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Can Apple Take Microsoft on the Desktop?
An anonymous reader writes "RDM asks Can Apple Take Microsoft on the Desktop?, a comparison of recent sales and profits and the future outlook for Macs and PCs. It's the opinion of the article's author that Apple doesn't have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win. The key is to take the most valuable segments of the market. They show via a few quick financial numbers that even though Apple is selling fewer machines, they're making more money per machine than your Dells or your Gateways. Not being beholden to Microsoft gives them a big advantage when competing with traditional PC sellers. Once Apple is positioned, Microsoft will be forced to choose whether it wants to battle Mac OS X for control of the slick consumer desktop, or repurpose Windows as a cheaper, mass market alternative to Linux in corporate sales. If it doesn't make a choice, the company will face difficult battles on two fronts.""
If Microsoft bends over the desk. (Come on, this was the expected joke - the title was phrased this way on purpose)
RDM asks Can Apple Take Microsoft on the Desktop? ... They show via a few quick financial numbers that even though Apple is selling fewer machines, they're making more money per machine than your Dells or your Gateways.
So then the proper title should be "Can Apple take Dell or Gateway on the Desktop". With the release of bootcamp, Apple's competing against Dell and Gateway in the Premium consumer hardware space (which Dell/Gateway suck at anyway) so it's no wonder Apple's winning.
The flip side of that is that as commodity beigeboxes, Dell and Gateway do great in the corporate world, which is a space Apple has yet to penetrate to any large degree, because the customer doesn't fit their product space.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The cost of a product is not just the cost of the box but the cost of the people to support it. Linux requires more support from people with more knowledge and hence the support is more expensive.
they need to fix this real fast! the mini has laptop parts, is not that easy to open and has POS gma 950.
The Mac pro is nice but the cost is high apple could add quad-core cpus at the top end and drop the price of the low end dual-cores as well as lower the video card prices.
The I-macs have laptop parts and don't work that well for people that have good screens. Also they force you to get a bigger screen if you want a better video, faster cpu, or bigger HD.
So the article is saying that because Apple charges more for their computers, resulting in higher profit margins, MS is doomed? The article tries to make it sound like Apple is making more because they arent paying license fees to MS, but in reality they are charging a HUGE premium for their operating system. Compare the price differential of a mac with an equivalent hardware dell, its quite large.
There are so many things in this article that make no sense.
The author claims that the ipod and iphone are going to be major factors in killing the windows monopoly.
The author actually claims that consumers are willing to pay more for laptops because of resale value. I reread that like 5 times to make sure I wasnt reading it wrong.
This sounds like just another fanboy who wants to see Apple win and is grasping at straws for reasons why it will happen.
We have these PC vs Mac Spoof videos
all have some humor, and some have a point.
nicely done.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you've wasted any portions of your life reading M$ FUD, you'll find that M$ repeatedly states, and has convinced a large part of "Middlemanagement America" that Windows is actually has a cheaper TCO than Linux. As 90% of IT professionals/ametures/downsyndrome know this is complete crap, that 90% goes to 10% when it comes to untechnical Management types. However, the summary is completely... full of shit. "Once Apple is positioned, Microsoft will be forced to choose whether it wants to battle Mac OS X for control of the slick consumer desktop, or repurpose Windows as a cheaper, mass market alternative to Linux in corporate sales. If it doesn't make a choice, the company will face difficult battles on two fronts." Microsoft facing off in the Desktop market, no matter what "part" of the "desktop market" you talk about, is like the USA taking on Hati and St. Lucia in conventional warfare. If Apple could even reach %20 market share, thats still less than a minor threat to Microsoft, and Linux hasnt even seen a 5% share of desktops.... So a loss of %25 market share for desktops would make microsoft angry, but by no means "bring the giant down". TFA also hasnt been paying attention much to the past 20 years in personal computing... like... Apple has ALWAYS had a higher profit margin... but that doesnt mean shit when you lose out on penetrating massive amounts of markets... which is EXACTLY what M$ did rather well and Apple dropped the ball on, and the rest is what it is today. To the parent Papa TrollFlamebate you might just do a fucking search for "MS Monopoly + Linux" and you'll have 400000000 pages of explinations. Or perhaps, you can go back to highschool and do a research paper on "monopolies" and their affects on the free market instead of prentending to be some sort of insightful visionary who asks one line questions that "no one" has asked before.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Microsoft has the corporate desktop sewn up, plus they're still cheaper than apple. No way will they ever dethrone MS.
Interesting. The fairly large medical clinic at my university is also an all-Apple environment. (Even the TV screens in the lobby run a looped Keynote presentation.) There must be a good set of patient-management apps in the medical space for OS X. I've seen the login screen my doctor uses, but I can't remember the name of the app offhand.
Seriously, Apple has already cast their dice in a move away from computing. iPod, iPhone, iThisandthat are moves that show that Apple isn't really committed to long term computing at least in the traditional sense. Application developers have already felt the sting of the insular computer as appliance strategy. Without real applications (which might or might not last in their Office and Photoshopy forms) OSX has little potential as an ongoing consumer and business platform.
All that said, working with production apps like Adobe CS or Office is unquestionably cheaper on Windows. The workflow is virtually indistinguishable (I continue to work with both) and users won't care. For consumers, it might be that they just want an Internet appliance with unified consumer level apps. For them, OSX will be fine with the iLife suite. Not pro level, but pretty and tightly integrated. Of course, if those same consumers want to game then they'd better like WoW, because that's about it.
