Slashdot Mirror
Noise Over Mac OS Market Share "Slip"
OakDragon writes, "Mac OS market share actually slipped since last September. This reverses a trend in the winter and spring months that showed some slight growth. The actual percentage loss is small: 0.02%. But it may be significant since it follows a solid growth trend. It must be disappointing to Apple and Mac fans to see what is basically a flat line in desktop market share." Mac-oriented sites are pointing out the unreliability of the metrics from Net Applications, which are based on users of the HitsLink service.
I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a .2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods.
....really old design from the early 90's, but it's been low on my priority list for the last four years) was likely the first online textbook receiving much more international traffic (about 1000 unique visitors/day from all over the world) and I have seen the international Macintosh marketshare increase from about 4% to 6.5% of total traffic over the past year.
Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day). Of all the traffic that hit my blog from the recent Boing Boing posting, it appears that of those that clicked through, over 23% of the clicks were from Macintosh systems and from the traffic I get from Slashdot, about 15% is from Macintosh systems. This limited sampling shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.
Traffic from another site I manage, Webvision (I know, I know,
Both of these statistics mirror the trends I have seen reported for the platforms marketshare on much wider scales. These are direct measures that I am reporting as opposed to a fee based service like HitsLink whose measures are not as direct. Too bad Google's Zeitgeist no longer reports on platform statistics which were a good measure of overall platform usage from a much wider used resource.
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Forgive! It was the Eye Candy what made me do it!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Who's going to buy a brand new Macintosh when we are just about to go to Rev. B. chips/platforms? Maybe everyone who is not 1-point-oh-averse has already bought a Mac. And everyone else wants x86 2.0.
Between this, the gentoo article, and the global warming article, I'm seeing some local warming right here.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Film at 11.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Of course these numbers and not at all scientfic. The change is also completely insignificant. I agree on all of that. However, I have a feeling many who will denounce these statistics would be singing thier praises if they showed a significant gain ;-)
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
You need to buy at least five or six PC's before you get one that works decently. The Mac always works the first time. :)
On a more serious note, what's the Linux vs Windows market share these days?
Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way.
Mac marketshare is always between 3-5%. They're saying on the high side of that 3-5% so that's just peachy. Why is everyone so concerned about marketshare for the Mac when all the hardware is all basically commodity, and most of the really good Mac software comes from Apple anyway?
Mac owns 90% Market Share
http://useragentswitcher.mozdev.org/
:-D
set to os x
Go dig into the numbers a bit. I'm not a Mac fanboi (see my abuse of one earlier today) but this is a non-story. The site in question is tracking Mac OS and MacIntel seperate, so of course Mac OS is dropping. Add the two together and you get a different picture. They appear not to have fixed the scripts that generate the cute graphs though, because up to now they broke out each OS variation so they could see the migration patterns in Windows versions.
Democrat delenda est
"According to Techweb, data gathered by Net Applications shows that the Mac OS had 4.35 per cent of the world's operating system share last December. Now it only has 4.33 per cent.""
Yet, at the link to the actual data, it says, for August 2006:
winXP: 84.18%, win2000: 6.54%, Mac: 3.71%, win98: 2.40%, winME: 1.10%, Other: 2.07%
So, 3.71%, not 4.33%. Looks like The Inquirer is reading the line for April 2006, and not September 2006. Actually, Mac share drops continually during the period December 2005 (4.35%) to August 2006 (3.71%). This is more than half a percentage point... which you can trust as much as you can trust their methodology, I guess.
Btw, "Other" rises from 1.33% to over 2% during the same period. That's us Linux people, right?
Mac-oriented sites are pointing out the unreliability of the metrics from Net Applications, which are based on users of the HitsLink service.
Yet if it proved the opposite they wouldn't question its reliability at all, and would bring it up every chance they get.
"Mac OS market share actually slipped since last September."
The statistic is affected by the $200 PC computers and $500 laptop PCs that are being sold.
Another explanation is that the potential Macintosh customer now realizes that the Mac is little different from a Dell PC or a HP PC. The principal difference is the price.
Well, I just priced out a new workstation comparing the top of the line MacPro and an equivalently configured Dell. I ended up buying the 3.0Ghz version of the MacPro for $1000 cheaper than an equivalent Dell.
Once Steve "I have a big ego" Jobs switched the Macintosh from the PowerPC to the Intel processor, the Macintosh lost its mystique.
Au contraire. Have you ever unboxed a new Mac? Have you ever really spent time with a Mac? While the OS is most of the experience, it goes beyond the OS.
Using some simple patches/tools, you can run Windows XP on the Mac. With a little effort, you can run the x86 MacOS on a Dell PC or an HP PC.
And with some simple tools, I can run Windows on my Mac. So?
Since the Mac is now essentially a PC clone, why would you pay a premium for Mac hardware?
See my above comment. It turns out that for the high end at least, the Macintosh is MUCH less expensive than a Dell or HP.
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Does this mean that Apple is beleaguered again?
Warning: The intelligence of this post may be larger than it appears.
I blame those idiotic commercials with the "nerdy" pc guy and the "hip" mac guy. They cater to the lowest common demoninator of consumer, and convey no real selling points for the mac. To me they seem condescending and blatently inflammatory.
If you want to sell your product apple, sell it on its own merits. "OMG The alternative is the SUXORZ!!" is not a good advertising methodology.
Quite frankly I don't want to see OS X have some huge marketshare. I'd prefer the platform to have enough marketshare that developers can make money and Apple to make a profit, but not big enough for Virus writers and spyware authors to care (the way it is now).
Why does OS X have to have an increasing marketshare to remain successful?
To start, that tower is only "better" if your space is worthless. A large part of the Mac Mini's appeal is its form factor.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I'm sure you're running Linux on that box. If not you need to factor in the cost of Windows and any other apps you need to make it an Apple to Apple comparison. Sorry for the pun Argg..
Trust me, surface area is precious to me. But I'd still rather have a tower I can put things like my TV TUNER CARD in [thus removing the need for a TV] or a half-way decent GFX card in. MacMini is basically a laptop without a screen, keyboard or trackpad. You can't add a PCI device to it, etc... Even given my limited horizontal surface area for stuff I'd much rather have the tower. I can [and do] stack shit on top of it anyways so the loss is trivial.
Oh, and it being a better box underneath is a nice feature too...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
FWIW, If you look at the Mac Pro (dual Xeons == four cores) and price a similarly configured four core workstation from Dell, the Mac ends up being about a thousand dollars cheaper.
If you think an Antec mid-tower is "a better case" than a Mac Mini you were never in the mini's target market anyway...
Talking about using CP/M is funny, but, since few Slashdot readers know what CP/M is, they won't understand the joke.
CP/M is Control Program for Microcomputers, an OS used with 8088 microprocessors back before IBM thought of selling PCs. It was a dog of an OS, mostly because it was unfinished. Back then CP/M was sold by a company that thought printing the original of manuals on a dot-matrix printer with an old ribbon was acceptable practice.
The Morrow Microdecision came with a Command Line Interface language called Pilot that was in many ways better than the CLI that comes with Windows XP. I suppose Microsoft's plan is never to supply a finished OS so people will always want new versions.
--
Bush lied, the U.S. government killed thousands. Impeach.
Remind me how "free" Mac OSX upgrades are?
Yeah, I am running Gentoo on it. I get your point, but it's moot once you hit the next revision of OSX. And anyways, for the price of "Apple Approved" memory [to at least match the GB I have] you could have bought an OEM copy of WinXP. So you're still ahead by ~$100 with the custom box. And yes, I trust the people I bought it from. The box works and if it didn't they'd make it right [not all shops are evil]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Bloody hell! It's back to beleaguered then.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I'd never buy a MP Intel box. That's just criminal. AMD HT all the way!
Core 2 Duo + CSI (Intel's name for HT, not the TV show) would probably be a good contender, who knows...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Well, "better case" is highly subjective. Your tower certainly isn't "better" for someone who needs a small-profile case. The mini is essentially a headless laptop, and with that shrinkage comes extra cost. If you don't need it, great for you. I just wish Apple would sell an inexpensive headless tower without 4 fucking cores and everything else industrial strength like the Mac Pro. I'll bet they could sell a nice Conroe tower for cheaper than the mini, with upgrade space to boot.
Of course, the other argument for Mac fanboys is that your PC probably didn't come with all the stuff that's standard on a Mac. Firewire, blueooth, wifi, gigabit eth0, remote, optical audio i/o, OS X, iLife, etc. You probably don't have every one of those. Maybe they're worth nothing to you, personally, but to make a blanket statement that it means Macs are overpriced is silly.
Apple's very price-competitive for what they sell. The thing is that they include the kitchen sink in every model, whereas many consumers don't need or want all that. It's all a tradeoff. Congrats on your new computer.
My point is if I wanted to price shop, the Mac Mini would be what I'd compare against a custom box. Yeah, I guess if the OUTSIDE APPEARANCE of the box mattered more I'd be in the "target market." But for the rest of us who can at least compare two numbers to find out which is smaller ... we avoid Apple because you pay for a stupid name.
... let's see
As for the Antec being "better"
- room for PCI/PCIE cards
- ventilation
- room for drives, e.g. RAID
- PSU that can handle the combo
And frankly this case actually looks decent. It's not just "another beige box." It's got neato ports on the front, neato front panel, it's cool.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This is pretty absurd. The market for 10.4 Tiger is pretty much done, because anyone who wanted to upgrade to to Tiger did so last year.
Anyone buying a Mac in the last year and a half got Tiger for 'free.' So who is left to buy a Tiger upgrade? If they waited this long, why buy it now rather than waiting for Leopard in a few months?
Statistics are worthless if they are presented by idiots who don't even know what the numbers mean.
----
www.roughlydrafted.com
Well, I just priced out a new workstation comparing the top of the line MacPro and an equivalently configured Dell. I ended up buying the 3.0Ghz version of the MacPro for $1000 cheaper than an equivalent Dell.
I'll be honest: I read that and I thought you were lying. So I went and looked for myself, and sure enough, I can't duplicate your results.
I can't get the Dell price down far enough. Only $1000 more expensive than the MacPro? The best I can do is $1500 more expensive.
Excuse me while I go and try to find all the pieces of my entire fucking worldview that you just completely shattered.
Free MacOS from its dependance on Apple hardware.
People say that Apple relies on its profits from hardware more than software, and breaking the tie will cause Apple's hardware business to suffer. But I don't think that is true. Here is why:
1. Apple zealots still buy Apple hardware because it is "higher quality" and "more stabler" etc. No net loss/gain here.
2. People unwilling to buy Apple hardware, but willing to run MacOS will pay Apple whatever they charge for OSX ($199?) and run it on their PC. They will also (likely) purchase other Apple apps for the OS. Net gain here of both userbase (and everything that comes with that, including commercial app support) and profit.
3. Windows lovers will continue to buy PC parts. No net loss/gain here.
4. People who only purchased Apple hardware to run MacOS will buy PC parts and run MacOS on it. Net loss on hardware only here.
In the end I think there are far more people in group 2 than there are in group 4, and the benefits of the increased userbase will far outweigh any loss on hardware they may incur.
Whats stopping them? An outdated ideology that relegates their products to a niche market (save the iPod, and we all know what a failure that was).
One thing that many people forget is that what Dell has on their website for prices is WAY more than businesses actually pay. At my previous employer, a Dell desktop that cost us around $600 was close to $1,100 on the public website for the exact same machine without the "corporate discounts".
Just because a workstation costs more than an Apple on the Dell configuration page that is available to the general public, it does not mean that any companies are actually paying that much. Dell regularly gives heavy discounts, especially if buying multiple machines. I also know that Apple discounts, but not almost 50% off of the web page price.
This is not a critisism of Apple at all, just trying let people know that Dell's web page prices for business class machines are WAY more than any smart business would ever pay.
why would you pay a premium for Mac hardware?
About the same price. Oh, and Macs have no such thing as "driver installs." Peripherals work. Right Now. Instantly. No errors. No dialog boxes. No ding noises.
And OS X is the best operating system on the planet.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Let me get this straight...
Apple's overpriced, but pretty, x86 OEM boxes are remaining a niche product in the computing world at large???
SHOCK!!!
The writing has been on the wall for Mac hardware ever since IBM dumped Apple as a customer a couple years ago.
Apple will flounder around in the x86 OEM business(you are here) -> then go software only(ala Be) -> and finally sell off the Mac/OS X stuff to concentrate on the lucrative and growing digital content market
What is the fascination with market share?
What's the thinking here? More market share must mean more sales and therefore more profit? Apple seems to be making plenty of money, so what does more market share gives you, or is it just a measure of how many customers you did not get?
IMHO, the problem is you can not make a product that will please everyone. Apple has decided to make a certain kind of product - looks cool, well designed, easy to use and at a premium price.
I guess it depends on how you classify your market. If you are talking portable mp3 players in the USA, then Apple has around 80% of the market (their figures).
If you mean "laptop computers" then the field is wide open to every man and his dog that can bolt a machine together - including the el cheapo models who compete on price alone. This is akin to putting Mercedes, Audi and Lexus in the "car market" and wondering why their share is so low (hint: you are including Hyundai and others). This is not the same market. Who are the premium computer manufacturers? IBM might be there, Dell isn't.
As long as Apple continues to focus on making their products this way they will have a following and will generate profits - to hell with market share.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
The article doesn't even get iPod sales correct. It gets the peak month wrong, and it's off by several millions. How can we accurately discuss the results if it doesn't even get public iPod number correct?
"Sufferin' succotash."
Actually the mobo I got [Gigabyte 965P-S3] has Intel HD sound, gbit eth0, 1394, usb, parallel and serial ports, PS/2 keyboard/mouse, a PCI-E 16X and 3 1x slots as well as 3 PCI slots. It also has four, count em four, not 1, not 2, but four slots for DDR2 memory.
