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'Perfect Storm' of Mac Sales on the Horizon?
fkx writes to mention an eWeek article suggesting that, finally, the PC-using public is going to 'get' the Mac. According to the article, the new advertising, increased functionality of OSX, and Intel-based machines are all raising the profile of Apple's machines to new heights. From the article: "However, this cycle isn't your usual processor upgrade cycle that comes every time Intel or Advanced Micro Devices tweaks a process. This is a major shift that affects all parts of the Mac customer-developer-vendor ecology. Longtime Apple watchers can count two earlier events of similar magnitude. The first such transition occurred in March 1994 with the arrival of the PowerPC architecture. The Motorola 680x0 architecture that had served the Mac platform for a decade was quickly supplanted by a set of new, more powerful machines. "
I'm waiting with baited breath for the release of the Intel PowerMac. I've never, ever, ever owned a Mac in any form. I've got a ton of Windows workstations and Linux servers, but never a Mac. This will change in August. I'm tired of ridiculous Windows behaviors (disk defrag inadvertantly deletes required system DLLs...nice), and ready for new ridiculous Mac behaviors, knowing I'm not giving dollars direct to Microsoft ever again.
RW
At least in my college-age demographic it is. I'm seeing a HUGE desertion of PC's in favor of the MacBooks (the MBPs are a little bit out of the range of the average college student). It's going to be a good year for Apple.
basically getting a mac now means being able to do all the stuff you've always done on your pc - plus all the stuff a mac can do. in the past there was always what you were 'giving up' - now that's gone. it is now the windows machine that runs less software.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Isn't everyone tired of the phrase "perfect storm" yet? Why do people keep using it?
Windows now has about 95% of the desktop market. Nobody is suggesting that will drop to 5% overnight.
Yes, the vast majority, of windows users will stay with windows, no question. But there is always that segment of the market which will be shopping for a new PC soon, and may consider a Mac.
How large could that segment be? 5% would be huge. If Apple could get another 2% - 3% of upcoming PC sale, Apple's sales would double. Clearly that is very significant.
The reason I have not bought a Mac is the same reason I have not ever bought a whole system: I don't want to plunk down over a grand for a new computer. For the last two decades I've always upgraded my machine by piece-mail. A new case, a new HD, a new mobo, a new video card.... So at every purchases it's only been a few hundred at most.
My old laptop is aging and I want something new. The Macbooks look good, feel good, seem to be so much more secure, and, in general, have only one drawback which is price. That's a one-time thing and I'm at the point where I'm ready to suck it up and spend it. This after twenty years of PC use. I can't be the only one drooling over these things.
More than that, the next iteration of OSX promises to be more efficient while Vista is likely to be far less effecient, need way more resources, and still suffer the same fates as my previous Windows machines.
Beyond all that, have you seen the Mac stuff? It's so cool looking!
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
MSFT is strongly pushing DRM for video content whereas Apple so far has been silent on the matter. I do not foresee Apple making a sharp about face and forcing HDMI down our throats at this stage in the game. If you value your freedom of fair use, I would suggest looking at Apple.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Hi, my name is Brent, and I've got a problem.
Oh, wait, wrong meeting.
I made the switch a couple of weeks ago, but the interesting thing I'm noticing is that the tech community, the network admins and programmers, are going to be the last ones to make the switch, and that's why it's going to catch us geeks off-guard.
In my day job, I'm a SQL Server administrator. I rely on MS tools to get my job done, and I can't do my job on OSX - or at least, I couldn't until Parallels came along. Boot Camp is a nice idea, but since I have to have SQL Server Management Studio running all day, dual-booting would mean I'd have a shiny laptop running Windows. Big flippin' deal.
Most of the guys around me said, "Why make the 'switch' when all you're doing is running Windows AND Mac OSX all the time? How can that possibly save you time or energy?" Well, it doesn't - it involves more work - but I'm having a great time doing it. As I write this, my keyboard is glowing. That's coolness.
All of us network admins and infrastructure managers rely on more Windows-centric tools than we'd like, more stuff tying us down to Windows longer than our end users. The end users seem to use more generic applications like Office, and they're able to make the switch even faster than the supposedly high-tech guys.
Normally, when a Big New Thing comes out, the geeks are the first one to make the jump. Apple's making it so easy to make the switch that the push is coming up from the end users. Attention, Windows network admins: there are probably people right now in your organization thinking about making their next computer an Apple. Be prepared when they start asking support questions like, "Which of our applications don't run on a Mac, and why?"
What's your damage, Heather?
for most of the geeks :-) Before being bashed by FOSS gurus, let me show my example.
:-) (just remember that IBM and BEA's VM's performs better than Sun's)
...), and it can become a pain to get things working. On Linux, things are far better than Windows. You have almost the same tools, but its far easier to get things working: just apt-get / emerge / whatever and you are ready to go. In a Mac, just "port install" what you need, just like linux. The difference between Mac and Linux is in the tools. The same ones + a fantastic editor (and cheap for some, expensive for others). Ok, its not that smart to left an inexpensive OS to go to an "expensive" one just because of an editor. But trust me, it worth.
:-)
:-(
I'm a Java and Ruby (on rails) programmer. I've dropped windows about 2 years ago, and used various flavors of linux in this meantime (debian, ubuntu, gentoo and ubuntu again). Less than one year ago I bought my first mac (mac mini).
