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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.'"
The real test of this switching will, of course, have to be seen to continue over the next couple quarters, which would also show that most people are not caring about the processor used in the machines, so long as they work well.
antipaucity
This has been a long time coming, and is less dramatic than I think people will realize.
The numbers of mac users have long been under-reported for a number of reasons:
1- The "independant" research agencies don't reports sales apple makes directly or thru apple specific retailers.
2- The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total Addressable Market (TAM)
3- Macs last a lot longer than PCs and are useful a lot longer
4- Windows is counted twice- once when the PC is sold and once when an upgrade is bought, meaning that many of the "new PC sales" are actually windows upgrades.
They don't go into their methodology for a reason-- because the goal is to market windows as the dominant platform. (How many linux boxes were shipped with windows and count as "windows marketshare"? A large percentage.)
Recently I heard that an independant survey had been done to find the TAM, and that this survey found that %16 of the household machines currently in use were Macintoshes.
I'm glad to see Apple has been growing Mac shipments. I hope that software developers will realize that the Mac market is much larger, and vastly under-served compared to windows. But then, again, I think maybe I should shut up and go write some software to sell, and hope nobody shows up to compete with me.
I wonder if the intel switch will affect sales for Apple... but I don't think so. Most people don't realize that Macs don't already use Intel chips (believe it or not!) and it seems amazing to believe, but I think mainstream america thinks that Apple makes windows boxes and doesn't really see what the difference is.
This would explain teh failure of the switch campaign-- people think Apples are just another form of PC like Dell, and why would you care? They just buy what the salesman at the local store tells them to buy.
This brings up the third factor for Apple. The halo effect helps, and the ipod store brings people in.... but these average, mainstream amercians, then end up asking the salesman what computer to buy, and since they are in an Apple store, he sells them a Mac.
So, while I think computer retailing is on the decline, Apple's stores strategy will prove to be brilliant. When the others won't carry your product or market it, do it yourself.
And I'm glad to see Apple showing the haters to be wrong-- when given a chance to know about them, people will buy Macintoshes.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
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/
Wired: "Fabled iPod halo effect"
Tired: "Steve Jobs reality distortion field."
the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed - w. gibson
I much, much preffer using OS X versus windows. OS X is so much more mature of an operating system than windows even attempts to be. The old addage of 'it just works' very much so applies. If Apple can come down in price a bit more, and bring in more software development, and market there machines a bit more agressivly, then Apple has a great chance to take over some market share.
Add to the fact with the rumors of all the DRM lockup of longhorn, OS X has none of that expect with iTunes, who wants to use an OS that is crippled for media?
I have purchased a Mac Mini, and a 17" top of the line Powerbook within the past 3 months. I was praying that OS X would at some point run on all intel/x86 hardware, but I doubt I ever see that.
Mac has OS X going for it, and Its a very good thing indeed, no wonder people are switching over and dumping spyware, adware, drm crippled, and virus infested PC's that, never ever come close to having a realitivly bug free, secure operating system.
Meanwhile, I'm looking ahead at Longhorn. I'm not seeing Windows maturing in the way we'd all expected -- .NET was supposed to help unify the branching 64 bit architectures and foster finer-grained security controls, but MS are backing away from .NET for Longhorn. Instead of eating their own dog food and telling us it's good, they're telling third party developers "you go first" and apparently waiting to see if it's safe for THEM first. Why is skipping out on .NET so bad? Things are bad enough with wildly different Windows configurations, thanks to MS' lack of library/DLL versioning and much larger range of hardware platforms. It's impossible for a developer to test or even forsee every target configuration. And now instead of migrating to .NET with versioning and a narrowed virtual target platform, we're just going to add random combinations of DLLs from 3-4 slightly different CPU architectures in the mix.
MS' operating system lifecycle is 3 years and growing, and we're preparing to see more of the same. The current model is too fragile to do new and exciting things reliably, and so unless MS are working on a new OS in secret, Windows is going to be a pretty boring place for the next 3-5 years.
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
This clearly flames the debate : is Apple all about iPod now (or already video iPod) ? Or is it still a true old fashion PC company ?
Yes.
It's an old-fashioned PC company. They do R&D and come up with new, good ideas (and sometimes some bad ones).
It's not a mass-marketer who tries to sell as crappy of a box as they can get away with. That's the new-fangled PC company.
Mac was certainly a foot in the door for the Music and Film industries - don't discount Mac usage in those industries as a reason why Apple got the green light to do iTMS.