:-)
As for OSX/ilife/etc, I don't want that. Gentoo is free. I have all the tools I need as a developer, gamer, music listener, author, pron viewer, etc for free from the nice world of OSS.
I agree with your post though. I know the mini has a niche market. But RIGHT NOW [as you pointed out] if I were to compare custom boxes, the mini is what I'd choose as it's more comparable in featureset [e.g. not a quad-core xeon]. So yeah, if Apple made something similar they could probably price it right. Unfortunately, "rational" people is not who Apple targets.
This would be like asking Alienware to make a low-power student box...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Let's see: 1. Macs are pricier (oh, but they are "cuter"!) 2. There are far fewer software titles available (especially games) 3. To me, Macs offer a much lower utility. For #3 here's an example. I am a PC tech and was disgusted the other day when I couldn't even copy and paste (or drag and drop) a folder from a user's Mac hard drive to a Safari/Firefox-loaded FTP site. It prompted for username & password like it should, I authenticated, and the Mac browser displayed the folders, but wouldn't allow me to paste files. This procedure works like a charm in every version of Windows I use at work. To me the irony of this that Apple pretty much invented the whole drag and drop GUI, right? Regardless, they are touted as being so user friendly and this just hammered another nail in the coffin for me when it comes to Macs. I'll admit that they look purty, though!
Yes, all that case room is a great place to put devices that have drivers that will operate poorly with my OS.
99% of the market want a simple box that works. I use my mini (Core Solo at that!) as a glorified KVM, web browser, mailer, skype box, and occasional photo munger. An appliance to do this wins every time against spending effort configuring another effing PC.
I haven't checked prices in a couple weeks but I am currently using a Compaq nw9440 laptop, which is pretty much the same machine as a MBP but with some different doodads. Same LCD, same size, about the same weight, etc. It was the same price with onsite service contract as buying the MBP with the non-onsite service contract where you have to take it to an apple store and get sneered at by so-called geniuses.
"Have you ever unboxed a new Mac"? What does that have to do with using the computer? This statement of yours hurts your argument more than it helps it, and makes it clear that your love of the Macintosh is pure fetishism.
I have not only unboxed new macs of every generation except the G5 (but I have unpacked a G4, WOO FUCKING HOO, I'M LIVING NOW) but next to my HPQ laptop is a dual G5 2.0GHz. It annoys the piss out of me. The Dock? Stupid. NeXTStep's dock was at least reasonable from a usability standpoint. Applications have inconsistent looks to them, and the appearance was supposed to be the selling point really. Menus misbehave constantly. And yes, I am fully patched, although I am running 10.3 - work is unlikely to shell out the $120 for the OS upgrade until one comes along that we either need for a new program, or one comes out that actually delivers $120 worth of new functionality instead of just being released to give them an excuse to change the API and break a bunch of their own programs again (like xcode - why can't the fucking IDE properly run on newer/older versions of the OS?)
And with some simple tools, you can run Windows on your Mac.
Redundant much?
But why would a nerd buy a Dell or HP when you can build a clone for half the price? (Half might actually be literal in the high end...) You can argue that it's comparing Apples to Oranges, for lack of a better pun, but since you don't have the capability to do that with a Mac, I think it's a valid comparison.
I think Apple should start selling ATX CPU/MB combos. They could pick up the people willing to build their own machines that are currently avoiding them, probably without hurting prebuilt system sales much at all because most of the people who buy Apples now (not all but most) are not the types who will or even can assemble their own computer (even though it's so pathetically easy these days that anyone with two neurons to rub together ought to be able to do it.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I keep hearing this argument, does Steve Jobs beat up everyone who doesn't upgrade or something?
It costs you $0 if you don't upgrade, and the computer continues to work.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a .2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods. Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day). ... shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.
They were actually reporting a 0.02% change, which most people would consider noise. Claims of accuracy to the five places are silly, unless you have millions of hits.
w3schools.com OS index shows a growth in share for September of 0.2%, though they have a less generous estimate of 3.8% total share.
Everywhere I look, I see more people using Mac and Linux. It's hard to believe the combined share is less than 1 in 10.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So, "the Mac OS had 4.35 per cent of the world's operating system share last December. Now it only has 4.33 per cent." Is that, by any chance, a share of a "market" that consists mostly of corporations and IT departments?
The Mac has always had that problem. "Market share" depends entirely on how you choose to define the market. Among people who don't want Apple computers, Apple's market share is small.
Cessna has a market share of about 4% of the airplane market (Cessna has revenues of $3.5 billion, Boeing $52.45 billion, Airbus $34.4 billion) but nobody worries about Cessna. If you define "the market" as "general aviation," then suddenly Cessna's market share becomes 33%.
What next? The Seattle Caviar Company's share of the egg market is slipping? Sunkist Oranges only has an 0.001% share of the apple market? Shinola has only a 1% market share of the shit market?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Only problem I have with this box is the ICH8 is not well supported by 2.6.17 but apparently 2.6.18 addresses the issues I'm having.
:-)
In general, I use my boxes for a lot of random tasks. One of which is TV watching which uses my 5 yr old Hauppage WinTV PCI card. It's passed through 4 or 5 diff boxes and it's just the way things are
But also I need a bit more horsepower than a core solo @ 1.6GHz. My build times affect how much work I can get done in a day and faster == better.
That and Core2 is wickedly overclockable. Without changing the voltage and not going over 60C [I turned the alarm on] I can clock my 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo all the way upto 2.6GHz [380MHz x 7] with PC2-6400 memory. It still runs cool, passes memtest86 and runs builds properly. And given that the Core 2 competes well with the Opteron it's not a bad free speed boost.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You should probably mention that you are comparing Apple's top desktop to a top Dell Precision workstation from the Small Business section. As another poster said, businesses don't actually pay that much when they buy more than one.
More importantly, your statement only holds true at the very top end...of the business market...without any discounts.
It costs me $0 to upgrade my Gentoo box.
Tell me how fun this is in a year or two when your newer applications stop working because of broken/missing symbols and what not. If I bought a MacOS box I'd upgrade it, not only because I want security fixes but presumably because I'd use OSX software that I need to have running and can't afford the risk of it not being compatible with previous releases.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"It must be disappointing to Apple and Mac fans to see what is basically a flat line in desktop market share."
Not as bone chilling as the news that "Other" (that's French for Linux, boysngirls) has about as many users as WinME.
"Sloppy metrics" is the understatement of the decade.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Dell's computers aren't cheaper than Apples for the same thing, but Dell sells cheaper computers. They just aren't comparable to any of Apple's.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
IIRC even Steve Jobs said something early this year about being surprised at sales being stronger than expected. The PPC to Intel transition is a major one and is an excellent long term move. But it did cause some people to hold off on buying waiting for more native software, and allowing time for the shaking out of any minor glitches in the first products. A few probably also held off on buying when they heard that the Core 2 chips were coming.
It is pretty obvious that the move was a wise choice and that both Macintosh users and Apple will be better off long term. The appeal of the new generation of machines can be expected to increase over time. In addition to new features in the OS, it is reasonable to expect that 10.5 will bring even better performance. It'll likely make better use of multiple CPU cores, use the GPU horsepower for other tasks, use the Core 2 supplemental SSE3 instructions (I've heard them called both SSSE3 and SSE4), and use of the 64-bit capabilities. The software for Windows support will also be more mature (Apple's utility is currently beta).
The release of Vista will likely bring an increase in the number of people pondering new machines instead of just an OS upgrade. With Apple being more visible than in the past some of those people will opt for getting Macs instead (either solely for the Apple experience, or to run Windows too). Some may also be playing wait and see with Vista. If it isn't really, really, wonderful, it'll help Apple.
Also where has the other person been? Windows was an Apple clone? The only innovative things in Vista are cheap knock offs of Tiger not even Leopard. Microsoft is falling behind in "their" efforts to clone Mac. Too busy patching holes in security. Macs are stunning boxes and unlike Windows systems effortless to set up and use. After nearly two decades on Microsoft systems, DOS then Windows, I'm thrilled with the Mac I just bought. I'll still keep my Windows systems for now but I'm writing this on the Mac, where I spend most of my time.
Due to the fact that four-fifths of the population own and use PCs, I'd be remiss if I didn't say, "Most people don't give a half-shit."
Meanwhile, the 'no driver installs' holds true for any new prebuilt system.
Oh, but you're talking about custom systems. Well, I'll make you a deal: Build your own Mac using specs found from the OSX86 wiki and patch your copy of OSX appropriately as per their instructions. We'll assume this as an out-of-the-box equivalent. Now, tell me about your 'no driver installs'.
Oh, I'm sorry, were you insisting upon comparing apples to oranges (or frankenboxes, as the case may be)?
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
What apple really cares about (and what matters for OS adoption) is how many people are making serious or primary use of OS X. What these numbers show is what portion of web browsing is done in "OS X"
Now given the recent release of boot camp, parrells and similar programs it seems likely that a significant percentage of OS X users will spend say 5% or more of their time in windows. If the growth in market share for OS X is usually less than the average percent of time OS X users have started spending in windows it would look like the usage is down even if there was an actual ncrease in the number of people buying and using OS X.
In short it seems likely this is an artifact of the recent ability of OS X users to effectiely run windows.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Anyone who thinks that a 0.02% change is likely to be statistically significant has to be smoking crack. Of course, with enough users and a rigorous enough methodology, it's possible, but I doubt it.
Stop spreading misinformation.
First, security updates continue, IIRC all the way back to 10.1.
Second, newer applications don't "stop working." What happens is developers start to take advantage of new features in the API--Core Data, Core Animation, Spotlight, etc which, yes, one has to pay to get. Applications that do not use these features will continue to work into the far futrue.
The only time the "links broke" was at the 10.2 switch, and hasn't happened since. This was a deliberate move that was planned from before 10.1, announced in advance, and was related to the switch between GCC 2.x and 3.x. Other than that the software is, generally, both forward and backward compatible.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
But why would a nerd buy a Dell or HP when you can build a clone for half the price?
Ummmmm, perhaps because I am not a nerd? Geek perhaps, yes. But not a nerd. Furthermore, it is not my job to build computers. Rather it is my job to do other things like generate and analyze data, teach, write grants and papers. I would much rather spend my time doing these things than building boxes, installing drivers, dealing with conflicts and such. I want my computers to work when I pull them out of the box. I want my computers to simply work when plugging in a peripheral without launching a wizard that says "I see you are trying to add new hardware". I want my computers to not constantly notify me in the middle of a presentation that my anti-virus software is out of date or than the computer suddenly discovered a new wireless network. (I've seen people who, for kicks when someone is making a presentation with a Windows laptop at a big conference, start creating new wireless networks).
When your time reaches a certain value/minute, you start to look for ways to optimize your life and for me at least, the Macintosh allows me to get work done without getting in the way.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I keep a separate Linux box for development - the dev tools I need to run are Windows/Linux only. But the last time I tried to configure my Linux box to do email, web, skype, etc, I swore so loudly I bought the mini. It just worked. And it makes a greak keyboard/mouse switch (via Synergy).
My dev time is too precious to screw around with getting appliance-level performance out of Linux.
The fact that Apple is running out of suckers does not surprise me.
Commodity/standard/cheap hardware + GNU/Linux = you win!
.....You can't add a PCI device to it, etc........
Why would you need or want to? The USB or firewire will allow just about any peripheral device to be connected that has been invented by the mind of man. What sort of PCI device functionality could be connected to a low end type computer such as a mini or its much bigger non-Apple equivalents?
All theory is gray
Shouldn't that have been "...teh SUXORZ!!"
I think that line highlights everything people are saying perfectly. You just proved why the Mac makes sense for lots of people. Sometimes Time > Money.
The problem isn't over charging for the computer as much as apple doesn't make a cheap mini tower computer....which is really stupid of them.
Meanwhile, the 'no driver installs' holds true for any new prebuilt system.
You're kidding, right? Please say you're kidding. One word: printer. Thanks.
Oh, but you're talking about custom systems.
Nope. Off the shelf Macs. Of all the people I know with at least one, none have reported an error dialog. Ever.
Face it. Apple makes the best computers on the planet. End of story.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Well, I just priced out a new workstation comparing the top of the line MacPro and an equivalently configured Dell. I ended up buying the 3.0Ghz version of the MacPro for $1000 cheaper than an equivalent Dell.
That's a bit rich, but I will give that Macs are not significantly more expensive than equivilent commodity products.
However, it doesn't go the other way. There is a rainbow of choice on the commodity side that Apple cannot match, at any price, because they do not offer it. So in practice, commodity PCs are much cheaper, because you can buy only what you need, and not what you don't. And, if you want something Apple doesn't sell, you're SOL in Mac world. Some examples would be a low end laptop with a large lcd, or a high end, compact laptop. Or, any laptop with a VGA port for connecting to projectors, which generally do not have DVI inputs.
I am not an Apple fan, but those numbers have no meaning for me. As you would learn in any statistics class, any statistical number you get should be reported with some 'error bar'. What if the samplig was done so that the actual Mac usage was 4.35+-0.1? What if the error is 0.01? The same number would have two different meanings...
Bingo, you got it.
The ONLY reason I was comparing my box to the mini is because Apple doesn't have a similar "beige box."
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The ones where the mac and pc persona debate who is better. The "facts" they use in the adds are pure BS, and the Mac persona is a moron. It's kind of sad because Apple does have a lot to brag about but they'd rather BS.
"the Macintosh lost its mystique"
I don't give a crap about mystique. It works better.
