1 Million Windows to Mac Converts So Far in 2005

UltimaGuy writes to tell us AppleInsider is reporting that according to one Wall Street analyst over one million Windows users have switched to Mac in the first three quarters of 2005. It is speculated that these numbers are a direct result of the popularity gained through the iPod and related technologies in addition to security concerns from Microsoft. From the article: "According to checks with Apple Store Specialists, Wolf also said a larger than expected percentage of Windows to Mac converts appear to be purchasing Apple's higher-end systems and that their transition is fueled by the epidemic of viruses and malware on the Windows platform."

Comments

"switched" or "also bought"?

[conJunk]

TFA:

"If we assume that all of the growth in Mac shipments during the past three quarters resulted from Windows users purchasing a Mac, then purchases by Windows users exceeded one million," the analyst said. "Indeed, the number of Windows users purchasing Macs in 2005 could easily exceed our forecast of 1.3 million switchers in 2006."

TFA seems to be using "switched to" and "converted" interchangably with "purchased", implying that every Windows user who bought a Mac was turning his or her back on PCs. I don't think that has to be the case at all. If we assume that TFA is right about the reason for such good Mac sales (derriving from the strength of the ipod), then isn't it reasonable to assume that a fair number of those are people who are buying Macs not as their exclusive computer, but possibly in addition or in complement to their PCs?

Maybe the real signficance of this (assuming the numbers are correct) is that it's no longer uncool to own more than one computer!

Re:Onlly reason I haven't...

[danrik]

Your mistake is buying 2GB of RAM from Apple. They overchage for RAM unlike anything i have ever seen. Save yoruself some money and buy from someone else.

Re:The Mac Experience - not all its cracked up to

[MKalus]

Have you had a look at Pages? That may just fit your bill?

Re:No Surprise Here

[Laitment]

Actually, it's based off of the Darwin operating system, and uses the XNU kernel, which is based off of both the Mach and a customized version of the FreeBSD kernel.

Re:Analyze this!

[jma05]

>> Most of this is working on CVS stuff (do a checkout when you have a net connection, edit away, then commit when you get back). I know it can be done on Windows, but it's damn ugly.

Not really.
http://www.tortoisecvs.org/

Re:As a Mac user

[jcr]

Just to expand on that a bit: Apple's online store, and the iTunes music store are both WebObjects apps.

-jcr

Re:Time Value of Money

[nathanh]

It all depends if you'd rather have two-four hours for yourself or a little cash in your pocket...

You're deluding yourself if you think MacOS X doesn't require just as much tinkering. I'm a long suffering Mac user who has recently spent a few weeks with Tiger. I've easily spent 20 hours in the past month installing third party software like VLC because Tiger won't play DivX, finding various tweaks on macosxhints (eg, disable dashboard which is a memory sucking vampire), hunting down a crashing issue with ARD (had to replace it with OSX VNC), mucking about with configuration settings that have retarded defaults, and so on and so forth.

It's amusing that the GP commented on the multimedia keys, because attached to this Mac I have a Logitech keyboard and the multimedia keys don't work. Not even with the official Logitech drivers. Yet they work perfectly on Linux and Windows.

So don't give me any crap about Macs saving you "time and money". I use all three of the holy trinity quite heavily - Windows, Linux and Mac - and they are all about as sucky as each other.

Re:The Mac Experience - not all its cracked up to

[Smurf]

Then, I actually tried to create a tri-fold brochure with it. I could type a sentence, then wait 10 seconds for the first keystroke to appear, and another 30 seconds for the entire sentence to be inserted into the text. This occurs when editing Apple's own tri-fold brochure template.

This is very interesting. I was going to mod you down, but you are already at -1. Then I thought to myself: "I actually use and LOVE Keynote, but I don't really use Pages, so modding this comment without first hand experience would be unfair."

So I fired up Pages, opened the Three Panel Brochure template (I guess that's what you meant), and noticed that if I replaced the template text, the program would be dog slow. Not as slow as you say: after typing a very, very long sentence, the last character would appear around six seconds after I typed it, which is anyway too annoying.

So I was going to mod you up. But then I saw all the comments saying that they don't experience such a long lag... WTF? So I closed the document and started a new one using the Club Newsletter template, which looks fairly complex. To make things fair, I inserted five different pages all with several columns, pictures, side texts (or however they are called). By the way, everything looks very cool, and far more complex than the Three Panel Brochure. I started editing all over the place, with *absolutely* no delay.

So the problem is actually with the specific template! Apparently it's much more complex than it seems, or the author screwed up, or it uses a particular "feature" that kills Pages. In any case, you can make documents that look much more complex using other templates (although I only tested those two).

Someone please mod parent as "Underrated". I personally thought that describing my findings would contribute more to the discussion.

Oh, by the way: Pages - Just say yes only if you have already tested the template you want to use.

Keynote, that's a totally different story. Keynote rocks!