Apple doesn't really offer a professional platform no matter how handy a unix command line and perl scripting are. I remember when they tried harder and in fact had a richer environment of third party developers. Tight intergration of app and OS has killed the third party ecosystem on MacOS X which is ironic, really since that's usually what Microsoft is accused of.
Oh, and the article is about hardware vendors competing, not really Apple v. Microsoft.
From TFA:
Apple is competing against Microsoft's offerings, but it's not a retail software battle. Apple is using its integrated software to eat up the prime portions of the PC hardware market.
Nonsense. If they are chasing the corporate market, the key is MS Office, not one OS or the other. The minute that Office for the Mac starts to slip significantly behind in compatibility with the Windows version there will be few corporations that will chose Macs over PCs.
Regardless of what the fanboys believe there's nothing in the Mac's "integrated software" that's a make or break Corporate feature.
(ps - comment written on a G4 Powerbook)
Three Squirrels
First of all, Apple is in the entertainment business as well, so the profits need to be spread over more than just computers; although they do make more per machine than most PC manufacturers.
But even if Vista stumbles - as the author points out - users stay with an existing MS OS rather than dump MS altogether as Apple owners did when the ][ line dies (I was one to the bitter end) or when Apple failed to keep pace. What Apple has to overcome (as does Linux) is the huge installed base and apps that run on it. The switch to x86 architecture made it even tougher to move to the Mac given the lack of native binary apps for it; such as Photoshop whose CS2 is a bit slow on the newer Macs (CS3 is nice but not yet out).
iPhone - that looks to be a questionable product; given Apple has apparently hobbled it from the get go.
And this is my perspective as a Mac (and Windows) user.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I for one though, do not like Apple and its OSX as a platform and wonder why people say it's very good as a platform.
I don't like their hardware strategy, but I like OS X because it requires far less effort to maintain it than anything else I've used. I like it that there's no registry that can get corrupted such that one installer can ruin everything, and most programs don't need an installer or uninstaller (drop the program icon to trash & empty usually removes the program), and that there's nowhere nearly the dependency hell of any other OS I've used. I also like the fact that I can actually force a user account to have no admin priviledges and the software would actually work. This works under UNIX, but for my family, there's always one program that they need that pukes when it doesn't have admin priviledges.
Seriously, Linux may still not quite be there, but at the rate it is improving, it will exceed both Windows and OS X as a desktop platform within the next few years.
I doubt Apple will ever gain significant market share as long as Mac OS X requires a Mac.
The cheerleading chumps in my local Apple store are dimwits who spend more time chasing their female co-workers around the register than digging up useful information. So far the simplest information has to be double-checked before confirmed. Mostly they look like future aerobics instructors and act like it too. I guess that's show Microsoft good!
However, if Apple delivers a 12" Intel based Macbook Pro like rumours say, I'll probably buy one and run Solaris and Windows via Parallels. It's just too bad that Apple's initial warranty on their goods is so skimpy. They really wanna jack you with their over-priced and under resourced AppleCare bs. Which isn't that great from what my pro-Mac pals say. Though of course those same people evangelize Apple at the drop of a hat.......still it isn't like Dell is any better at customer service. As someone else here pointed out it would seem that article should pit Dell and Gateway vs Apple......
My recent encounters with OS X Tiger is that it reminded me of Gnome only prettier......
Hey, you think your house is cool?
This article contains the most ridiculous apples and oranges comparisons and circular logic I've read in a while.
The first mistake is comparing the net income of Apple to Dell and HP as evidence that Apple only needs to sell a small percentage of computers to "win." I guess for some definition of winning that doesn't include percentage of computers sold, this could be true.
The article then compares Apple's net profit to HP and Dell's, (both of which are lower than Apple's) as evidence that Apple is the dominant player in the desktop computer market. This ignores the fact that much of Apple's profit comes from music sales which are unrelated to desktop computers.
Of course, with a lot of hand waving, you can say this:
A large chunk of Apple's profitability comes from the iPod and other consumer electronics. Those sales are increasingly directing consumers to the Mac, and will help float the company through downturns in PC sales.
But where's the evidence that the iPod drives people to purchase a Mac? The Mac market share hasn't grown substantially even as the iPod has dominated its market. According to this logic, Mac sales should have jumped substantially.
Then, in the next paragraph:
However, as Apple takes away PC sales, an increasing smaller number of Windows licenses are sold.
And where is the evidence for this? Even if Apple makes more money on each computer they sell, the data shows that they still sell about 5% of PC's. Profitability doesn't automatically translate to market share, even if you really want it to.
Sure, Apple can be more profitable than Dell, but it doesn't make a lick of difference as far as Microsoft is concerned, as long as Apple's market share hovers around 5%. No matter how razor thin HP and Dell's margins are, Windows is still shipped on almost every PC they sell.
You have to compare Microsoft's sales with Apple's, if you want to extract any reasonable conclusion.
This is about as insightful as saying "well, General Electric is more profitable than Dell and HP combined, so this spells the end of the Windows PC market."
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
For the past 12 years or so I work for a company providing IT support for Macs. For 11 and a half years the Mac world of our customer base this: Mac users bought more Macs and in some unfortunate cases switched to PC's (mostly because of corporate decisions high up in the company's hierarchy).
Lately something strange is happening.
Firstly for the first time in these 12 years I have to help customers switch over from PC's to Macs.
Secondly I've had PC customers buy Macs for their looks and running Windows XP natively as if they were PC's.
The first is happening mostly with small companies and home users, the latter also in bigger companies.
So, Apple in the latter case does seem to gain on the desktop but not necessarily taking on Microsoft.
Very strange.