"why would you pay a premium for Mac hardware"
Because it's very well designed, and comes with a state-of-the-art OS. Any other dumb questions?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
My time is worth money too. However, unlike the average consumer I'm not a retard and know how to google. It literally took me only 10 minutes to find the boot line I required.
In many fields [not just computers] if people were willing to invest just 5 mins of their time they could save money, resources, etc. Granted there are limits to this, but spending 10 mins looking for a string saved me over $100 and got me a box with more gusto than the Mini.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"Most people don't give a half-shit."
And I don't give a quarter shit what people do or do not give a half-shit about. Popularity is not a determinant of quality, nor of suitability to my needs.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
That's not a fair comparison, for three reasons:
1) The Mini is a low-end machine, and Core 2 is a brand new processor. Even Dell is only fielding Core 2 in its higher end XPS and Precision lines, just like Apple is fielding it in their higher end iMac and Mac Pro lines. The only reason you got it in a lower-end machine is because you built it yourself, which 99% of buyers won't do.
2) Your "custom machine" includes no warrenty and no technical support. That's probably not a problem for you, but it is for Apple's target market.
3) The two products you mentioned aren't in the same market! The Mac Mini is a SFF machine, something which carries a several-hundred dollar premium in PC space (for machines several times as large as the Mini).
The basic problem you have is that Apple doesn't have any product targetted at the market you're talking about, the headless desktop. Apple's desktop is the iMac, which is very competitively priced in its market. For example, to get a machine like the $1500 iMac 20", you'll pay Dell $1850 for a comparable XPS 210. At that price, the two machines have the same processor and RAM, the Dell has 70GB more HDD, a TV tuner, and an USB2 external disk, while the Mac has Wifi/Bluetooth and a much faster GPU. It's also, based on my own experience, more compact, nicer looking, and quieter.
In short, Apple's prices on the Intel Macs are great, if they're selling the product you want. If they're not, then its not fair to make comparisons with products they sell that aren't intended for your market.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Aside from CPU architecture wonks who post on slashdot, nobody cares. To 99% of the people who buy computers, a Mac is a Mac, and a Dell is a Dell, and the difference between i686 and PPC instruction sets is totally lost on them.
Once Steve "I have a big ego" Jobs switched the Macintosh from the PowerPC to the Intel processor, the Macintosh lost its mystique
Yeah, because the end user got a free blow job every day from Motorola just for having a PowerPC processor. WTF?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
In my personal experience, I know more and more people buying Apple who never have in the past. Especially in the notebook computer market.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is what most everyone else here is seeing as well.
Sometimes these studies aren't an exercise in what the truth is in the real world, especially if they are funded by those who don't like what is happening in the real world.
As to TFA, I have a question... There are lots of Slashdotters that can probably answer this for me pretty well: Isn't .02% statistically negligible, WRT a market trend report?
Mod me OT on this one, It's fine with me.
I'm always amazed at the vitriol that spews forth on this subject. Although, frankly, post threads like those in response to this article are always interesting to read (and sometimes funny).
IMVHO, use what machine and OS you like, like what machine and OS you use (if you have a choice). It isn't the chip, the windowing system, the kernel, or the manufacturer... it's what it does for you personally. I like Solaris, Fedora, Mac OS (any, really), XP, 2000, Irix, HP/UX... well, just about any of them. The hardware is always a relative benchmark to me. If I like it, and it works great without kicking me in the pants every time I try to use it, then I use it. I enjoy my little Blade 100 as much as my VAIO as much as my iMac G5. Like what you use, and use what you like.
A Passionate Independent Musician
You're missing the point entirely. It's like saying all those SFF PCs are worthless because they're less expandable and more expensive than your Antec. Expandability and price aren't the point of the Mac Mini. The point is to have a computer that's small, quiet, and unobtrusive. Something that fits on a fancy glass receptionists desk, or in a quiet study. Just because they're comparable in price doesn't mean that the target market of the two things are comparable!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'll tell you what the post means. It means that somebody has paid a press agent to put stories in the media pushing an anti-Apple agenda.
Let me explain a bit about HitsLink. Their reason for existence is to be a paid "hit"-man for publicity pros. Are you CBS-Viacom or the Radio Industry? Do you need to make it seem to the business community that Howard Stern is tanking on Sirius Satellite Radio? Have Hitslink provide a story saying that the number of Lycos searches for "Howard Stern" are down by X %. Forget the fact that everybody knows that you'd go to Sirius.com if you want to read about Stern. Forget that nobody uses Lycos any more.
Let's say you are Salem Radio Network and you want it to seem like conservative commentator, former Sec'y of Education and degenerate gambler Bill Bennett's morning show is really happening. Get HitsLink to create a story saying that he's "Number 9 in the nation". Forget that he's just been dumped from the third biggest market in America (Chicago). Forget that the actual listings show that there are 24 talk shows ahead of Bennett's. Let's just round the figures out so that there are 2 or 3 talk shows tied for Number 1, Number 2, etc. So you can say that Bennett is in the Number 9 slot when in reality he is number 24 out of 30.
It pays to know that nearly every story that you see or hear in the media has been placed there by a press agent or public relations department in the form of a press release, which gets reworked (sometimes) by a "reporter" (really a stenographer) into a "story" which is presented as "news". It pays to know that outfits like HitsLink exist just to spread manure.
You have to ask yourself if a story like this passes your own "smell test".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Your point #3 highlights why Apple is not growing. They're not tagetting a rational market. More people would rather have a beige box than a tiny little cute espresso sipping elite box.
As for the warranty, I've read the anti-apple websites. Their warranty isn't something to really be proud about. That said, the company I bought from is trustworthy. I've had to exchange/refund things before and they never fight it. Because of that I order from them for all my gear, even though I don't live in the same city. I'd rather pay $15 shipping on $300 worth of gear, than pick it up locally. That's call loyalty.
The only reason I compared against the Mini is because it's the only thing Apple offers that is close to what I needed. I didn't need a "box in the monitor" imac and I certainly didn't need a quad-core MacPro thingy...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"Stop spreading misinformation."
Good luck with that. This guy uses his anti-Mac jones to pound railroad spikes through 2x4's.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
What box from Apple compares to the "beige box?"
I think that's my point. Most people I know would rather have a beige box [e.g. custom functional reliable box] over some cutsie-wutsie-itty-bitty box.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Geek perhaps, yes. But not a nerd.
There's a difference??? Oh noes!
I don't know what you've been smoking but for the same price of a top-rated Mac Pro at 3GHz, you can get a 3.73GHz from Dell, so why don't you please stop spreading FUD and have a nice cup of shut the fuck up.
Where can I buy one of these Orange computers?
How ya like dat?
The Z80 is a sperset of the 8080, not the 8088. The 8088 is a superset (IIRC) of the 8080. However, neither the Z80 nor the 8088 are not supersets of eachother, so not all Z80 code will run on 8088 and not all 8088 code will run on Z80.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Celeron D, 256MB, 80GB HD, CDRW, 6-in-1 media reader, 17" Monitor, All-in-one printer - $149. That's why Apple's marketshare is slipping. They've done wonders to lower their prices, but the Wintel world has not been standing still.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Wow...just wow. That's a pretty good troll, but why anyone would care about a comparison based on 10 year old hardware (the 8600) and at best 8 year old software (MacOS 9) is beyond me.
Your point #3 highlights why Apple is not growing.
Apple is making money hand over first, so their strategy of not paying too much attention to marketshare doesn't seem to be a bad one.
They're not tagetting a rational market. More people would rather have a beige box than a tiny little cute espresso sipping elite box.
IYou're right in a way, in that what lots of people do want to buy is a cheap beige box running Windows. Sure, Apple would sell such a machine, but why would anybody buy it from them, instead of buying it from Dell?
As for the warranty, I've read the anti-apple websites.
The anti-Apple websites are unreliable, by virtue if their very subject matter. They exist because Apple is held to ridiculously high standards. Take Dell's 240x series of monitors for example. Websites universally laud the 2405 and 2407 for being the best monitors in their class. Yet, Dell is on their 7th revision of the basic 240x design, and its taken that many revisions to sort out the inverter whine, the lopsided stands, the backlight bleeding, the banding on gradients, the fuzzy text, etc. Everybody just accepts it as a fact of life that when you order one of these things, you will have to take Dell up on their "15-day no-questions return" at least once. Yet, everyone denounces Apple for far less serious problems with the MacBook, even though the problems aren't nearly as widespread.
If you look at actual studies of customer satisfaction, say those conducted by consumer reports, Apple is at the very top of the heap.
The only reason I compared against the Mini is because it's the only thing Apple offers that is close to what I needed.
It makes absolutely no sense to compare two products that have entirely different purposes. If Apple doesn't sell the product you want, then complain about that. Don't rig up a comparison that's fundementally flawed.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Stop running M$ on your macbook - you're feeding the Windoze zealots with misleading statistics !
As an aside, I do occasionaly need to use IE for cr@ppily encoded sites - maybe this stat can be interpreted as an increase in cr@ppy websites is driving macbook users to use parallels/IE for browsing ...
There's a sucker [%s/sucker/stat/g] born every minute ...
Are you saying that Apple doesn't provide discounts to businesses?
Talk about a statement that doesn't hold true.
With the major "Buying Force" spending $50,000 on cars and buying $450,000 homes, I doubt price is the overall reason to buy or not to buy Apple products.
Rather, you go with what you feel more comfortable with.
It's obvious you went the cheap route, which is fine in your case.
But the "Buying Force" knows when you want something nice, your going to pay for it.
Anyway.....it's all based on what the Market will Bare....
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Using a Mac with a TV tuner is amazingly easy. The Eye TV Hybrid is so small, it'd be no trouble at all to bring it along and use even with a laptop. It is about the size of two fingers held together. The included software is very easy to setup and use, making a Mac into an excellent TV/PVR.
Used with a 24" iMac, you'll get native 1920*1080 (full 1080i resolution), something that very few of the $4000 plasma televisions offer. A recent Apple Event included mention of the upcoming iTV (name subject to change, $269 IIRC) that will allow streaming video wirelessly to the living room for that bigger screen. Think of it as Airport Express for video/audio, with a remote control path back to the server. I think we'll see Apple making a big push into video around the time 10.5 ships.
Oh really?
You're not seeing the flaw in your reasoning. Does it make sense for me to bitch that the Ford Focus is much slower and more expensive than my Kawasaki motorbike? Does it make sense for me to ask, "well, what car from Ford compares to the bike?" Does it make sense for me to bitch about Ford not making motorbikes? Of course not!
As for what people want: if Apple could make money selling such boxes, they would be. If Steve Jobs is anything, he's good at making money. The simple fact is that even if they did, nobody would buy it. Your friends don't want an Apple machine. By your own words, they want a custom, functional box. So why would they buy from Apple? They wouldn't, they'd buy from Dell or build it themselves. So what purpose does it serve Apple to target a market that doesn't want their products?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I was sort of shocked when I read this as well. Can you fellas be a little more specific with exactly what you configured? I just looked at Dell's website and I can't even find a 3.0Ghz single processor configuration. Maybe it's because I'm looking on the home site and not the small business site or somesuch confusing thing that is typical of Dell. I also noticed that the Dell workstations go up to 3.7 Ghz and the Apples only go up to 3.0. Is it possible that you are comparing Apples to Oranges? Right now I am comparing a dual 3.0 Ghz Apple Workstation with a Terabyte of hard drive 4 GB of ram and the best videocard to a comparable dell excepting the fact that the Dell has 3.2Ghz processors because i couldn't configure it like that. The Dell is $4,500 and the Apple is $6,649. Until I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume that you're comparing a 3.7Ghz dell setup to a 3.0Ghz Apple setup.
I want my computers to work when I pull them out of the box.
Having just bought my first "pre-made" computer in years (a new laptop from Compaq), I find this statement *hilarious*.
After taking this thing "out of the box", I spent no less than 30 minutes weaving my way through pre-setup wizards and registration dialogs. I then spent no less than *two hours* uninstyalling tosns of pre-loaded crap software I did not wan ton this machine - stupid toy games, trial versions of anti virus, trial versions of DVD burning software, trial this and trial that, all cluttering up my tray with 15+ icons.
In comparison, last time I built a computer, it took me about 30 minutes to put the pieces together, and 30 minutes to install the OS. Net savings of 1.5 hours and god knows how many hundred dollars.
Of course building your own laptop is not really an option, hence why I bought this one. But god, I buy pre-made PC's as little as humanly possible.
Macs on the other hand - I have not had any real experience with yet. From what I hear they funciton much better "out of box" - no pre-configuring, no trial craptastic software pre-installed.
The summary of this article is tagged fud and notfud. In fact, I've noticed that most if not every article is either tagged "fud" or "slownewsday."
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Um, no, because my custom box does what I want [and more than the mini]. The fact that Apple doesn't sell anything comparable, and even if they did it'd still be more expensive is why I don't own a single piece of Apple gear. That was the point of my post in the first place. To point out that Apple doesn't make good [any] custom boxes and loses appeal with people who have to be smart with their budgets.
Recall there was a time when Apple made towers with proper expandibility and all that. The original G3 and G4 towers had PCI slots where you could add new hardware on. But that all aside. I honestly think there is a larger market for the "beige box" then the cute boxes.
I'm not saying that apple has to sell to the mass markets. I'm just saying if they want to eat into the larger market they have to sell something the larger market wants. If they want to remain relegated to sub-5% market share that's their right.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
1. My custom box is cheaper.
... I'd buy the $300 TV tuner [my PCI card cost $100 retail in 2001...]. But I'd also be a starbucks latte sipping poetry writing retard with money to spend foolishly.
