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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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
99% of the computer buying population has no idea what your post even means.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"Other" is actually Linux combined with Mactel (and still others) as they break out the Mactel and MacOS (PPC) separately apparently......
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I've just put together the complete figures, based on their stats, incorporating both "Mac OS" and "Macintel", since December last year. Mac OS overall is down from a high of 4.49% in April, but consistently up from a low of 4.28% in June.
(Bit of a job getting that to look right and get it past the lameness filter!)
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
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
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.
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."
Yes twitter... too bad w3schools is not even close to being representative of the real world. Might as well use the statistics from kernel.org.
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."
You heard right. When you take a Mac out of the box, you just plug it in, turn it on, give it a username and password for it to create the administrator account, and then you can either fill out the registration info or hit command-Q and start using it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Actually at least OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, along with GraphicConverter and a couple other things were extremely useful extras that came with my PowerBook (bought in 2003). They were NOT trial versions nor crippleware. I use them regularly, although I haven't updated them since then.
I'll sorely miss OmniGraffle when I eventually buy a MacBook Pro, since it's no longer part of the package. Not sure about GraphicConverter, but OmniOutliner sure is included.
Maybe you should have actually tried them before deleting them. And yes, if you don't like them you can just delete them, along with the trial version of Office and Quicken. My PoweBook didn't have any eReader nor