How could Windows possibly be cheaper than Linux?
When pundits talk about Linux, they men Red Hat.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That was done last year apple still has the same prices and hardware. Today dell has lower prices for that same system or you can get more hardware for the same price as the apple system right now.
Actually, no, this article drives home the point that from Apple's point of view, they SHOULDNT release Osx86. They are making more per box then Dell. If they came out with OSX86, most of the people that would buy it would probably be people that would buy Apple hardware anyway. I'm sure there are a small percentage of people that refuse to buy Apple hardware, but the losses in profits in other areas would dwarf this small gain. So really they would be losing a ton of money for a small increase in market share. They went through this before with the clones. I hate to break it to you, but Apple exists to make a profit. They do that by making things people want to buy at prices that people are willing to pay. I'm sure they have thought about doing so, and came to the conclusion that it would be folly. Apple isn't exactly bleeding cash if you noticed....
Monstar L
Well if apple does not release Osx86 they should at lest have a mid-range system with out an build in monitor and on board video.
I think Apple's in a good position for the next generation of end-user computing. Once all the "fat client" applications migrate fully online, it won't matter what the user interface on the desktop is like. As long as a web browser is there, it shouldn't matter. Right now, they have a lot of work to do. There's a whole generation of software developers who are used to the Windows platform, and the majority of businesses use Windows as their core desktop computing environment.
Once people sit down and poke around with a Mac, they're usually happy with it. The interface isn't as much of a stretch from Windows, and the OS is designed to keep the user unaware of what's going on under the hood.
Desktop PCs are going away, and eventually full laptops might follow. The only things that remain to be solved are: (1) Web applications need a user interface that's as fast as a desktop one, and (2) Either people have to give up their privacy and let third parties hold all their data, or local storage needs to be merged with these connected apps.
I'd love to use Macs at work, but our industry uses custom Windows applications that won't be ported in the near future. Getting people to develop for MacOS would be a big step toward business acceptance. Virtualization is great, but it needs to be simple. MacOS did this by placing "Classic" (Mac OS 9) apps in a seamless virtual environment. Users didn't even need to think about it, and that was important. There were _a lot_ of classic apps that needed to be emulated. It would be cool to do that for Windows apps, but I doubt it's ever going to happen.
If M$ continues the trend of insane prices and extortion, Apple might get the opportunity to do a little extorting of its own. I think the real question which we're beating around the bush on here is this: How long is it going to take for an open OS with a real chance of taking out either of these closed and unfriendly giants to emerge? I love Linux, but I don't see it catching on many of the average windows-trained users anytime soon :/
As chance would have it, this morning I came up with a suitable neologism for describing the business practices of the likes of Microsoft: capiXtreme
(n.) capiXtreme (abusing a market monopoly to extort assets from clients and use recovered assets in the production of further assets)
(adj.) capiXtremic, (of or relating to capiXtremism or capiXtremics) "a capiXtremic corporation" ; "capiXtremic methods and incentives are the only considerations"
(n.) capiXtremism, (the practice of employing capiXtreme or capiXtremic strategies, policies, or measures) "Microsoft's core business model revolves around capiXtremic strategies that place profits ahead of everything, regardless of what state the organization is in or what the resulting impact will be on the surrounding environment and ecosystems."
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Nice rewriting of history. All the indications are that PA Semi was very surprised when Apple didn't pick them as a supplier for notebook hardware. They were expecting Apple to be a major competitor. Also, if IBM had planned on dumping Apple, do you really think they would've added VMX (AKA Altivec) to the Power6 architecture? Since it only supports single-precision FP, and the chip has dual double-precision FMAC units anyway, the VMX unit is almost completely useless except for compatibility with OS X software that uses AltiVec.
And finally, the Intel Macs are broadly price competitive. Even months after its release, the only notebook that competes with the MacBook in its segment is the Vaio C series, and the latter is the same price for fewer features. And of course the Mac Pro is an absolute steal for a quad Xeon machine, even all this time after its release with no updates.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
They show via a few quick financial numbers that even though Apple is selling fewer machines, they're making more money per machine than your Dells or your Gateways.
Which is why my first computer was a ZX81. The first computer I did real stuff with was a Commodore and my first "really real" computer was a PC XT. I could afford them.
To be sure, Apple is gaining ground, but they're so far from even being a significant threat to Microsoft in terms of OSes that it's almost laughable. The most significant threat Apple poses is by making it necessary for website designers and others to test in Safari and what not; when MS alternatives hit critical mass, then MS is in trouble. That's unlikely to happen from Apple alone or even Apple + Linux; in addition, all Microsoft has to do to kill Apple is stop producing Office for OS X.
Besides, while Apple does make more money per machine, Gateway also sells high-end Xeon workstations and the like. What would be more interesting is to see how many high-margin machines Dell sells in comparison to Apple -- but I'd be willing to bet Dell sells a larger absolute number of them, even if Apple sells more on a percentage basis. Finally, some of the topics raised in an earlier thread about Apple in the enterprise may be worth reading because they apply here too.
Sorry for this offtopic post.
/etc/init.d? Can I start/stop services like, say, snmpd, via ssh?
I'm buying a MacBook soon as my new development machine. Everything about it looks great, but I have a few unanswered questions. I've googled around a bit, but I need a developer perspective if possible.
1. The Mac Terminal app doesn't cut it. What's the best terminal app that compares to KDE's Konsole (tabs, colours, all that stuff)? I found something called iTerm - any good?
2. What's the Mac equivalent of
3. What are people's experiences with the rootless X environment? Stable? Well integrated? I ask because I have the feeling I'll be making heavy use of the Fink project and running the odd X app.