And
2. I already own a TV tuner card.
I suppose if I didn't own one and I didn't know how to build a custom box
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
There is indeed a lot more choice on the PC side. Of course most of it is poorly designed junk, since the focus of the PC world is how cheaply you can make things, not how enjoyable you can make the ownership experience. And that's why you can buy PCs for so much less than Macs. It's not that Apple's ripping you off, it's that Steve quite laudably refuses to make junk.
Of course there are exceptions, like Alienware and the like, but they're comparably priced to Macs. It's nice in an abstract sort of way to see all that choice, but that makes the Apple zone, where all is tasteful and beautifully designed, look like the best place there is.
However, one of your statements is simply not true. I hooked up my PowerBook G4 to a VGA projector with the adapter Apple provided in the box, for free. So compatibility with projection LCDs is no reason to stick with Windows.
D
After taking this thing "out of the box", I spent no less than 30 minutes weaving my way through pre-setup wizards and registration dialogs ... Macs on the other hand - I have not had any real experience with yet. From what I hear they funciton much better "out of box" - no pre-configuring, no trial craptastic software pre-installed.
You heard wrong. There is registration, there is wizard like tools to setup networking and email, etc. There is also trial software, MS-Office for one.
I know this can be a little confusing to computer novices. The 3.73GHz Xeon is slower and uses more power than the 3.0GHz Xeon, even though they use the same socket. However, you shouldn't be talking shit, especially about a subject you know little about.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
I just went and speced out a hefty Mac and a Dell. Had to go with the super duper video since it was the only model both offered.
Dual 3.0Ghz Xeon
4GB Memory (4x 1GB sticks on both, ECC on both)
4X 500GB SATA drives
512MB NVidia Quadro
DVD +/- everything drive
No monitor on either system
Apple: $7,449 firm
Dell: $5,575 before the infamous Dell discounting starts
One year warranty on the Apple, Three years Economy OnSite on the Dell
Democrat delenda est
There is always a slowing trend in buying consumer goods between July and October - before the holiday season. I am not sure if this data is compared to the PC market share for the same period. The focus is more on this umber now because of the increased market ad media focus on Apple.
I want my computers to simply work when plugging in a peripheral
..and you bought a Mac? From my experience The term "not Mac supported" is more likely to be uttered than anything else in the hardware peripheral world. If you cant plug a USB Device into a Windows XP box and click next once or twice, and generally on the first time using the hardware, then yes you deserve your mac. I am not saying XP does not have it's (huge) problems, but patting yourself on the back for "Mac compatibility" is somewhat akin to a joke.
about 50% of Apple's hardware sales are laptops, and they are going to possibly break a company record this quarter by selling over 1 million laptops. the previous record was last quarter and that was a bit under 800,000. the iMacs are selling well, and the Mac Pro and Xserve finished off the last of the PPC Macs. that should resolve some holdouts. it sounds like the above post explains it that they are not combining PPC and Intel based Mac OS X hits.
l e-laptop-sales-to-push-past-the-million-mark.html
just one source of this:
http://macuser.pcpro.co.uk/macuser/news/93513/app
just to save you some time..... if you look for more info on google you may want to do a -recall if you put in: Apple million laptop
I priced this out on the Dell Home site and it didn't even come close to being true. Unless the Dell Home Site offers a $1000 discount that they don't offer to businesses and the Apple Business site offers a $1000 discount that Apple Home doesn't offer, then you are completely off with your figures. I am almost certain you are comparing a 3.7Ghz Dell to a 3.0Ghz Apple. Will someone please provide price points and specs for this exceptional case of an Apple being cheaper than a comparable anything? Last time I checked even Sony made less expensive stuff.
http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20060919/is-apple-
If that is really a random sampling, it has everything to do with overall market share. But it isn't. It is a sample of the market which subscribes to HitsLink. That's not a random sample.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Dell quickly throws a few hundred off each to me (on purchases less than 5 computers)
I don't buy direct from apple, but I don't get that from my local Apple supplier.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
IIRC you'll have to look at Dell's business machines to find comparable pro hardware (dual Core 2 "Woodcrest" Xeon CPUs - the 5150 chip is 2.66 GHz). I believe Dell has an offering called the Precision 690.
The non-Xeon Core 2s cannot be used in pairs of chips. One chip = 2 cores.
At 3.7 GHz, it sounds like you're looking at machines with the earlier Pentium IV or D CPUs, much different animals.
Note that the Xeon is dual core, so with dual Xeons you're getting four cores.
This kind of topic always gets so many responses ... its just crazy! And once again, the "report" that kicked it all off has no information on the methodology used.
*Yawn* As long as Apple stays in business and I can upgrade my machines every 5 years or so, I'm a happy camper. Nobody is forcing the unaquafied masses to buy Macs, so they should all just settle down and reinstall their systems or something.
Not all random numbers are created equally.
How many people (like me) are waiting for a Core 2 Duo MacPro? Perhaps we would make up 0.03% of Mac OS's market share?
No, I will not work for your startup
"Au contraire. Have you ever unboxed a new Mac? Have you ever really spent time with a Mac? While the OS is most of the experience, it goes beyond the OS."
...um nevermind.
Oh yes, oh yes I have. That new Mac smell, each little piece ready for the unwrapping, the soft white curves, the feel of plastic on my naked...
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Disclaimer: I am a very happy owner of a Mac Pro.
I'd prefer the platform to have enough marketshare that developers can make money and Apple to make a profit, but not big enough for Virus writers and spyware authors to care (the way it is now).
I honestly have never understood this idea that Macs would suddenly get more interest from Virus writers if they had market share.
If you were a cracker and you saw these pompous Apple commercials, saw the Apple trolls that say that Apple can do no wrong, and saw all this news coverage about POTENTIAL viruses for OS X that turn out to be garbage, would this not be an obviously huge target to shoot for if you were going for notoriety?
No. I have no doubt you'd get some more interest if there were more market share, but basically Apple has been giving crackers the raspberry for years now. I highly doubt they're just idly ignoring a target that would likely get them huge press and shut Apple up about being Virus-free. That's way more interesting than an XP exploit, which we've seen hundreds of.
Why does OS X have to have an increasing marketshare to remain successful?
Because it's a publically traded company?
Wikipedia sez: "The My freelance gig in front of a Mac trolls appear in virtually every discussion about Apple Computer. The troll claims to have witnessed <the latest Apple hardware> taking 20 minutes to copy a 17 MB file from one folder to another and proceeds to question all Apple users as to their platform choice. It is a straight forward copy-and-paste from a weblog entry by Jason Kottke. It has also led to some very inspired and amusing parodies."
This is the poster who made the comment about the corporate discount. The company I worked at could also get a discount on Apple equipment. The discount averaged about 10-15%. Basically what you would get for an educational discount.
Dell highly inflates prices on their web page to catch the suckers who do not know better. I personally like OSX and the Apple hardware, but when it was time to buy a laptop earlier this year, I got a Gateway at a retail store (which has performed quite well) with 512MB, 60GB, DVDRW, 15.4 widescreen monitor, Celeron M (don't do gaming on it) and wireless for $650. I did have to spend time ditching the lousy add on software, but it was still worth it. Even with the discount I could get at Apple, an equivalent machine was roughly twice the cost. The only real benefits the Apple had was a faster processor (the machine is used for minor picture editing and web surfing by the wife) and a bit better battery life.
As I said before, I think that OSX is much more secure by design, easy to use, and Apple makes good hardware, but I could replace the laptop I have with a brand new unit, and still have paid less than one Apple laptop.
I know that this was about workstation class machines, but
Thanks, I just priced it out on the small business website and the Dell came in 1300 dollars cheaper. I don't love Dells or anything, and you certainly do get some extra value with an Apple, but I would still love to see an apple that is cheaper than a dell, I'd buy it in a second.
Does Netcraft confirm?
No ding noises.
Actually, that's something I can't stand on the Mac. I use a PC at home and a Mac at work, and the lack of any feedback on the Mac is really annoying when I try to plug in something like a card reader.
Perhaps it's just because I buy cheap peripherals that go belly-up far too often, but the indication of whether a new device is installed and working properly, is fried and functionally useless, or just "isn't", especially in an instantaneous and unobtrusive form, is quite useful.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
"The basic problem you have is that Apple doesn't have any product targetted at the market you're talking about, the headless desktop."
I sure wish they would. I really don't like having all in one units. I want some expandability. Most notably I'd like to be able to upgrade my video card and put another internal drive or two. If I had an iMac I'd have to have a large stack of external drives next to it.
I prefer having a standalone monitor as it's more flexible. If the monitor breaks, I can hook up a spare and not have to send my computer in.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Well, I just priced out a new workstation comparing the top of the line MacPro and an equivalently configured Dell. I ended up buying the 3.0Ghz version of the MacPro for $1000 cheaper than an equivalent Dell.
Interesting. I just priced out the HP equivalent of the top-end Macbook Pro, and it comes to $1484.99 (vs. $2,799.00).
The bottom end Macbook Pro is $1,999, while the vaguely equivalent costs $1094.99. These aren't nearly as similar as the previous ones are: the macbook has a higher resolution, an X1600, and digital audio i/o, while the HP has 512 MB more RAM and a Go 7400. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be willing to spend $900 more for those features that the Macbook has.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
I ended up buying the 3.0Ghz version of the MacPro
I want to know why you think you need $3,500 worth of bleeding-edge computer hardware to "write grants and papers"?
It sounds like a classic example of being sold a 747 when you only needed a pickup truck. A $599 Mac Mini would have been be able to do everything you want. Or is this another educational establishment scam thing, where larger price tags are easier to justify?
Yeah, some real-life figures on a 1.83 Cure Duo Mini, from the Activity Monitor:
1. Copying around the internal drive, about 12 MBytes/sec
2. Copying between firewire externals, about 17-20 MBytes/sec
3. Copying to a scavenged Compaq 60 Gig laptop drive over USB, 9 - 10 MBytes/sec
Note that CPU usage is usually minimal even when moving this quantity of data around in a sustained manner.
Given these figures, I'm contemplating imaging to the external, and booting off that instead, but it's hardly worth as the machine is easily the fastest and most responsive desktop I've ever used.
For comparison, I've seen 60 MBytes/sec out of a AMD64 with a SATA Raptor.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
"With the major "Buying Force" spending $50,000 on cars and buying $450,000 homes, I doubt price is the overall reason to buy or not to buy Apple products." To continue with your analogy, the fact that I can afford a $50,000 car does not mean that I will be willing to spend $2000 for a computer with $1000 worth of components in in it. There is something to be said for paying for luxury, but I don't consider the Mac OS to be luxurious enough to justify its price. "But the "Buying Force" knows when you want something nice, your going to pay for it." Well I am not the "Buying Force," but when I am about to buy something, I usually take into account what I want to do with that something, and then try and find the cheapest thing i can buy that does that thing. In the case of Apple, which doesn't really add any comfort for me, I am not willing to pay a ton of extra money for hardware, and a ton of extra money software to do the same thing. "Anyway.....it's all based on what the Market will Bare...." I don't know what the deal is with all the extra capitalization, is that some sort of pun (bare means naked), but that is quite true, there are a bunch of people who buy Apple and like Apple, and that is fine, but price is a reason not to buy Apple, and is perhaps why the market will only bear a user base of roughly 5%. The people who love Apple and are willing to pay for it, and the people who work in jobs where Apples are superior. While I agree with most posters that the .02 percent shift is not very significant, I think the main reason that Apple's market share is either stagnant or growing slowly, or whatever, is that it is strictly a luxury brand. Computers are beginning to be so frequently used that even poor people (gasp) are starting to buy them. Office Depot was just selling a computer for $100 or something like that. For people who are not able to buy $50,000 cars, Apple is going to remain far out of reach.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
The cheapest you can price a Dell Precision 490 with a pair of 3.0GHz Xeon 5160 processors is $3478. That's with a bare CD drive and an 80GB drive. (The Woodcrest Xeons are the 51xx series, not the 50xx chips, so make sure you're picking the right chips.)
The same Apple system is $3224, with a DVD burner and a bigger hard drive (and and extra bay). Enjoy your Mac.
I suspect that you compared an older Dell model with the previous-generation Xeons, not the more powerful Core 2 "Woodcrest" Xeons. Please check that as there is a big difference. The 2.66 GHz Woodcrest Xeon is the 5150.
You'll need to select TWO of them (for four cores total).
The default "Suggested Configuration" for the Mac Pro, is $2499 which includes:
Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" 5150 processors
4MB shared L2 cache per processor
1.33GHz dual independent frontside buses
1GB memory (667MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC)
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics with 256MB memory
250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive1
16x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
There are many possible configurations of course, pick what you like. All Mac Pro configurations include: two Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" microprocessors, eight fully buffered DIMM slots, one double-wide PCI Express graphics slot, three full-length PCI Express expansion slots, four hard drive bays, two optical drive bays, five USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, two FireWire 800 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, optical digital audio input and output, analog stereo line-input and line-output, and a headphone minijack.
I want to know why you think you need $3,500 worth of bleeding-edge computer hardware to "write grants and papers"?
Did you happen to read the bit about analyze data? If you bothered to click through and explore before opening your mouth, you might find that I do lots of image analysis work and for that, I need cycles.
Of course the cool thing these days is that I can do it all (data collection, analysis, write up, and image preparation for publication) in one environment. I *used* to have three systems on my desk each with a 21in monitor. An SGI Octane, a Windows system and a Mac. Now its all one MacPro with a couple of big-assed monitors.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I'd pay at least $100 to get OS X and to not worry about viruses and malware.
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
::Ummmmm, perhaps because I am not a nerd?
Ummmmmm, shut the fuck up, worthless Apple zombie.
Install Growl and run HardwareGrowler (included with the download). It'll give you an unobtrusive, customizable notification when you connect or disconnect a piece of hardware.
