs, you can.
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I was a user who switched not more than a month ago. I had a fairly high-end PC (Athlon 64, 1 GIG RAM, Radeon 9700, etc). My computer was more equipped, I discovered, for playing games. The main reason I switched to the Mac wasn't the hardware (the 1.8 Ghz iMac G5 w/ 1 GIG RAM I have is nice, true, and the LCD is nice for documents tho the CPU is 20% slower). Its been for the software and not for OS X itself.
Spotlight, some apps included with the OS and some others I've bought as shareware really make my academic work so much easier. OS X is nice otherwise for the Unix stuff (shell scripts especially). I don't use Automator or Applescript since for what I need to do, the shell scripts are easier.
The difference I see is this: all Mac OS X apps are user-centric whereas Windows apps are too task-oriented. They don't overwhelm with Menu options or buttons. There's greater empahis on tabbed-interfaces.
Allow me to illustrate the difference as I now refuse to use Word for my Academic work for the following reason. I've found a program called "Copywrite" which lets you easily flip between different documents and add notes to the project or each document easily. This program alone shows the difference, to me, between Windows and Mac apps. Pages is another great app. I was trying earlier to stop using Word and move to an app that doesn't lock my work in as much as Word does. I've changed my workflow to use a plain-text editor (Copywrite) to write the text, biblio, etc and then use Pages to format the text. Brilliant. I save all the headaches of Word-atuo-formatting-clippy crap. These two programs are really the killer-apps for me.
Everything else is just stock stuff. Sure, there are mac suppliers that focus on mac compatibility, such as making sure their PCI cards conform to the PCI-X standard that powermacs use.
Harddrives are standard drives, RAM is standard (although you have to, as with any computer, make sure you buy the appropriate kind)... Heck, most "everything else" is already built into the mainboard -- the stock soundcard in macs already supports 24bit recording and CoreAudio, not to mention FW 400/800, Giga ethernet, optical audio...
The only thing that really are "mac only" are the mainboard, chip, and video card.
So no, in no way is Apple a single supplier for parts. They control the initial hardware. What you hack into it after that point is up to you.
Of course, try putting together a dual 64-bit processor desktop system on your own, and let me know how that works out for being cheaper. Or making something that is smaller than the mac mini with more functionality for less cost, or slimmer than the iMac.
From the geek perspective, why would I switch NOW? We know that the MacTel machines are coming which makes purchasing any PowerPC based Mac less reassuring.
Try looking at things from a perspective other than that of a geek. As a geek, you probably know how to secure and maintain a Windows box. I've got news for you: for every person like you using Windows, there's ten or more who aren't like you and who feel powerless to keep their machine from getting owned and/or having their personal information/identity stolen. We've got enough people just throwing out their malware-infested PCs and buying new ones that the practice merited an article in the New York Times.
As far as the non-geek public is concerned Windows malware is an unchecked epidemic, right now-- a Mac is a solution to that, right now. Non-geek types don't look at development roadmaps to determine when they purchase a new computer. They usually buy something current when they need it, and use it until it dies-- they will most likely never crack it open to upgrade components, and probably won't even upgrade the OS over the lifetime of the machine (a habit developed when the major Windows PC makers refused to support any OS other than what shipped with the machine). They have no reason to care about what's down the road, because everything they're buying today will cover their needs for a long time to come. When they're ready to buy another brand new machine, the Apple x86 transition will be complete.
~Philly
While your situation isn't the norm, it certainly isn't unusual.
But you didn't answer my question, on Low End Mac you can find perfectly useful Macs that will run 10.4 and run it well for less than $200. An entire computer sans monitor for the price of a decent video card! Or one third the price of Photoshop itself.
So what's the problem? A need to have the latest and greatest preventing you from getting an older system?
If you really and truly want to build your mac, then surf Low End Mac, eBay, and such until you find an old G3 or G4 at a good price ($50-$200, depending). Then buy it and rip it apart to get whatever part you want to call it. A few weeks later do the same. Continue until you have ripped apart and put back together enough macs to call it a system. Then put all the other systems back together and link them together via XGrid and you'll likely end up with a system more powerful than a wussy single tower G5.
BTW, What is it about your personal situation that makes waiting 5-6 months for a system problematic? What is it about the mac mini that makes it a bad system for your needs?
A starving artist should know that you can return your windows version of the software with a letter stating that you are switching to a different platform to the software maker and get free versions for the new system. Adobe is very good about this I know, I'm sure other companies would also respond well to a nice letter.