4. Does the Finder offer a tree view? I couldn't figure that thing out.
Thanks to all who answer.
Linux requires less support from people with more knowledge. Which is more expensive, I do not know.
... that Microsoft is "beleaguered"?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
I haven't seen any evidence of lower prices on the Dell. Apple has kept the same price points, but they've gradually upgraded to faster Core 2 Duos over that period. A MacBook with 2 GHz Core 2 and 1 GB of RAM costs $1300. A Latitude D620 with the same basic features (1 GB RAM, 80 GB HD, DVD burner, wifi and bluetooth) costs $1268, with Dell's "$366 limited time instant savings". The Dell is all of $32 cheaper, and doesn't have Firewire, a webcam, etc.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It could work in some medical areas because their primary software is often just some text terminal into a medical database. The workstations are often more or less just dumb terminals.
It is great for end users. Bad for (business) developers. I only say bad for developers because basic things like ODBC are really poorly implemented on OSX. And your default database is MySQL. Not that there is anything wrong with MySQL, per se. It is great for web stuff, but it doesn't have any of the Crystal Reports type things that many businesses require. Just about everything on the Mac is geared towards graphics and end-users.
That said, I'd much rather use and administrate Macs at work (small college) than PCs. Even if it does limit the business end of things. But maybe that is just me.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
What would be the point of such a machine? The GMA 950 is a perfectly adequate chip for everything but games. And for games, well, if you're playing games, why the hell are you thinking of buying a Mac? Doom III is still considered a "new release" in the Mac world!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Apple isn't making more money because they don't need to be "beholden" to Microsoft. The reality is that operating system licenses don't cost the Dells of this world that much. They are a thing that goes on every PC and hundreds of millions sold each year means it doesn't cost a great deal per unit for Dell.
What Apple has the advantage of is that they do not need to compete trying to make a system which does exactly the same as their competitor's boxes with exactly the same hardware and resources. They have their own OS and can pick out a few things which differentiate themselves. That differentiation comes at a slight price premium. It is NOT because "they are not beholden to Microsoft" - they could do the same thing with a high-spec PC like Alienware do (ironically part of Dell now), they just do it with their own stuff and application suite and the integrated-monitor-iMac and cute features on PowerBooks instead.
If they did that they would have the all the driver nightmare problems that windows has. Currently they have a good reputation for reliability because they have the luxury of knowing exactly what the hardware looks like when they develop for it. If they allow people to start plugging in video cards with just-released-yesterday drivers they will be staring at the same problem MS has been dealing with for decades.
MS even has a few advantages here that Apple would not have:
1) They have a very large testing infrastructure set up to assist third party developers already in place.
2) Third party developers are going to be more interested in getting their drivers to work well on windows and its likely that the mac will be a second priority.
Once OS X becomes untied from specific hardware, we might actually see this happen.
But will it? Until then, I doubt it.
Home users and corporations alike like to custom tailor hardware for their needs, along with a large open market that pushes down hardware costs.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Despite that "Mac" and "iPod" are wide known trademarks, and the "desktop PC" having just two main uses, office and home, there is a hidden mesh of dependencies that makes you to choice the MS Windows option. Today is much easier to migrate from Windows your e-mail and administrative/office applications, but most people don't want to take care of extra annoyances, that is, IMO, the MS de facto monopoly key point.
While OSX is a good desktop OS, as it is XP or Vista, if you want to live without constraints and breath freedom enjoying a highly customizable desktop, your choice is GNU/Linux. Many fears come to most people: What if my disk fails to boot? Where is the Outlook e-mail? Can I play -put a D3D game here-? (...) Where you reply these questions, most users appear to be discouraged. May be the solution could come from some kind of loadable OS, a la Knoppix, using the disk as CD/DVD image cache (with dynamic patching), fault tolerant (fixable via copying the DVD image again), while the data is in alternate disk partitions... et voilà, you've got a crash-proof OS. The Vista FLASH cache techniques are, IMO, just a imagination deficit: if you have mechanic disks with >50MB/s sequential read, why the hell don't you fill 256 or 512MB of RAM with a previously stored OS image?
Open office is a big threat to Microsoft, and Open Office keeps getting better and better. Why do you suppose Microsoft is so behind the scenes Anti ODF? Because the way to an OS's heart is through its Office package. Microsoft office was the only game in town, but now it looks like there is a big push towards ODF .. which will make Open Office a viable candidate for the office applications of small corporations -- which will fuel interest in medium, then large corporations.
Why should a casual (but knowledgeable) user buy a PC and pay $270 for Vista, then another $200-$300 for Microsoft office when they can get a Unix Distro for cheap and Open office for cheap? Yes, you get what you pay for, but with Microsoft products, you don't always get what you pay for, you get less.
Why do you think Microsoft got into the Xbox and game business? Because it was a big business in PC's at the time. By separating it from the Home PC, they kind of protect themselves of games being produced for other OS's, and make a fair bit of profit in that market too.
Look at the Game world of warcraft? It's both a PC and Mac game. Look how screemingly successfull it is. Get a few more games like that to run on Macs and the OS competition will really really heat up.
...most programs don't need an installer or uninstaller (drop the program icon to trash & empty usually removes the program...
And the odd applications that do require an installer I tend to look on with some level of suspicion. So what are you doing and why? How do I uninstall you when I decide I don't want you any more?
TextWrangler has some method of enabling command line tools which doesn't have an equivalent disable which leaves me feeling edgy about what kind of cruft can be left behind. Not that OSX cares either way, I just get a touch of OCD about untidy systems.