For more information, click here.
Warning: Rant to follow
Unless you're Ballmer or Jobs or a Linux distro company, does it really matter? I mean, really, really matter?
Do I, as a OS X user, see any sort of effect if OS X usage goes up or down?
In case you're wondering...no.
I guess I just get tired of Linux fanboys declaring that "we must get this to the desktops of the unwashed masses" or the Mac fanboys stomping around saying how much Microsoft is copying from OS X into Vista, and the Microsoft fanboys sitting around all smug with their favorite OS enjoying a practical monopoly status.
You use what works best for what you want to do, market share be damned. I use OS X for some things and WinXP for others because they each have their strengths in different areas. If John and Jane Public can easily get their digital photos of Junior's 8th birthday party by simply plugging their camera into their Windows box and pressing a button, more power to them. If you develop the Next Great Thing in an Unbuntu environment, congratualtions.
If a WinXP platform did what I want it to do as well as, or better than, OS X for a better value then I would have stuck with WinXP. If the engineering tools I need to use every day worked on a Linux platform as easily as on an WinXP or OS X platform, I would have stuck with Linux.
I coouldn't care less if OS X market share changed 0.02%, up, down, or sideways.
I'm done ranting.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
As a Mac user, I could care less about this. If people want to continue laboring away on an unsecure, unreliable piece of s___ Windows OS, they are more than welcome to continue their suffering, hopefully in silence. I'll continue to work efficiently, securely and quietly in my reliable, intuitive and wonderful low-market-share OS X in the meantime. I mean, I actually got what I paid for when I bought my Mac. Three years down the line it's still running like brand new. I could never say that about my old Windows machines... However cheaply priced they may be these days, I wouldn't take one even if it was free for all the hassles that come with them.
Blah, blah, blah...whatever... We're all such losers for caring so much about this stuff in the first place, right?
and dells use desktop ram, desktop cpu, and desktop video card the I-mac uses laptop parts.
Also with the dell you can upgrade the video card with out being forced to get a bigger screen / hard disk and faster cpu with the I-mac.
aka the 20" lets comes with and lets pay more for better video then the 17" and the 17" only lets up the video ram not get a better card.
My goodness tell whoever is hiring you that they're spending more money in wasted freelance time than a new mac would cost!
Netscape! I shudder in horror. 486?
When your time reaches a certain value/minute, you start to look for ways to optimize your life and for me at least, the Macintosh allows me to get work done without getting in the way.
Sounds like a good reason to switch to Mac. I have this trouble all the time with my XP Pro systems but my Mac rarely bugs me about anything. I get warnings everytime I turn on an XP system. I just want to be left alone to work not be harassed by Windows. I had it demand to restart my system in the middle of a render I had to fight it off for two hours to get the render done. I was ready to reformat it and go back to Win 2000. Either way I'm still planning to finish a migration to Mac.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
[In regards to statistics] "Then there was the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches."
W. I. E. Gates
$1300 cheaper than $2499? That's about $1200!
I looked around some and found that it cost about $1400 just to get a pair of the Xeon 5150 CPUs with no computer!
When you give no specs or prices, I find it difficult to believe that you can find a situation where a compable Mac isn't significantly more expensive than a wintel PC.
What do you mean by "top of the line?"
If you mean that you simply picked the most expensive options on each model - then the comparison is nonsense.
If what you meant was "best for your needs" - then of course this is entirely subjective.
If you compared architecture for architecture with same sized/types of drives, memory, video - there is just no way I can think of to obtain your numbers.
Here are my comparables:
Micron PC: www.mpccorp.com
Total Price $2,685.00
Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional w/SP2
Dual-Core Intel Xeon 3.0GHz Dual Processor (2x2MB Cache, 667MHz FSB)
1GB (2X512MB) ECC DDR2 FBDIMM SDRAM
500GB RAID Edition SATA II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Hard Drive (7,200RPM)
256MB Nvidia GeForce 7300GS Graphics Card PCI Express (VGA DVI-I TV-OUT)
Integrated Dual Gigabit Ethernet
Mouse already included in Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop
NF640 Base Chassis w/Fixed 550w Power
Microsoft(R) Office 2003 Basic Edition
Sv.1st-3rd Yr.Manufacturers Ltd Warranty.Tech Support & Parts
SV Customer Selects No Uplifted Server Service
Apple Computers: www.apple.com
Total price: $3857
Two 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
1GB (2 x 512MB)
500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI)
One 16x SuperDrive
Apple USB Modem
Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple wireless Mighty Mouse - U.S. English
Mac OS X - U.S. English
AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro/Power Mac (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
My space isn't worthless, but I'll easily give up an extra 2-3 cubic feet of it for a cheaper computer - not to mention nice things like expansion slots, extra drive bays, and a 3.5" harddrive.
Yes, the link provided in the story, http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 5, lists the market share of the various Windows versions, Mac, and 'other'. And the Aug 2006 stats show WinME+Win98 at 3.5%, and 'other' at 2.07%. But that 2.07% isn't all Linux, not even close.
= 2, the share is broken down into much more detail (rather than throwing the low share OSes into 'other'), and Linux is listed at only 0.47%.
If you look at another link on the same site, http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I think that would compare to the Apple Xserve, which can handle 32GB RAM, SAS drives, can be clocked upto 3 GHz, and the price starts at $3,000 (although it isn't available until October). Compare a Dell Precision 490 with two Xeon 1030s (clocked at 2.0 GHz, same as the basic Xserve) is $3,461.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I don't want to start a holy war here but what is the deal with this eight-year-old Mac troll? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig browsing slashdot when I should be working for about twenty minutes while it attempts to to make me laugh 17 times. At home, while looking at the *BSD troll, which by all standards should be a lot less funny than the Mac troll, I'd be giggling in two minutes, if that.... From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Mac troll is a superior troll. 8-year-old Mac troll addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use the Mac troll over other faster, funnier, more reliable trolls.
"Recall there was a time when Apple made towers with proper expandibility and all that."
Why do you think that the current Mac Pros are not expandable?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Dell is a tad slippery about their pricing.They sell the very same product at different rates based on how you navigate the maze of their web site. They're almost like an airline in that respect.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Aren't they just happy using their computers? Apple fanbois are the most obsessed bunch of douchbags I've ever seen. No wonder Apple's market share is slipping!
Tell that to my brand new Mac Book Pro sitting in front of me (which I purchased after dumping my Acer Aspire 5672).
Also tell that to my PC, which has been replaced by a Mac Mini.
You are DEFINATELY smoking crack. I haven't found A THING that hasn't worked on my mac.
Windows has the bug gun in its pocket. Huge commercial application support, hardware and driver support along with games. You can walk into a best buy, a walmart, a savemart wherever software or computer hardware is sold and it will always be available for windows.
Apple has an advantage over linux with apps but strangely enough, they have not gained large scale adoption and support for "games" and commercial apps. What so I can run photoshop on my MAC. Not everyone that uses a MAC is a graphic designer.
Linux even with its vast improvments is bottom barrel in terms of commercial apps, driver hardware support and games.
Microsoft was on the ball with this in the early 80's before most of their competitors even gave it a thought.
I think Apple should start selling ATX CPU/MB combos.
People with a fiduciary responsibility to thousands of shareholders have decided that expanding into the cheap shit market wouldn't be a good move.
Speaking as a shareholder, I'm rather glad that you're not in charge of Apple's product planning.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Should be Xeon 5130's, not 1030's.
Jesus Fucking Christ, Get OVER YOURSELF! You don't want it, okay, we don't care, go away? And yes, I'm posting this from an apple laptop, so what? The $900 unit with student idscount was a great buy for me, and it's lasted me 4 years now, replacing the two dells I beat the crap out of and an IBM thinkpad that died of natural causes and a gateway that just went poof due to my abuse. the apple's the only thing that's survived. I've had your $500 dell laptop, and it just didn't stand up to my stresses. Not exactly normal, but I strap the ibook to a motorcycle gas tank every day, slam it shut and abuse it most henoiusly, and put it through the rigors of a lifestyle that most people consider insane. It worked. FOR ME. You don't see me wasting pages upon plages of slashdot space just detailing how I think everyone's wrong and that I need to show my superior intelligence by preaching and telling the ignroant crowd what theyu should think. You know what? I realize this post is completely SUBJECTIVE AND RELEVANT TO MY EXPERIANCE MOSTLY. Just like most of your posts. A post better not made. For the love of god, pleas,e just stop preaching to the slashdot chior. You know, the ones who already knew everything you stated and made an informed decision to buy what they wanted at the time they bought it.
When you compare Apples to Apples (pun intended) you see they actually are _very_ close in price.
http://flamesnyper.com/mac-vs-pc/
Click the link for a price comparison using a Mac mini and a Dell system. Pretty informative, if you ask me. Of course, I wrote it, so I could be slightly biased.
Oh, you need a TV Tuner?
Why would you need a card slot for such a thing?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I have, my PCI TV tuner (but it is a piece of crap that doesn't even work on 2 of my 3 PCs for no apparent reason, has absolutely no linux drivers of any kind, and it is the reason I will never buy MSI cards ever again, but I stand by that it doesn't work on a mac.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
But the ads say that my PC doesn't speak Japanese to my USB Camera!?!?! and since the ads say so, it must be true!
Market share does not matter, and never has. Apple sells millions of computers and makes a nice profit for the stockholders.
Twenty years ago Apple had a certain market share of a small number of personal computers sold in the world.
Today Apple has a certain smaller percentage of a much larger number of personal computers in the world. But it's selling more new computers now than it ever has, many more per year than it did twenty years ago.
As long as Apple makes money, putting out sophisticated computer systems, who cares about market share?
If I only had US$0.05 for every time I heard somebody predict doom for Apple over its tiny market share...
With bootcamp and intel processors there is an increased proportion of macs that will run windows and to run windows you have to buy windows. Does that affect the statistical OS proportions?
Given that 3ghz 5160's are less than $900 to begin with?
3 05&dept_id=2522
http://www.ajump.com/ajump/product.asp?pf_id=5240
Dell Precision 490
Mac Pro
- Two Xeon 5160 (3.0GHz Woodcrest) processors
- 1GB (2x512MB) 667MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM
- 250GB 7200rpm SATA hard drive (RAID 5 not available)
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB
- One 16x SuperDrive
- Support: AppleCare Protection Plan (3 years warranty and support)
- Integrated 1394a and 1394b
- Price: $5198
There are several options that cannot be made "equivalent" or are difficult to do:TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Nobody likes to drink alone.
That's really not true, unless you're going to get into a hissy fit about what's onboard and what's not. If we're going to go on a hardware basis, comparing the video card, RAM, CPU, hard drive, screen size, etc., Dells (after coupons, which are essentially always available) and HPs are much more aggressively priced than Apple computers. The thing is, Apple only has three lines of "mainstream" computers: the Macbook, the Macbook Pro, and the iMac. Each of those is a fairly specialized machine, so a real one-to-one comparison is essentially impossible. (Compare this to HP and Dell, where the differences between any two given machines, because of the plethora of hardware options, is much smaller and thus more easily quantifiable.) And then there's always the question of the OS and how much value that adds. But on a pound-for-pound hardware-only basis, the mainstream Macs are more expensive than their PC counterparts, even if you add the onboard options (like firewire) as add-in cards, which are always more expensive than their onboard counterparts.
On the flip side, though, the Mac Pro is incredibly well-priced. Anandtech posted some interesting reviews of it, though, and it looks like the decision to go with FB-DIMMs is a real thorn in its side. Besides that, though, it looks like a knockout machine. I'm really not sure how Apple did it, but kudos to them.
Since the Mac is now essentially a PC clone, why would you pay a premium for Mac hardware?
Dude, the 1990's just called. They want their Mac dogma back.
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There is indeed a lot more choice on the PC side. Of course most of it is poorly designed junk, since the focus of the PC world is how cheaply you can make things, not how enjoyable you can make the ownership experience. And that's why you can buy PCs for so much less than Macs. It's not that Apple's ripping you off, it's that Steve quite laudably refuses to make junk.
Or, you're just being gullible. Apple is not a charity, it is a for profit corporation, just like PC vendors. Apple's quality will be better than some, and worse than others. There's no magic pixie dust here. Recent history would suggest that Apple's current products are worse than most for quality. ie, massive battery recall, overheating, discolouration...
Oh, and my Acer laptop looks much, much nicer than those white plastic MacBooks.
However, one of your statements is simply not true. I hooked up my PowerBook G4 to a VGA projector with the adapter Apple provided in the box, for free. So compatibility with projection LCDs is no reason to stick with Windows.
You don't use projectors very often, do you? They're generally built into the room, with a VGA cable running through the wall to a jack, with another VGA cable running up to a podium. Adding another connection point to that mess is simply not acceptable. Futhermore, you're absolutely fucked if you forget the adaptor. No one else in the room will have one, because they sensibly bought laptops with standard VGA ports. Even if they *do* happen to have one lying around, it will be a standard DVI adaptor, not the mini DVI on MacBooks.
It'd be interesting to know how many people counted for Windoze (XP, 2000, NT) are mac owners surfing from work
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
I am about to buy the best laptop I can find, or maybe a desktop plus a very light laptop. I really want to buy a Mac but am moving away from it!
I always was an Apple person and I have a bunch of old macs in my closet. But I've used linux as my main computer for some years.
I hate using linux as a desktop at least on this laptop, which ran Win2K fine but was dying on RH9 and finally I am on blackbox now.
I used linux because I'm a developer and also because I hate Microsoft.
I want a Mac because it is cool and mostly virus free compared to MS.