Old reliable needs good care and feeding, and she probably has a few tricks left in her. Lest there be any doubt, if Mac was unimportant they'd let it languish on PowerPC.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Oh, no no no. I always buy two or three G5s to help inflate obscure, random surveys about computers. It is worth the extra six grand.
What'll be interesting is if at some point network effects kick in and Apple's marketshare really takes off. What marketshare do you need to get to before people stop worrying that "no one else has a mac"? Once Apple is past that things will get interesting!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
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...
1) My positive experience with my iPod,
2) The security and virus issues associated with Windows and the lack of said issues on Mac,
3) The Mac Mini is now in the range of price I am willing to pay for a desktop computer, especially one that will mainly be chacking email and surfing the web,
4) Positive reviews of Mac's OS X from programmers and IT geeks.
Mac has done a lot of things right lately to start winning over former Mac haters such as myself.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
While I'm a PC user who uses primarily XP and Linux myself (I'd like to purchase a Mac in the future) when it came time to help my friend buy a new computer, I recommended she get a Mac mini.
Traditional her and her family had always bought PC's, mostly because they were the default option. They owned several old Compaqs and a white-box store built machine. The primary reason I got her to buy a Mac is because she's a totally non-techie, and hasn't the slightest clue about computers (nor should she have to, IMO). Mostly she just wanted to be able to type stuff up for college, browse the web, IM, email, and play music.
Initially she was very hesitant about going through with the purchase (she had been set on a Dell previously..) since it was something totally new and she was concerned she wouldn't be able to use it. But I eventually convinced her to buy the Mini.
I was supposed to go over there and help her set it up once it arrived but when I called her to confirm, she gleefully told me that she had managed to set the whole thing up by herself and was already using. No help from me required, and this was someone who was a complete techno-phobe.
She's had her mini for several months now and uses it way more than she ever used her PC, which was full of crashing software, crawling with spyware, and in generally a bad state. Last I checked, the mini was running good as new. She's now recommending it to all her friends.
I think this experience highlights what I think is the best part of Apple's whole initiative.. they have simplified the computing process for the average user. Most people have no need nor desire to be computer experts, they just want the damn thing to work properly and stay out of their way. This is the way it should be. I really hope Apple keeps up the good work, because if someone like my friend can set up, use, and maintain their computers with so little trouble, then Apple is doing things right.
From my experiences with Microsoft, I still don't think they "get it". People should just be able to USE their computers, and from what I've seen of Longhorn, it doesn't look like the situation will be improving..
>>The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total
>>Addressable Market (TAM)
>Market Share refers to the sales cycle. You're talking about
> Installed Base. They're not the same and Mac haters have good
> reason for choosing to frame the argument in their terms.
Actually the grandparent is more correct than the parent, although the terminology is a little off.
Although I haven't seen good universal definitions for it, Total Adressable Market (TAM) indicates how large the total market of people that could purchase a product is. For a software developer this is a very important number and is often the same as the fraction of the installed base that can run the software. So if there are 100 Macintosh users, 75 on Panther and 25 on Tiger, and your software application requires Tiger, your TAM is 25. It can get confusing when you start talking about Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), in which case, the definition of TAM could be 100 and the SAM is 25. However, those definitions are a bit fuzzy.
Market share is different, but it's a generic term. A good business person does not take the statement "Apple has 4% market share" at face value because frankly it has no meaning. Market share must be defined in terms of what the market segment is, what the time period is, and other factors. You can therefore have installed base market share for a particularly defined segment. And defining the base market can be complex because you can do it based on unit sales or revenue (revenue is easier to come by than unit sales)
Market share can easily be defined as the grandparent said:
> %16 of the household machines currently in use were
> Macintoshes
That's more useful because we know the time frame (installed base, so it's cumulative), and what the market segment is (all U.S. households). And unit sales versus revenue is irrelevant. We still need to know more about the segmentation of the households for this to be useful, but it's a good starting place.
That's why when various people quote that Apple has 4% worldwide market share, the figure is so meaningless. Are we talking installed base? Quarterly sales? Quarterly shipments? Share based on unit sales or revenue? What about market segments -- U.S. households, every PC (including those for specialized purposes, like factories or POS units?), etc. What about specifically people that want to purpose my application, what's the share there (getting into SAM here)?
But just like the press can screw up statistics during any election year, the business press can grossly oversimplify market share rendering it useless.
All that said, it's great that Apple's unit shipments are up and growing faster than the industry. What's interesting is the iPod has helped Apple's Macintosh sales better than any ad campaign they've run.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
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