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
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.
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...
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
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."
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."
you still did more wrong. I configed the Dell 690 the way you listed and the total came to $7784
i think you used the Xeon 5050 3ghz chips, and not the Xeon 5160 3ghz chips....
huge difference as the Xeon 5050 are $930 less per processor on the Dell config
the 5050 is an old netburst (P4) chip, and the 5160 is the woodcrest (Core 2) chip
Still a Dell win? that is $1,000 more then the Mac Pro! What the hell is your definition of a win? Want to play poker somtime?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
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
You are actually my favorite kind of control freak. You want high quality and you are willing to invest your own time and make sure you get it.
But then there are people like my Aunt Jeanne who can't do that. They have to rely on the computer sellers to get it right the first time.
One thing I've been telling people for a long time is that Macintosh computers last longer. I purchased my current Mac in 1999 and it is still very useful. I can run the latest operating system software on my Mac. There are two applications that I cannot run on it currently that are of interest to me: Motion and Shake. Motion requires a faster processor than the one I have (a Sonnet 1GHz upgrade) and Shake requires at least a G5. Final Cut Pro HD will run on my machine, though I'm not currently working with it.
All other applications that I might use do run on my Mac and probably will for the forseeable future, which will allow me to still use my computer for another year -- though I would like to upgrade after Apple has all of the kinks out of the early Intel boxes.
A seven-year-old PC cannot usually run the latest operating system or applications because you cannot put enough RAM into the box to get it to do those things. My argument is that one should take useful life into account when figuring costs.
And I value jmorris42 (1458)'s time -- perhaps more than he does. It takes him time to research and purchase all of the components he needs for his high-quality homebrew computer. It, then, takes him time to assemble it. Dell and Apple both charge for their research and assembly, which is why both will cost more directly than the unassembled components.
My question for Apple is, will the new Intel boxes have useful lives for as long as their Power PC-based ones.
I also question the basis for the suggestion that Apple is losing market share or that their market share is flattening out. If you are logging which operating system is hitting your servers, you have to take into account the fact that Apple's included browser, Safari may be set up to masquarade as Microsoft Windows-based Internet Exploiter, thus reducing the frequency of hits that are known Macintosh computers.
I think both Apple and Dell are doing good innovation. And, while Apple may be winning some kind of price war presently, commodity pricing may be manipulated by working on the supply chaining as well as putting together exclusive contracts with certain key manufacturers. Apple seems to have a price edge today. They may not tomorrow. Frankly, I didn't buy an Apple computer because it was cheaper. I bought an Apple computer because I knew it was made by a top-tier manufacturer that supports its product and because I wanted to run Apple's operating system which, I believe, is easier to use than Microsoft's.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.