The opposing side is I need WinXP for business. My brother who has a Mac book pro and uses windows in an emulator recommended it ito me but I heard it is slow. I heard Bootcamp is not totally there yet or needs an unsupported hack to be usable. I am waiting now because I heard about battery fires, macs not being allowed to be used on planes, and an upcoming announcement from Jobs. I want a Jaguar mac with the time machine bad but I'm waiting.
I think there must be a lot of people like me, enough to make that minus 0.02 go positive. People who know all the issues and still want a mac but it is killing them to make that decision. And they are in fact moving away from the mac like me right now.
For me to buy a Mac Book Pro, Apple must provide
- a supported way to run WinXP natively on another partition and be able to access that data from OS X.
- ironclad assurance about the batteries
- info about whether Jaguar is available now and what is this announcement in October we are supposed to wait for?
- Finally, I love macs but I have been screwed by Apple lots of times, starting way back with the Apple III (I had an Apple II Integer Plus too, FWIW. And a fat mac, a quadra, a powerbook, and oh heck with it). I am willing to buy the best system they have so it will not go obsolete right away but I do NOT want them to take my money and then screw me over again. I want the XP side to work like an ordinary windows machine, not a slow machine. It should be a screaming fast machine.
You know reading this I'm thinking, why do you want a Mac? It's all cool but really you need a PC for business. And I'm still moving away from the mac. It's insane. I guess I have to wait for Jobs again?
Apple has produced a great operating system. I can't tell you how many people I've met who say "my next computer is going to be a Mac." But that's just their problem. Most people aren't going to ditch a perfectly good computer just to run OSX. By limiting OSX to Apple computers, they're going to drastically slow the growth of their operating system. I'd bet 90% of the people I've met who say "my next computer is going to be a Mac" would go out and pay $200 to put OSX on their current computer a lot sooner than they'd buy a new computer just for the operating system.
The video card you chose on the Dell is not the same as video card you chose on the Mac. In spite of the names, the Mac version includes specialized hardware to run 3-D stereoscopic goggles with your video output. The Dell version does not include this. It is a specialty, niche add-on that seems to make the Dell similar in price to the Apple. But in reality you are getting short-changed by buying the Dell (just like with the sub-par sound system). Not to mention that you started out with a budget box to even get this close. Start with a real Dell pro machine and see how close you can get. It is not even a competition.
I don't think that survey is accurate. I remember reading that the number of Macs in Africa had tripled in the last six months.
#DeleteChrome
Were they trying to figure out the total addressable market or the install base? Nobody is still selling Windows 98 for crying out loud. Regardless, their stats are meaningless even for that number.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
More people would rather have a beige box than a tiny little cute espresso sipping elite box.
No, more people want something that just works (and often in our consumer driven society something that looks 'cool' too). They don't want to munge around with drivers or kernel compiling. This is why linux and do it yourself PCs remain a niche market. These same people are also willing to pay more for something that just works. This doesn't make them stupid or lazy, it just means they think their time is better spent using their computer to do what they want to, instead of looking up kernel config options so their video card can play some game.
That is the segment that the Mac targets which is for most part currently on windows. I think what you'll find though is that the switch campaign has been pretty successful and the people who do go mac don't often go back.
Didn't you just compare them? Doesn't that make them comparable? They are just computers with largely identical parts inside.
The site I have data for is large (around 10mm pageviews per day) and is general in appeal (not an Apple or tech related site). Our Mac percentage has been increasing slowly but steadily. For September so far it is at 7.63%. I predict that they're doing fine.
Cheers.
>>Face it. Apple makes the best computers on the planet. End of story.
I just faced it, when you insisted. Now my face smells like shit - kind of Applish!
And HEREIN lies the rub. In the cases of the MacBook Pro, the MacBook, and the Mac Pro, Apple initially leapt out of the gates with spectacular pricing. However, long term, their "price once, and forget it" strategy begins to kill them.
In three months, as the holiday season rolls around, Apple won't be able to hold a candle to Dell's pricing...for one, Dell (and all the others) will have a full sub-$700 product spectrum. Apple will have one mini. Granted, the cloners will likely not be putting Core processors in those cheapy boxes, although I could be wrong.
Right now, Apple is showing its complete inability to maintain competive pricing with the MacBook Pro line, and they have only been OUT barely 9 months. The company's old practice of incremental speed bumps won't cut it in Dell-land. But thanks for playing. They are even allowing the MacBook to be cannibalized by Core2 offerings tugging at the $1500 price point. By Christmas, the cloners will be selling MacBook-killers at less than $1000. Same performance or better, same LCDs, same drives...substantially cheaper. Most consumers don't use "that warm, fuzzy feeling you get helping out Steve Job's company" as purchasing rational for doling out an additional $200 over the holidays.
Next up, Apple continues to exhibit near brain-dead marketing. Oh sure, they know how to make really pretty iPod ads, and some rather funny "I'm a Mac, I'm cool; I'm a PC, I'm a TOOL" ads. Wow, an entire, encapsulated marketing plan for all those dumb fucks that grew up on TV and turned out TV. But they completely misunderstand the bulk of the educational market, trying to offer the same computer to K-12 school administrators (make it cheap and capable, "we'll use Apple //e's until 1990!") as they offer to Higher-Ed STUDENTS (who are looking for a computer to LAST 3 or 4 years, "I need beer money and book money, and I might think about buying another computer as a Senior cuz I still get a discount, but otherwise this has got to last...and play Tetris and log me onto FaceBook"). They believe that "Pro" users are too stupid to watch what competing systems are valuing at (MacBook Pros that are $1999, when the competition has moved to a 64-bit processor and dropped the price $400). They fundamentally don't understand warranty and hardware service. In fact, they are so retarded on this point, it comes off like a PeeWee Herman "I meant to do that" when Apple expressly remarks that they aren't interested in the Enterprise market. C'mon, a Pro model with no On-Site service option...Huh? (But it isn't like they don't offer an "extended" warranty that masquerades as a pro-option, at least on price!)
And yet we sit here and argue over 0.2%? Doesn't anyone get the fact that Apple has had Intel-based, no Intel-DESIGNED clone boxes on the market for nearly a year and they've been COMPLETELY unable to grow their market share appreciably above the levels that existed prior, when they were able to white-wash performance metrics and Jobs-note marketspeak about the capabilities of PowerPC chips...when the "Apple" market was PowerPC only, when there was no dramatic growth opportunity. Apple can say what they want; the analysts can say what they want..."the Holy Grail is the Pro Graphic Design Market...all hail the Pro Graphic Design Market!" Horseshit. That is a myth. The market share to be gained is in two places: Enterprise and home use (especially internationally). And Apple has even been unable to ride the iPod "halo" or the Security Scare to its benefit.
In another year, this will be moot...as Apple falls further and further behind the "industry" curve they will become less and less relevent. Just as has happened over the past 10 years...Jobs is turning out to be another Scully, ironically. (Just for giggles...anyone know how long Sony rode the WalkMan?)
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
YOu guys love to hate Apple. What about intalled user base? The improtant number.
You did forget one factor of price in your comparison: Size. The Mac Mini is quite a bit smaller than your run-of-the mill PC tower. As is typical in the computer world, the smaller it gets, the more it costs you. I think this fact bumps the Mac Mini up even more than noted in your comparison.
I have a $100 HDTV tuner, so I think you're way over-paying; but you might have wanted to mention that this tuner can do HDTV (on a couple of unnecessarily high powered apple computers) before quoting you're maccishly high price.
Similarly, don't forget that the Precision 490 (at least here in Australia) comes by default with a professional 3D graphics card (Quadra FX 3450) that's worth ca. AU$1600 on its own (for comparison, the Mac Pro's pitiful 7300GT is worth ca. AU$120).
The Mac Pro is certainly a (truly amazingly, considering it's Apple) well priced machine (and it's a shame they don't have a less expensive version for us mere mortals), but the difference is not as large as the original poster would have you think. As close as I can get them, which requires adding Applecare to the Mac Pro and bumping both machines up to the Quadra FX 4500, puts the Dell at about AU$300 more.
The advantage Dell has is a model (and price) range that actually covers the massive gap between a 1.66Ghz Core Duo based machine and a quad-core Xeon based machine.
But you can't put a sound card in a Mac, so they suck!
(that bulge? That's my tongue. In my cheek. Above my Powerbook.)
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If Mac became mainstream...you would have just as many viruses and malware as windows side. It's not a matter of a better or worse OS...its a matter of install base.
I don't know if this story is an indication of a problem, but here it is anyway. After seeing a couple of her girlfriends with macs and "how easy they are", my wife convinced me to get her one as well. So we got a white MacBook, which is nice and sleek. My wife used it for maybe 2-3 weeks, then went back to her old HP laptop. She keeps on saying that she'll be using her Mac, so we'll see. But one way or another there are some significant issues on the mac vis-a-vis migration for former windows users. For instance, the Mac store offers free migration which is good, but I feel there was no attention to detail. For instance, even though they were told that my had a Hotmail account, they setup email in the Mail application instead of Entourage, which can actually read Hotmail. There were a couple of other issues with migration as well.
Finally, if you are windows power user, MacOS leaves you underwhelmed. Where is the freaking maximize button? Seriously, not what the application thinks Maximize should be, but actually maximizing the window to the maximum real estate of the monitor. While at the store I asked one of the clerks where the real Maximize button was and his answer was (for real), that a "Maximize function was a Windows thing and unnecessary on the Mac". Ok, what if I like to browse full screen? "Well, most web sites display their content in 800x600". Slashdot immediately came to mind.
I don't understand your argument. Are you saying that the identically named internal parts you get are somehow different because the box they come in says "precision 490" on the outside? Or are you saying that because you can pay more from Dell for the same parts because of their byzantine array of product lines, that means that the lower priced box "doesn't count"?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Bullshit. I just went to both sites and created a top of the line workstation myself. I even laborously cut and pasted the specs.
This is with NO coupons, no other BS:
DELL Precision 690
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5050 3.00GHz, 2 X 2MB L2, 667 (two processors)
1GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 533MHz, ECC (2 DIMMS)
Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2 with Media
250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache(TM)
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3450, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA
16XDVD AND 16XDVD+/-RW, w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD(TM) and Roxio Creator(TM)
3 Year On-site Business Standard Plan
No Monitor Option
Final Dell Price: $2,247
Mac Pro:
Two 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
1GB (2 x 512MB)
250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI)
NO apple server software
One 16x SuperDrive
AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro/Power Mac (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
Display: None
Final Apple Price: $3,548.00
Want to add more RAM?
+$300 for 2GB with Apple
+$217 for 2GB with Dell
Want to add beefier proc? well, sorry, Apple doesn't provide a better one.
Want more gfx power?
+$925 Quadro FX 4500 with Dell
+$300 Quadro FX 3500 with Dell
+$250 ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI) with Apple
+$450 4 x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB [Add $450] with Apple
+$1650 NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB, Stereo 3D (2 x dual-link DVI) with Apple
I have been perfectly reasonable and erred on the side of making the Dell more powerful (thus more expensive) than the Apple. You judge for yourself which is the better value
Times have changed. People are compromising mass numbers of systems and creating armies of zombie systems that they control via IRC botnets. They sell control of those systems to spammers for big money. The mac is simply not as profitable for them. It's supply and demand. There is a huge market for PC vulnerabilities.
There are mac rootkits out there. There are plenty of smart hackers studying the Mac operating system and finding vulnerabilities. It's just that there is little financial incentive to infect large numbers of mac systems, so it's not really a problem for the majority of users. This is not the case for the PC.
Uh, if your time is so valuable, why are you reading -- and posting! -- to slashdot?
Well played.
A 0.02% change? Wow, 1 in 5000 Mac OS X users have defected. The sky is falling, quick, hide!
put a second and third mouse button on their laptops, and got rid of those awful touch pads, I would consider switching back. Oh, and better support for Linux would be good too.
Who moved my sig?
So does copying files, launching browsers like firefox, etc.,
In fact i tried using Speed Freak and while it is appealing to use it to speed up your existing app, the rest of them tend to be slowed down.
If windows is bloatware, can anyone explian why it is so much faster than Mac OS X? And don;t say because of increased security.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I'm calling BS here .. neighbour purchased a brand new HP yesterday and as soon as he turned it on it "Found new hardware" and he had to install the Wireless and Bluetooth drivers just to get it to shut up, even though he doesn't need either to work just yet.
So that's not even the printer, it's stuff the manufacturer put in there. You NEVER get that with a mac. It really does 'just work'.
Do either one of you have a link to your configurations???
A ppleStore.woa/6734003/wo/XQ2IBYNvqzWN2vAkLoC1oRU4v sn/2.?p=0
x ?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=D690F2&s=dhs
I almost took both your words for it but then thought better of it and checked myself too because I just couldn't believe the modding system would allow such unsubstatied claims to be so rewarded.
Basically as close to the same setup as possible:
Apple $5,249.00
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
Dell $3,871
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp
Where Apple have gone wrong in the desktop space is in the false belief that people are desperate for iLife applications like iDVD, iMovie, Garageband, iWorks, iPhoto and others. Actually, those are consumer applications with a definate "Steve on the stage" geewhiz but with a limited market in a world of physical media free content distribution (YouTube, Flickr etc) and more. Furthermore, and this is the crux of the issue, MOST people buy computers to solve problems, such as running their business. (Gamers buy consoles or DIY PCs.) And for all it's faults, Microsoft has, even if initially accidentally, created a vast 'ecosphere' of available solutions or tools that make creating turnkey solutions easy. A well organised iT person or team can form a company and then engineer and market solutions to small businesses using available MS and 3rd party MS tools - and very inexpensive unbranded PCs.
Once Apple encourage 3rd parties to put together solutions for those desiring them, then people will flock to the Macintosh's focused industrial design (in particular the Mac Mini) running the stable and virus free OSX.