They are probably paid for, but given an unprofessional look to give that grass-root look.
The funniest of them is the FreeBSD dude who is irritated because people mix him up with the Linux dude, neither of which look like an Apple noob.
Astroturfing - but fun
we get people trying to force Apple to ship Macs without OSX? They're abusing their dominant positoin, I tell you!
Of course not, since 2007 if finally going to be the year of the Linux Desktop.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Disclaimer: I am a Mac fanatic, so my opinions are biased. However, working in IT, Apple's biggest hurdle is that their OS isn't FIPS compliant, and doesn't have the other certifications that Windows does. FIPS doesn't equal security, but it means that the hardware or software module has seen review and meets the standards. The vendor paid the ticket of admission.
Where I work, I have to supply assurances and justifications for pretty much everything to legal and management. We all have a number of corporate regulations (SOX for example) that if violated will kill my company and land a lot of people in prison. If I install and use Windows, in the eyes of the law, I have done my "due diligence", so if there is a security breach, I can point and blame it on some Windows security flaw. Assuming the third-party firewalls and intrusion software doesn't catch it first. If I use Macs, I can't state to management that I am using "due diligence" -- Macs don't have the certifications which seem meaningless in one area, but are 100% critical in other areas. A security breach (and databases of peoples' info copied) in what would be arguably a more secure environment using a Mac and MySQL would land me in a Federal prison because I didn't follow legal processes and didn't use use an OS that has the pretty colored seals on the box.
An analogy is like a lock on a security door. One is less secure, but certified by the US government, one is more secure, but doesn't sport those pretty colored logos. Then comes a time that both locks are broken into. If I'm using the one certified, I can just say "blame the maker -- I did my part to adhere to standards" -- my rear is covered. The one that isn't certified means I breached policy, and thus am liable for the intrusion personally, and my company is liable as well.
So, until Apple gets the certifications (FIPS 140-2, level 1 for example) that can assure the attorneys I work with that the OS is secure from the CYA perspective, I will be running a Windows installation. I love Macs, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a 5x7 because I did "The Switch" at work, and run afoul of US law because of it.
Apple needs to double Mac market share in order for the platform to gain enough respect to be seen as a viable alternative platform by the masses. One way this could be accomplished is through the creation of an enterprise targeted subsidiary. If the Mac had around 10% marketshare, it would become very difficult for third parties to ignore the market. It would also be hard for M$ to eliminate or underfund the Mac BU without being called to the carpet again for monopolistic practices.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Apple is a far worse monopolist than Microsoft. I don't want to see hardware and software owned by one corporation.
While you make a good point, why is it do you think there is so much focus on using a Mac to run windows?
I think it is because someone finally made a computer that people can have a positive buying experience.
Cost is one of the least important things to a consumer, if you provide what people want (ease of use and style are big) they will pay more for it.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
The problem I see is that people think that all companies buy top-of-line PCs. A Decked-out MacBook Pro? I don't think so.
I have a feeling that a lot of companies are like the one I work for. We don't have a huge I.T. budget, so we have to be creative with our computer purchases (ie, eBay). This also means we are n-1 to n-2 generations or more on hardware, and n-1 on the operating system. Though, I should note that I work at a factory where we still have production PCs running DOS. (If it ain't broke, don't rewrite it.)
If Apple brought their system prices down to that of the common beige box, then and only then could they hope to truly capture the corporate market at large. But, that would mean less profit per box. And, in the end, Apple doesn't seem to really be suffering, so why would they want to hamstring their bottom line? The last time I read about Apple's bottom line, it was very healthy.
Thus, I does it really matter that Apple only has 5% (or whatever it is) of system sales?
Bearded Dragon
For a lot of people, games are still an integral part of PCs. Until Apple gets serious about games, and convinces developers to do likewise, they will not surpass MS. Only by familiarising users with their system during their free time can they hope to get workplace adoption as well.
The argument seems to be that one of the most significant trends in computing that I have seen in my lifetime, the decoupling of hardware and software buys, and the increasing "modularity" of computer hardware and software, will be reversible.
I don't believe it. Customers, consumers or corporate, would have to be pretty stupid to return to a situation in which they will lose every time. It is a great deal more convenient, and financially wiser, to be able to pick and choose what you need. Suppliers may not like it -- they never liked it -- but the closest, single-supplier monolithic platforms are all but extinct, a process that started with MS-DOS. Apple is basically a relic, a computing coelacanth, propped up by a dedicated fan base. But being cool is not enough.
Apple's OSes may be admirably slick. But they will make big inroads in the general market only on the day when you can select "Apple OS XI" on Dell's site when you buy a new laptop, as an alternative to MS Windows or Linux.
The thing is with Apple you only have one supplier, Apple, and one price, what they say is what you pay, you can't shop around at all. With PC's you have dozens of supplier to choose from. So finding a PC maker that is selling a system at a similar price to a similar Apple system is not difficult. However it is also not difficult to find PC makers selling systems at a lower price than Apple, it's called shopping around, something you are unable to do when buying from Apple.
So yes, you can show me plenty of examples of expensive PC's and say Apple is on par with pricing. But I can reply right back; I just bought an Acer Aspire 5102: dual-core AMD processor, 1 gig of ram, 120 gig harddrive, 15.4" screen, dvd-burner, built in webcam and ati graphics. All of it for 675 bucks, delivered to my door, for just an hour or two shopping around on the internet. Show me an Apple laptop even close to that configuration for that price and I'll eat my hat.
Well, not, but it's a start.