Java development in Windows is "standard", in linux is good and in Mac it is great. You have the same tools as Windows or Linux and, since java is "portable", all other tools (frameworks) works fine. The difference between Windows and Linux/Mac is that Windows restricts you *a lot*. Ex.: I put all my libs in just one place, and make sym links to them in the projects I need. In Windows, its not possible (afaik) (yes, a simple example, but try to keep the libs updated on a windows box...) . And the difference between Linux and Mac is performance. *Usually*, a Java application runs faster on Mac than on Linux, because the Java VM in Mac is done by Apple, meaning that its built by the ones who knows the OS. In Linux, as you certainly know, is a certain pain to install Java (you need to follow one or another howto to get things working), and the performance is *usually* worse than in a Mac, because the VM is done by Sun, which is concerned mainly in getting things working. Yes, they care about performance, but not that much
When programming with Ruby, Mac is really awesome. Again, Windows looses here. In Windows, you have a set of tools (editors/IDE's) that also exists in other platforms, but its performance is poor (afaik). Also, some Ruby libs requires some sort of compilation (mysql, rmagick,
Besides these work-related details, you also get an OS that just works, with enough applications to do what you usually do on a PC, a good terminal (I definitely cannot use the "cmd" anymore), a more than nice UI and so on... And for people who asks me "why use a mac", I just ask the same: "why use a Windows". There is no reason to use Windows. I can't find something that Windows does better than Mac (ok, I left an space here for some +5 Funny comments).
But yes, there *are* reasons to use Linux instead of Mac. Specially if you want "all the freedom you can get", if you don't want to spend a penny in software or simply don't care about the UI.
Of course, I talked about just the OS itself. The hardware *is* more expensive, specially here in Brazil (macs comes from US, which means they are taxed in *only* 100%). But if you think a bit better, it probably worth. In my case, I spend more than 10 hours/day looking at a computer, so, it certainly worth for me
And I'm sorry, this would be a single-line comment, but it simply grows
ilex paraguariensis for all
When a mac app is ever-so-slightly needlessly-different in its user-interface, the Mac community gets up in arms. The fact that you have Gnome *and* KDE in that sentence is indicative of competing (and hence different) styles.
The mac has a long and established history of well-behaved apps, inter-operating via the OS. Nothing else comes close to the level of standardisation for all the commonplace things (cut/paste, print, preferences, user-customisable toolbars, menu layout, window management, etc. etc. etc.) It's a far more stable (as in: unvarying) environment for apps to co-exist.
Hell, you can run the whole thing with a mouse with only one button.. Twice as easy as anything else [grin]
I think though, it comes down to the well-behaved nature of the apps/developers, and the level of thought that has gone into how to make apps useful - have you seen the *size* of the Apple human-interface guidelines book ?
Take the menubar being always at the top of the screen - not everyone likes that (personally it bugs me to have to traverse two wide-screen displays to get to the File menu), but it means it's "infinitely deep". You can slam the mouse as fast as you like to the top of the screen and it'll still hit the menubar on a mac. Now I've seen people do the same thing on a PC (video-editing app), but they made it 1-pixel-in (presumably the border for a full-screen window took 1 pixel or something). Now it's nowhere near as easy to use... There are a myriad of little things like that, where it's been thought about on the Mac, and the lesson doesn't seem to have been transferred to any of the competitors.
Or hell, I could be wrong.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Digital and MS-DOS use CR-LF, UNIX uses LF, and Apple, bless it's heart, uses CR.
DEC operating systems for the most part use variable-record files with one record per line and either a 1 or 2 byte count plus an optional carriage control word per record.
CP/M and MS-DOS used CR/LF, but that was kind of an accident caused by the fact that every program was implementing its own I/O.
Apple and OS/9 and most mainframes that didn't used record-oriented files used CR, because that matched how FORTRAN behaved.
UNIX uses LF, because that's what the ANSI standard specified, but that was an "obscure standard that nobody else picked". I think they did the right thing because it happens to be very useful for a number of other reasons... but if it wasn't for UNIX gaining popularity it'd have gotten nowhere.
For the last two decades I've always upgraded my machine by piece-mail. A new case, a new HD, a new mobo, a new video card.... So at every purchases it's only been a few hundred at most.
And how do you upgrade just the cpu/mobo without upgrading ram or the hd? I've got an old HP I'd like to upgrade but when I upgrade my cpu/mobo I'll hav to upgrade my ram and more than likely my hd as well as both the bus and the hd interface will be different. As my graphics card may not be compatible with a new mobo I may have to upgrade it as well. I don't see how over a preiod of more than several years you can upgrade a piece at a tyme.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Every desktop computer I've had since my old Tandy 1000 has been a custom-built clone, excepting my stint with an Amiga 500. I've done the piecemeal upgrade thing. Here's my take on it: it's not worth it unless you're really broke, and if you're doing it often, you're probably wasting your time on your tools instead of what you do with them. Hence, two out of my three laptops have been Macs, and I like them a great deal.
There's another thing. If you want a second machine to your desktop, a laptop doesn't need to be a screamer to be very useful, nor does it need to run the same operating system. In fact, having two different kinds of machines can be pretty darn cool. So, try some old iBook or something; that's my advice if you want to sample the world of OSX. As long as you have over 512MB, even an old 600MHz iBook G3 machine is plenty for the basic browsing and email.
Out of curiousity, which of the two companies is actively selling DRM encumbered video? I agree, HDMI is a terrible thing, another opportunity to charge people more in exchange for hardware that does less and in the process help stamp out fair use. But Apple's no more our friend in this than Microsoft.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
The idea behind the Mac is that you're not supposed to have to worry about that stuff. You're supposed to be too busy actually getting work done with your computing appliance. When it gets long in the tooth, you sell it used (Apple machines have a ridiculously high resale value) and upgrade to a new one.
Personally, as someone who grew up with PCs in the 90s and has fixed too many computers to count, I find the idea today of dealing with the innards of a PC as archaic and obsolete an idea as having to turn a crank to start your car.
"Sufferin' succotash."