One more thing, Apple needs to show more confidence in marketing it's really useful applications. I have recently purchased Apple's Keynote. For all it's limited flaws, it is one of the most compelling, fun and usefull applications I have ever had the joy to use. And it's helping me raise money for my company and sell our product! Now that is what I call a solution! (Don't even compare it to PowerPoint!)
(I am aware that Apple are limited in their promotion of Office type apps as part of past agreements with MS. It's time they shook that one loose, else they will always be the superior underdog. Hmmm?
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
I think you missed his point, namely that devices made for use with Apple computers have less of a driver issue. Not so much the sound cards as much as extra hard drives, printers, scanners and the like.
Now I can frely admit that oftentimes products need drivers installed (my last personal case was getting the new Canon network printer up and running), but those installations are almost always painless. The way Apple defines the I/O means that I have yet to come upon a conflict between peripheral drivers. Back in the old days of System 7 to Mac OS 9, I would encounter conflicts between system extensions, but those weren't peripheral-related. So far I haven't had that happen under Mac OS X.
So in between the two extremes, the truth is that Apple can use a lot of commodity peripherals and storage devices without special drivers, and the setup is less complicated than with either Windows or Linux.
Uhm... Those appliactions aren't trial or crapware. The Omni apps are full versions of pretty cool (and pretty expensive) applications. StuffIt Expander used to come with Mac OS X, but does so no longer. The reason it came with Mac OS X was that lots of applications were delivered in .sit files, and you need Expander to open these. Contratulations on "cleaning them off," though - dragging a few applications to the Trash must have been a really complicated undertaking.
The main difference between nVidia's 'pro' and 'consumer' (Quadro and Geforce) lines is the drivers. The Quadro has more heavily optimised OpenGL drivers, and a few other driver-features like stereo display. Using some registry magic on Windows, you can run each with the other drivers. We tried this and found that the Quadro was only marginally faster in our tests.
Since Apple write their own drivers for OS X (based on the nVidia reference drivers), it is not entirely a fair comparison.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
DVI is a superset of analogue VGA. Any device that can be driven from a VGA port can be driven from a DVI port with a simple adaptor (one was included with my PowerBook). The converse does not hold; I have a digital display that can only be driven by a digital DVI signal; there is no way of making my ThinkPad, which only has VGA, drive it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple don't even have a mid-segment computer except for the unupgradebale iMac. Take any normal Dell, HP or garagebuilt (You know the stuff most people buy) and Apple don't even try to compete.
Now go to the Apple homepage and configure your Mac like one of the cheap Dells..
oh.. wait..
Well, still, I prefer my Powerbook over any Dell..
Georg
The CHEAP ones aren't comparable. Apple doesn't compete there. As in, both companies make $2500 laptops but Apple doesn't make a $600 laptop. Therefore Dell's $600 laptop doesn't really compare to an Apple one.
www.clarke.ca
I see people, even die hard Windows users, buying either MacBook Pros, or Mac Minis, like its going out of fashion, and I don't even live in the US. In fact, the only people I still see buying Windows are the poor suckers who think Outlook is a good mail client, and that Windows networking is acceptable.
I believe the Quadro chips also undergo more stringent testing - they are optimised for display quality, not performance.
Since Apple write their own drivers for OS X (based on the nVidia reference drivers), it is not entirely a fair comparison.
Nevertheless, it can't be validly claimed that a Mac Pro is massively cheaper than an equivalent dell when the video card difference alone accounts for ca. AU$1400 - $1500.
(This is not to detract from the excellent value the Mac Pro represents, although it's a shame the default video card is so weak and aftermarket options are still limited).
"Oh yes, oh yes I have. That new Mac smell, each little piece ready for the unwrapping, the soft white curves, the feel of plastic on my naked... ...um nevermind."
If you value your um nevermind, you probably shouldn't be putting a Mac Laptop near one.
Doh. Was supposed to be a link to the standard Apple mini-DVI-VGA cable for connecting laptops to VGA monitors/projectors, something I've done with iBooks, Powerbooks and Macbooks.
However, you shouldn't be talking shit, especially about a subject you know little about.
/. Thanks for clarifying.
And here I thought that was the whole point of
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I wonder how much of the decline is credited not to an increase in shares for platofrms such as Windows, but repurchases.
My sister owns a Dell laptop. Just recently she purchased a PC desktop for herself. Now technically she's still just the one person running Windows, but she would count as two because of licenses.
Also, re-buys and upgrades must be considered. If someone running XP upgrades to Vista in the future, Microsoft as technically sold both that person's copy of XP as well as the upgrade to Vista.
From what I have seen, just in my office, we get a much longer shelf-life out of low-end Macs and often rebuy PCs.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
5 minutes? And how many years of learning to be able to diagnose the problem and effectively research it?
I think you're taking for granted the body of knowledge you've amassed over the years. Most people don't have that - do you really think my fiancee would understand how to fix that problem? Probably not, but she still needs a machine that reliably runs Photoshop and InDesign.
I'll pop on their site from time to time just to configure a desktop with a 20" widescreen just for fun and sometimes I'll get a pretty nice computer spec with that widescreen for under $800. But I don't even have a place to put it.
Point being, last year when I was in the market for a laptop (unfortunaly, just 4 months before dual-cores came out, kicking myself) I waited for three months for the configuration I wanted to be the "cheap configuration." IE, yeah, best graphics I could get with a gig of RAM so I could play some games on the go, but not break the bank. Three months of configuring and re-configuring and waiting for just the right coupon to come in the email. Ended up cutting the price almost in half, which was nice. I know they still made too much money off me for my taste, but I've used their laptops in the past and their support (read: Daytime) is generaly great (they've next-day aired anything I've needed for free).
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
On the one hand, they didn't count intel as mac, so market share's up 0.6% not down 0.2% by their measure.
On the other hand, at least they're measuring market share by use and not sales.
On the gripping hand, I expected Apple's market share to be down significantly now because of the uncertainty over the Intel switch and the very real teething problems, so even down a little would be better than I was expecting.
On the... damn, out of hands. On the other other hand, it's kind of irritating that "Intel" seems to translate to "good" in people's minds...
My mom wanted a computer to go on the internet, do emails, and store digital photographs and play some music.
Dell had a decent laptop for $599 Canadian and a desktop for $399 Canadian.
My mom is totally happy, and I am amazed because Windows doesn't even suck anymore.
The only tech call I've had was to install some family tree software she didn't know how to install.
My PowerBook came with a mini-DVI to VGA adapter for free.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
.....I already own the said PCI TV tuner card.....
That's good and works for you. We have a 1993 Mac Classic with a special hardware/software setup which makes it into a nice phone answering/fax machine that STILL sits in the corner, quietly doing its job, 24/7. Anytime a technology works for you, leave it alone. Don't fix what is not broken.
I looked (longingly) at the new HD TVs at Costco the other day, but the beautiful picture doesn't make up for the crappy programming and the price is way too high. The DIY channel doesn't gain much from a bigger screen. Our $200 Walmart 27" TV is good enough to see the evening news on. You likely spent a good fraction of that to be able to watch TV on an even smaller display on your computer. I like specialized devices that do a given job well, rather than the 'Jack of all trades, master of none" approach.
All theory is gray
Return on Investment: Where is the benefit in gaining access to a machine only one out of every 100 people (roughly) uses and which is even more uncommon in business environments ?
False positives: millions of machines are used by government and by businesses, which will A) not have personal and credit card info to steal and B) will be wiped and restored far sooner than a consumer machine. And what is going to be more valuable information: the credit card number of a consumer plunking down two grand on a Macbook Pro or large screen iMac, or the buyer of one of those $400 Dell systems?
Infection rates: Any "virus" infection is going to spread far, far more slowly on Macs than PCs. Heck, there's a pretty good chance it wouldn't even hit critical mass, because of Macs' relative scarcity, and never make it outside the initial infection zone.
Nonsense. There are more Macs out there today than Windows machines when the first PC viruses started going around. It wouldn't crash corporate networks like Code Red did, but that's because most corporate networks are made up entirely of Wintel PC's.
No, Windows has been a cesspool security wise because of Microsoft's piss poor design decisions, not because of marketshare. If Apple had Active X, Internet Explorer, Outlook, auto-installing internet applications, and left ports and services open all over the place, they too would have a rotten record on security. If Microsoft had decent privledge separation, started using a firewall with Windows 98 and had some decent security models for their web apps, they would have a much better record on security. And the big traffic-stopping-billion-dollar-costing viruses have not been written to collect data, but for kudos or "because they could." And what is going to get a script kiddie more kudos: writting the thousandth network crashing Windows virus, or write the first ever Mac crashing virus?
I'm sorry, I can't see your planet from mine; I ran a spec comparison and got the highest of everything that I could reasonably compare the two on and it turned out just over $3,100 cheaper for the dell than a mac....?
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
But perhaps interesting. I manage a large U's main website (2 million visitors since 9/1).
For September (through 9/19), the platform percentages are:
Windows: 93.83%
Mac: 5.89% (Of this, PPC is 72.51% and Intel Mac is at 27.49%)
For all of April of this year, the percentages were:
Windows: 94.5%
Mac: 5.16 (100% PPC)
In the same time periods, Linux has dropped 0.05%, from 0.25% to 0.20%
Basically as close to the same setup as possible:
Not really; the Mac has 64 bit processors while your Dell has 32 bit Xeons. Use the same processors and your results will probably match the parents'.
Bullshit. I just went to both sites and created a top of the line workstation myself. I even laborously cut and pasted the specs.
Too bad you didn't take a second during your laborious cutting pasting to notice that the Mac has 64 bit Xeons while the Dell has 32 bit Xeons.
As to TFA, I have a question... There are lots of Slashdotters that can probably answer this for me pretty well: Isn't .02% statistically negligible, WRT a market trend report?
That information is not available. You see, the source data was not presented, only the results without and details of the methodology. This is PR, not science and is designed to influence people who pay attention to PR, instead of look at scientific data. The fact that you know what statistically significant means, is indication that you are not in the target market. The PR firm that puts out these studies just looks for a way to use statistics to support the position of whomever pays them. They don't release their data and make really obviously misleading statements because they know most people will never notice anything more than a headline that says, "OS X Failing in the Market." This is the same company that produced a bunch of stats showing how iPod sales are declining and the bubble has burst and used the normal retail sales cycle that happens every year as justification. Gee sales are lower than they were just before last christmas and just like in almost every other retail sales market on the planet? We'd better write a bunch of articles immediately so people know and lets forget to mention that this trend effects anything other than iPods.
I'm always amazed at the vitriol that spews forth on this subject. Although, frankly, post threads like those in response to this article are always interesting to read (and sometimes funny).
There are numerous causes for this. Mac users are a minority, and deviating from the norm in any way is socially a big taboo. As a result, Mac users feel the need to compensate by ardently defending their decisions. Likewise, pointing anything inferior about a product a Mac, Windows, or Linux user is using is a direct attack on their ego. You're telling them emotionally, that they were wrong. Especially for large financial investments, like a computer, people tend to irrationally defend whatever decision they made, because they feel threatened. Finally, many new Mac users find suddenly that a lot of the problems they were having have suddenly disappeared when they get a Mac. As a result, they tend to be astonished that Macs are not more popular and very vocal about praising them, sometimes to excess. All this leads to a culture clash, where people get very loud and often irrationally defensive.
IMVHO, use what machine and OS you like, like what machine and OS you use (if you have a choice). It isn't the chip, the windowing system, the kernel, or the manufacturer... it's what it does for you personally.
Any rational person who uses multiple OS's regularly quickly sees that each has things they do better than others. The problem is most people have only really used one, so they argue from a position of ignorance, simply to defend a choice they don't really have a lot of information about. People also have trouble empathizing with others, especially via weak mediums like blogs, so they operate under the assumption that everyone has the same needs and wants as they do. Add to this an unhealthy dose of misinformation from PR campaigns and astroturf and a few trolls and rabble rousers who just enjoy causing trouble and you get the loud, angry mess that is a OS flame war.
The only thing to do is sit back, enjoy the funny parts, and occasionally try to answer factual questions to help those who truly want real info.
And I'm hardly alone in thinking that way. Lots of people have money issues, even with the much improved Mac pricing, and wait is one of the best rules in computer purchasing. Wait until the heat and battery issues are cleared up. Wait for the next OS. Wait for the rumored compact 12" model using low-voltage chips with 10-hour battery life. Waiting always gets you more for less, particularly when the current models have "issues."
In the Windows world, the opposite process may be taking place. People are buying now, so they don't get stuck with all the hassles Vista will have its first few years. Vista, at best, will be a lot like OS X's 10.1, a bit buggy and lacking in even the necessary refinements.
No, this news story is a yawner concoceted by those who don't know what they're writing about.
If you consider what more than 80% of computer useres do, you can compare the two. More than 80% of computer users will gain nothing from an Apple over a $400 Dell. They will be able to browse the internet, email and listen to music without a single difference in experience. Oh, except that they will have more money in thier wallet. This "Apple vs the rest of us" mentality is the kind of snobbery that keeps Apple's share of the industry down (the price helps too). I have spent half the money on my PC to edit video (professionaly) than my freinds who have done the same with Apple. The funnier part is that I produce better quality in less time as well.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I'm surprised you didn't make the comment, but your figures are more proof that OS X is treading water.
Take a look at the downward trend or Mac OS, and how it almost matches the upward trend of Macintel. There's some lag between the two (on a per-month basis), but over the course of the year MacIntel increases 0.62 and Mac OS decreases 0.64. What this indicates to me is that, for the most part, OS X is just barely treading water. Most new purchases are from existing Mac users (which, from my experience, would be consistent with their loyalty).