If the Mac reached a 20% market share, that could be the critical mass. It would make more developers make apps for it, which would make even more people get Macs, which would make more developers make apps for it, which... well, you get the idea.
And consider: these days, when people think "computer", they usually mean "Microsoft Windows". Why? Because Windows is so ubiquitous that they don't know anything else. If another system took a decent chunk of the market, people would know there's something else out there, and would look into it. And they'd end up checking other systems as well. Mostly Linux, but a few even daring tread into the "extreme nerd niche" of Solaris, QNX, Haiku, MenuetOS, SkyOS, Syllable...
With Vista getting little praise from disappointed reviewers, Apple getting big bucks and high praise, Linux constantly improving, and the ubiquity and platform-agnosticism of the internet... maybe Microsoft won't just fall, but their slice could be about to get a lot smaller!
Circumcision is child abuse.
iPatient
I can't believe the article is actually serious. It is a COMPUTER OPERATING SYSTEM, not some sort of moral cause. How sad is it that people need to spout some tripe for some company they don't even work for in an effort to get more people to validate their choice somehow? What a waste of life.
Nothing. It is all stock hardware, they make money on the OS which comes with an Apple branded dongle in various shapes and sizes (and prices). But that it is, it is standard innards.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
....If we could have our existing desktops shipped with OSX, ......
You can. Just buy your boxes from Apple. Every one of them comes with OSX pre-installed. I'm sure that Apple will give a volume discount. You can even still run Windows for those few jobs where there is no OSX alternative yet.
All theory is gray
If they came out with OSX86, most of the people that would buy it would probably be people that would buy Apple hardware anyway. I'm sure there are a small percentage of people that refuse to buy Apple hardware, but the losses in profits in other areas would dwarf this small gain.
It would be a pretty risky strategy. If only Apple had another example of a company that tried this, i.e., just selling their operating system, but without proprietary hardware, to see if this crazy strategy of making profit from software would work!
Nah, you're right. There's NO WAY a software-only company can make any money.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
and while I saw a lot of people in the store checking out the wares, one thing that I noticed was that on the line for the cash register was that most people had iPod related products and accessories. And as I was walking around the store looking at the prices, it made me realize that Apple has way too much of a premium for their products, except for their high end stuff which can actually be a good deal.
What Apple needs is a desktop system that is in between the Mac Mini and Mac Pro. The so called xMac would be something I can see a lot of corporations adopting if they needed something that offers more flexibility than the Mac Mini, and as well as regular end users who wish to use beefier graphic cards to play their favorite games. The same goes for their laptop lines, they need Mac Books with larger screens without the speed range of the Mac Book Pro. And if they price it right, even with a small premium, many people will buy these middle of the road systems.
This year I am going to switch to a Mac Pro system cause, frankly I am tired of Windows and its potential security problems like IE exploits and Vista's attempt to lock you into Microsoft further, and Linux feels too kludgy on the desktop for me to bother with. Plus I always have the option of running Windows when I feel like it with Parallels/BootCamp.
There is one advantage to Apple products that PCs don't have. Because you pay a premium for their products, they depreciate a lot slower. You will find on eBay and other marketplaces that old Powerbooks and G5s still sell for about 60-80% of the original price. Some stores like PowerMax let you trade in old systems as well.
The article compares Apple's revenue and profits to Dell/HPs, and concludes that Apple is getting the high end computer market.
While this may be true, this is not a good comparison. You cannot compare Apple's profits to HPs in this way. HP does not have Apple's iPod profits, nor does Apple have HP's consulting and ink jet businesses
Dell and Gateway do great in the corporate world, which is a space Apple has yet to penetrate to any large degree, because the customer doesn't fit their product space.
What kind of crazy assumptions and blinders go into that conclusion? What exactly does Apple offer that does not fit the corporate customer? How does Windoze fit them better? Are you trying to tell me that fewer features for more money is what big dumb companies want? Bah! companies need to get their work done and everything else is a costly distraction. The more tools they have to do that and the less they cost, the better the corporate user works.
Neither company fits what big companies need. The only advantage non free software enjoys right now is in multi media and non free entertainment content. If companies really care about that, Apple is the winner. In every other category, free software wins. Right now, free software offers control, hardware costs, flexibility, stability and applications people in the non free software world envy. User created tools do the user's work better than boxed bits.
Don't cry about legacy systems holding them back either. Those are non free problems that go away as soon as you get out of the non free world. The longer companies wait, the more they pay and the harder it gets. Every dollar you spend on non free software is another dollar the non free software companies use to build the next trap for your data. Now, as M$ transitions to Vista, is the best time to jump. Wine, crossover office, email exporters and all sorts of other tools work with current M$ junk. Vista will, I'm sure, break many of those tools and make things harder again. Rather than spend lots of money on a Vista downgrade, people should be making a free software upgrade. Apple and M$ have their legacy niches, and that's where they should be deployed until those gaps are filled. Many of those gaps can be filled with virtual computing. Actual needs, like small scale movie making and drafting, would give non free a vanishing minority OS share.
Finally, as non affiliated computer customization and sales companies, both Dell and Gateway should be able to sell any of the above to any company. That they can't is one of the biggest downers of non free software. The game only works as long as everyone co operates to screw the customer and each other. The first company that breaks out of the game is going to be the biggest winner. When the rest follow, they will all have to compete on an even playing field of hardware and organizational merit.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Apple would be in serious trouble if Microsoft gave even less support to Office on the Mac, and both of them know that.
There will always be desktop/notebook computers in use as we see them today (well, for the foreseeable future anyway.) They offer power and flexibility that can't be matched by embedded devices. However, with the miniaturization of components, more embedded devices are on their way. The market for personal computers has peaked in developed countries and will not grow nearly as fast.
Apple isn't getting out of computing - they're jumping into emerging markets. Being in multiple markets is healthy for a large corporation - so long as those markets are complementary. Expertise gained from one market can be applied to other markets thereby providing a competitive advantage. What you see now is Apple expanding into new markets that complement their existing business. The cool GUI on the iPhone is a direct result of R&D spent on OSX.
Note that it is important for Apple to not expand into markets that do not complement their existing business. Do that and you soon become like Sony. How long did it take Sony to adopt mp3s? - No thanks to their recording label...
Willy
If Apple really wants to gain marketshare, they need to do two things:
Otherwise, Apple will continue to be stuck with their current demographic, which is largely based on creative-type users and a halo effect from them and the iPod. Mac sales will jump again in the next few months all due to Adobe finally releasing CS3.
"Being cool" will only get Apple so far. They have to play the game and get the work done, and allow their users to do the same.
License OS X to all comers. If Microsoft can get $399 for it's bloatware, Apple can get it too, and I'd pay it, as would a lot of you, even sans support. I can imagine by 2010 more than half the geek desktops on Earth running it as primary. At that point all the doors open.
I am not buying Apple's (or anyone else's) proprietary stack. Reread that last sentence until it registers. It applies even if the platform is only proprietary in the legal sense, as is mostly the case with Apple's hardware. The full stack chip to terminal business model declined sometime in the mid 80s and it is not coming back. It persists in some boutique niches, where Apple lives today, and that is as far as it will ever get.
No one vendor can scale well enough to satisfy the entire world of computing. AMD exists to make x86 scale to the market. Nvidia and ATI carry on because the market wants options. There has always been a plethora of storage vendors and that isn't going to change, because that is what the market insists on. The market has no trouble finding room for multiple competitive, successful game console vendors. The epiphany required to regress all of this back to the days of the One True Vendor is fantasy.
There has never been a better time for a rebel to chuck a sledgehammer through the screen. Vista sucks and few of us really want it. Less than a quarter of Apple's revenue comes from desktop/laptop hardware (linky). Why not risk some of that hardware revenue and take 50% of Microsoft's OS market?
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Are you high? From your link:
0 06/1115_lt1100.html
http://www.systemshootouts.org/shootouts/laptop/2
The Dell has TWICE the RAM of the Apple laptop. I wouldn't want to use OS X or Windows with 512 MB of RAM, which is what the Macbook comes with. Oh yeah, the 60Gb hard drive in the Macbook is also pathetic. The Dell has twice that. As well as twice the number of USB ports (I routinely use all 4 of mine so that's a requirement) and a bigger screen. The flash memory slot is also very useful for anyone with a digicam.
All the other piddling differences are inconsequential. I don't give a crap about the webcam and the 6 pin firewire. The software differences that the author says are the Mac's advantage are a matter of preference. Although I'm not a Windows fan, you can't just declare a winner between the two OS's as easily as saying that a faster processor is better than a slower one.
Man, my gf has a $3000 powerbook. Ya know what it's specs are? About the same as my brother's $800 Dell Inspiron. You're paying a few thousand bucks for slightly more rounded corners and silver instead of black. And personally, I prefer black.
I mean, hell, if you have $3000 to blow on it, go for it, but most of us can't afford to waste that much of a computer. Especially one that won't run the majority of apps. I'm a Linux user myself, but it's nice to know that when I wanna game I can go to windoze without much effort...though I usually just use QEMU.
My optician uses iDoc
Everytime I compare Apple to Dell for purchasing buisness equipment I find the Apple gear is more expensive. Sure, if you go ahead and look on Dell's site and pick something you think 'exactly matches' the Apple you can maybe convince yourself that the price is OK. But that is not how buisnesses shop.
Case in point, last year I bought a bunch of new workstations from Dell. The requirement was simple: least expensive Core 2 Duo with 2G RAM and dual DVI video (external monitor). Dell sold them to me for ~1100$ CAN. Apple's cheapest comparable is a Mac Pro starting at over 2.5k!
This years purchase is going to be least expensive core 2 duo with 1GB ram and 1600x1200 LCD display. Dell will sell me that configuration for around 1300-1400$. Where is apple? 1600$ CAN for a 20" imac with an inferior display or 2400$ for a good 1920x1200 display. No thanks.
How about least expensive system for light use? Dell will sell me an Optiplex for 429$ CAN while the cheapest possible Apple is 679$.
What about a workstation for technical computing with 16 GB of RAM and dual 2GHz Xeons? Dell: ~5000$ CAN, Apple: 9200$ - In what world is this a comparable price? Apple's prices for RAM upgrades are insane.
For Apple to have a chance they need to either provide greater customization at a fair price, or choose market segmentations that make more sense to business customers not home users.
As long as Apple continues to segment their market like this they will loose out on price to the likes of Dell that will give you exactly what you need and charge a fair price for it.
and an 128MB ATI MOBILITY(TM) RADEON® X1300 HyperMemory(TM) video card!
Steve (ThrowEm) Ballmer has not positioned Microsoft for the LONG RUN. This is why Warren Buffett always said he would not invest in Microsoft (a software only company), because he didn't understand the business model (or similar words).
When you have a major corporation who has effectively had only one CEO in decades, the corporation can be blind-sided. Dell has pushed the limits of "Cost Control" about as far as it can go.
Do you make Volkswagens for the Masses or Maseratis for the cognicenti? Doing BOTH is real tough (ask Detroit).