Yes, I agree with most of the posters here that we should ignore the "total marketshare" numbers, but the relative marketshare of Mac OS versus Macintel has much more meaning, and may indicate a trend of zero growth. This is not to say new customers AREN'T buying mew Macintels (I bought one, and I never owned a Mac in my life), it's just that they've also lost some customers with the move to Intel.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Only if you require prices to be similar in order to "compare".
"Compare" has two meanings. One is "to examine in order to note the similarities and differences of" and the other "to represent as similar". All laptops are sufficiently similar that they are comparable in the first sense if not in the second. When "comparing" two machines there is no reason to say they aren't "comparable"; that just sounds stupid. Simply explain the similarities and differences and let the reader decide.
All computers these days have nearly identical parts inside and run software capable of performing nearly identical tasks. If you think price (especially a premium price) and the appearance of the skin that contains them is what most matters in a computer, you are certainly entitled to that opinion. It is only an opinion, however.
I always find it interesting that when a comparision of a mac and a PC is made, it will inevitably be made using the mac as the definition of what hardware is desirable. It's as if it's assumed that only Apple can figure out what the customer wants.
"The CHEAP ones aren't comparable. Apple doesn't compete there."
There you go. No one should make this comparison because it's not to Apple's strengths. We should only compare product catagories that are perfectly aligned on what Apple offers.
Why shouldn't a Dell $600 laptop be compared to a Macbook? For the extra money, don't you think that the Macbook would compare favorably? Is it simply a fear that the price will be the deciding factor? Shouldn't it be?
The fact is that Dell is a company that is optimized to compete on price and Apple definitely is not. Why should Dell have to be compared to Apple in Apple's market while Apple not be compared in Dell's? Are you afraid of a truly objective comparison?
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a macbook 2GHz core duo w/1.25 gigs of RAM) for about 20 seconds now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 seconds. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape works great. And nothing else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite isn't straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've often seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, because of the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs slower than this 2 ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone wouldn't choose to use a Mac over other slower, more expensive, unstable systems.
Did you wake up with a stick in your butt, or was it inserted later?
I didn't suggest cheap shit. I didn't suggest clones, which has been tried before and failed because it was a stupid idea. I'm talking about a product with all the quality of the usual Apple motherboard...
Oh wait, you're right. That would be cheap shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Windows doesn't even suck anymore."
You haven't read Microsoft's EULA then.
"but I would still love to see an apple that is cheaper than a dell, I'd buy it in a second."
That is a valid reason. But do you have the "least expensive" of every thing you own? Your car, stereo, clothes, etc? Why, when it comes to computers, does it has to be the cheapest to be the best, I wonder.
To talk a little about the comparison of a Mac laptop to, in this case, a HP laptop: a close friend of mine who is starting nursing school, and has little experience with computers (she's just not a computer person) was given a new HP laptop by her family for school. She asked me to be present for the unboxing and subsequent setup because she figured there was some stuff that might need to be done to it so she could connect to the internet. She was right; I spent the next 4 hours trying to get her laptop to connect to a wireless network, among other things. It went down like this: first of all, the pre-installed software popped up so much crap, and took so long to load the machine up on start-up, I laboriously took the time to remove all of the crappy pre-installed software just so that she wouldn't have to wait about 15 minutes every time she started up. Then I had to install the usual firefox, ccleaner, avg, xp patches, etc. before I would connect to any network. This involved downloading all the appropriate software to my laptop, transferring the files to my thumb-drive, and installing them on her machine. Finally, I tried to connect to her wireless router. No dice. There was still some HP pre-installed wireless connection manager software that wasn't properly connecting to the router, because for whatever reason, the WPA key wouldn't take. So I went the windows route, which I discovered was blocked by the HP software. I then had to kill the software, and then start up a service in XP that would allow me to connect to available networks and enter the WPA key. This is all stuff that she would have NEVER been able to do on her own.
Contrast with:
Unbox Mac, start up, run through setup, start working online via wireless (albeit unencrypted wireless, but easily connected to nonetheless).
If you are someone who values your time, or are someone who doesn't have a friend that knows a thing or two about computers and will help you for free, exactly how much cheaper does the Dell or HP option become when you have to spend time and money later on service calls, and trips to the Best Buy Dork Squad or whatever they're called just to get your computer healthy?
We take for granted that we can manage our own computers well, but there's SO MANY PEOPLE out there who just don't care about the computing world like we do, but still have to rely on it to do their jobs. Sure, I'd love to just say "let them fend for themselves", but many of them are close friends and family who I would never expect to just "figure it out" without some hair-pulling aggravation. I wouldn't let them. To my friend, I suggested an Apple, but ultimately her family made that decision, and she's gotta live with it. And to those that say, "Macs aren't impervious" I say, of course not, but they are orders of magnitude safer and easier to manage than a Windows machine, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
True, but as of now, Mac is still at 0 while PC is at 100,000+.
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
In other news Mac users reached th end-of-the-internet faster than PC users, accounting for a decrease per capita of Mac users online.
What I am saying is that Dell sells lower end computers than Apple. The cheapest Dell can't be fairly compared to the cheapest Apple because they are not at the same level of performance.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Comparing a $600 Dell laptop to a MacBook isn't fair to either of them, even though they are both their manufacturer's cheapest laptop. The Dell will certainly be less powerful, and the MacBook more expensive. A comparison between a similar MacBook and Dell has them around the same price. The Apple has a larger screen and a few more features, and the Dell has a Core 2 Duo rather than a Core Duo.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Yes, but adaptors get loose at the slightest bump, and send the display into funky-colours-land. They're fine for stationary, desktop systems, but are not in any way functional for laptops.
I need to plug my laptop into projectors. I don't particularily need to plug it into the few LCDs that do not have VGA connections.
Ah. As I've said elsewhere, an adaptor just won't do, because every little bump will loosen it, and send the presentation into funky-colour mode.
Well, that's just fine if you want your presentation to randomly shift colours. Adaptors are shit.
Funny thing is, Mac market share isn't so important, because it's "felt" market share is much higher anyways.
I switched to a Mac in August. I'll never look back, I don't even know why the fuck I even put up with Windos at all, ever. And mind you, I was using mainly Linux anyways when I made the switch (and darn, is Linux behind OSX in comfort and usability!).
A colleague did the same. Another one as well. Two others are seriously considering. And that's the general picture. Market share isn't slipping from my "small random sample", which is probably just as valid as that from the article.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Rubbish. I have given several presentations from my laptop using a DVI->VGA adaptor to plug it into a projector and never had this issue. If you are particularly paranoid, then you can screw the adaptor onto the DVI socket and screw the VGA cable onto the adaptor; all of mine have the required screws / holes for this, although I've never felt the need to use them because they tend to be a pretty firm fit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Even worse for all the non-business suckers who still buy Dells, paying for your PCs in the process.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Wow, several? Well, that's conclusive then...
What, praytell, do you intend to do on the inevitable day you forget to bring that adaptor?
I live in Academia, so it's something I do quite often, either at conferences, seminars, or lectures.
What, praytell, do you intend to do on the inevitable day you forget to bring that adaptor?
I keep an adaptor in my laptop case so that very rarely happens. So far, it's happened once, and I asked the next laptop owner along if I could borrow theirs. The last conference I was at had a projector which only had DVI input connected up (it was ceiling mounted). If your laptop didn't have DVI, you had to use the presentation laptop provided, and good luck if your presentation wasn't in PowerPoint 2003 format...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm curious to see September and October 2006, when students have returned to school.
I believe Macs have a higher penetration in all areas of education than in the rest of the world, which should push those figures back up. In fact, if Apple is gaining marketshare, we should see a substantial increase over the same month a year ago.
It's strange that HitBox's stats don't seem to go back more than a year.
The advantage Dell has is a model (and price) range that actually covers the massive gap between a 1.66Ghz Core Duo based machine and a quad-core Xeon based machine.
A small nitpick: There's not just one huge step from the entry level Mac mini to the MacPro. Apple has the iMac, which uses Core 2 Duo processors running from 1.83GHz to 2.33GHz. Benchmarks show that the 2.33GHz dual-core iMac outperforms the low-end 2.0GHz quad-core MacPro for certain tasks.
Of course the iMac may not be your cup of tea, and I'm not suggesting that it fills all the various niches that Dell's model range does. But it's the stepping stone from Mac mini to MacPro.
I live in Academia, so it's something I do quite often, either at conferences, seminars, or lectures.
So do I, and I've never seen an installed projector with DVI connection at all, let alone one without a VGA connector. Mac users are few and far between in the circles I travel, as is the case for the vast majority, so you're very lucky to have been around someone else who had one. Most high end commodity laptops which have DVI connections are full DVI, and also have VGA ports, so I can't see many people carrying mini DVI adaptors.
That's just it. Different buyers want different things so different comparisons may be of interest. A buyer on a budget may want to know what the benefit of paying more for a Macbook might be compared to the cheapest Dell. The point is that any machines can be compared (and are therefore comparable ;-) ). I personally am not price-sensitive and I want a large, high resolution screen. My current machine is a MBP but I've owned plenty of Dell's in the past.
Perhaps, but that doesn't make them "not comparable". For a cost-conscious buyer such a comparison might well be of interest, and performance is in the eye of the beholder. Apple's low cost machine is only available with a 13" screen and that may be "low performance" for someone who wants something smaller or larger. Apple isn't really about choice.
Straw man
Baseless comparison
Matter of opinion
Ad hominem
Untrue
FUD
Ignorance from overuse of PCs
It takes more than a gentle bump to dislodge it and why one earth would you laptop be taking more than a gentle bump while you're doing a presentation?
I read it. Looks just like Apple's EULA. Proprietary is proprietary. If you want freedom and privacy get linux. You're not getting it with either Mac or Windows.
If Apple truly wants to see its market share go into the double digits it will develop a MacOS gaming platform. I've used both Windows and MacOS for several years and would only use MacOS if I could run all my modern games on it. I work in the IT industry and have many co-workers who would switch to MacOS if they didn't have to give up their gaming platform to do so. I know Apple enjoys portraying itself as the computer manufacturer for the artistic, business and graphical design crowd, but what would be so wrong about offering a high end gaming solution as well???
Bumping a key every time you advance a slide...
These same sites that complain the 'Hits Link' service is not a reliable measure of OS usage proudly display their Alexa rankings... compiled by users of the increasingly marginalized Alexa desktop service.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Do Macs still go "eeep!"?
Thanks for the tip. Just put it in today.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I've run plenty of presentations without that problem. Either you're trolling, you're punching the keys, or you've got a damaged connector because there's no way that pressing a key would cause it to disconnect.
Pressing it a little too hard and bumping it certainly will.
No, you're wrong. all FX 4500 cards have that 3D Goggle port. For all its dubious utility, it is part of the FX4500 spec.
No, I am right. Look at Dell's website and you will see the version of the 4500 they sell does not include the stereoscopic goggle functionality. NVIDIA's specs for the cards they sell themselves are not the same for the cards they OEM to Dell and Apple.
I don't understand your argument.
That's because you have no experience buying computers in volume from Dell or Apple and you do not build any amount of computers yourself that would qualify you to understand. A line of Dell's designed to runs low end chips on an inexpensive motherboard is not going to get you good performance from a high end chip being put inside of it. Nor is your customer going to be happy with the shoddy case design relative to the amount of money they are putting into buying that CPU. If money is all that matters, then yes you can get close to an Apple in price buying Dell parts on its low-end workstations outfitted with high-end CPUs. But what you are getting is a low-end workstations outfitted with high-end CPUs. Experienced computers builders know exactly what a loss in performance this is. Why don't you?
Wow, I have no idea why your posting is at a default of 0. But I sure am glad I bought that Apple stock earlier this year. You seem to be suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance. I know you want the headline here to be true, but then you look closer and see there is no meaningful slip, Apple is doing quite well, and comparable computers just cost more. Historically, Apple has rode this transition perfectly. No slip in market share whatsoever and they have moved their entire product line to an entirely new architecture in less than a year. I can't wait to see what they have in store (you know you can actually go to an Apple Store and try their products before you buy). It sure is a good time to be a Mac user. The future looks so bright I gotta wear shades.
As I type this out on my first-generation 12-inch PowerBook G4, I am contemplating my next Macintosh purchase. Say, around Christmas. Before then, I will be buying an iPod shuffle with clip. And if it works well, I will be getting a nano or maybe even the iPod with video model. (Only thing there is I do not like moving parts inside.) Have you tried the latest iTunes music store? Lots of free content (great, easily-accesible Podcasts among other things), smooth and slick interface, and it is the next step in getting movies on your computer without violating the DMCA (not that I agree with the law). QuickTime is even better, too. But if you want to use other things, Flip4Mac now lets you run Windows Media on your Mac (if you don't want to install Windows), RealPlayer has and continues to work, and VLC (Video LAN Client) is available for Mac just like other operating systems. It is great to be a Mac user.
Well, I'm responding to a stale thread, but here it is.
My previous comment was simply attempting to clarify what I felt the grandparent poster was trying to say. I felt they were saying that Apple is not attempting to directly compete model for model with Dell's low end computers. You could be pedantic and pull apart the semantics of what I or the other poster said, but if common sense is applied to my comment it becomes clear what I am trying to say.
If you re-read my comment, you'll also notice that I didn't make any judgement on either Dell or Apple, or their respective computers. I didn't say cheap computers are "bad" or "good". I was merely making a point of computers in a certain sense not being comparable.
Certainly one can compare any two items or concepts. I could compare "urgency" with "a banana" and say that one is a noun denoting a sense of temporal imperativeness while the other is a fruit.
All right, that's enough for now.
- Andrew.
www.clarke.ca