I agree, Steve Jobs is leaving the "loss leader" business to the companies that want to work down the long price spiral as commoditization sets in and profits erode year after year.
Incidentally, RDM's Daniel Eran, has written the most clear series of articles over the last several months explaining the How, Where, When & Why of the PC market that I've seen. I think his point are well made (no connection with he or his site).
Instead taking an Apple computer, and then trying to configure a PC to be similar, turn it the other way. Take a bunch of random PC's, and try to get an Apple computer with the same features. Due to Apple's limited selection of hardware, almost always, the Apple computer is going to be more expensive (though you will end up with features the PC doesn't have, that doesn't mean I want to pay for them). This is especially due to the fact that you have to move up pretty far into Apple's line up to get features found on basic and mid-range PCs, like a 3.5" harddrives, expansion slots, and non-integrated graphics.
Are you denying that Apple prevents any other company from making compatible hardware>
I don't think there is a focus on using a Mac to run *Windows* itself - there is a focus on running a few Windows only *applications* on a Mac. Unfortunately, Windows is currently required to do that.
Apple had a unique product all their own prior to converting to x86 hardware. Given the cash injection from Microsoft [0] a number of years ago, and the recent windows support [1] on the mac, Apple isn't that unique. You just end up running Windows on Apple hardware - so what? The only thing I can see happening is that the software industry is going to be considering Microsoft alternatives for the first time in over a decade. If that's all that comes out of it, I'm all for it.
[0] http://news.com.com/2100-1001-202143.html
[1] http://onmac.net/
http://www.macwindows.com/
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Well, there is the potential for Apple to take over the home market.
According to Intel and IDC, the HOME pc market is only 10% of the total PC market... if apple has 3-4% marketshare and we know they dont sell much to the business market.... they might have at least a 1/3 or more right now of the home market.
If they get to the 5% range, then they could start to approach even being the #1 home computer.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
From the summary: It's the opinion of the article's author that Apple doesn't have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win.
So by changing the definition of "win", Apple can "win." Meanwhile, back in reality, as long as there are hundreds of millions more machines being sold that run only Linux and Windows and can't run MacOS X, there's no way for Apple to "win" the desktop market.
Why do Slashdot moderators post this Roughly Drafted guy's blog rants? He's an unapologetic Apple fanboy and pulls stuff out of his ass. Take this quote for example: "Just like Apple in 1990, Microsoft appeared untouchable in 2000.... Apple also didn't count on Microsoft offering much of a threat, since the company's Windows product had been an embarrassing joke until 1990, and was still laughably behind.". First of all, why does Windows seem any less touchable now than 7 years ago? They still dominate the desktop. And it must have been a different 1990 he was living in because Microsoft had already locked up the desktop business market by 1990. LOTUS 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were the #1 applications in their space, and they ran on DOS.
Everyone seemed to know where Microsoft stood back then. Fall of 1990, not far from Apple's height of Mac sales as the percent of the total PC market (1991-2), Microsoft was already valued about 30% higher than Apple in market cap. In 1990, Apple was facing a market that did not want to pay a premium for commodity computer parts and they released the LC and Classic to get some steam. Yet this roughly drafted guy is trying to claim that a desire for low cost commodity parts somehow won't stop Apple in the future. That's just not how it works in a free market.
My dentists office has been all Macs for quite a while now. It seems medical research articles are posted fairly frequently on the Apple Hot News section of their website.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
"If the Mac reached a 20% market share, that could be the critical mass. It would make more developers make apps for it, which would make even more people get Macs, which would make more developers make apps for it, which... well, you get the idea." ...but none of that will help Apple penetrate a huge portion of the overall market--the corporate desktop. Large businesses and government frequently will not accept sole source suppliers, so until Apple opens up the platform to others it will be locked out. Apple accepts this, at least publicly.
Don't know what all this talk is about anyway. There's an assumption that Aple's grand strategy is to undermine the Windows monopoly and I don't see that as being the case. The author says "Apple doesn't have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win, it only needs to take the most valuable segments of the market." but the question is "win what?" Apple, by his own arguments, is already winning. It is maintaining its brand image, it has a number of successful products, it is very profitable, and its stock is highly valued.
The article is written with the characteristic Apple slant. The history told is incomplete and overinflates Apple's relevance in the PC world while ignoring the fact that Microsoft had significant competitors. It denigrates PCs, calling them "e-waste" and claiming there's no innovation in them while ignoring that all the R&D that produces them is what makes Mac hardware today. It claims that Macs, though lower volume, represent the cream of the crop even though the true "cream of the crop" is the business PC that Apple doesn't produce. It consistently confuses Apple's competitors and uses improper metrics to argue that Apple is "large enough". All in all, it's an Apple-centric view of the world and history---not especially accurate, not offering any new or interesting insight, and not built on a sound premise in the first place. A worthless waste of time.
Grandparent is an insightful troll.
Apple controls the hardware, and prevents anyone from making other hardware on which to run Mac OS X. It's not just a matter of saying it's "unsupported", they actually go out of their way to make sure it does not happen.
You'll also notice many of the same strange practices as Microsoft, only moreso. Where is the option to set the default web browser? Why, it's in the Safari control panel! Just like similar options -- email client, HTML editor, etc -- are on the "Internet Options" control panel on Windows -- but that is actually in Control Panel, not just in IE.
Upgrades are more frequent and cost more, and are less compatible with previous versions than any Microsoft OS -- except Vista, maybe, but that seems likely to change.
And look at how they are handling the iPhone. NO third-party apps, the end. I don't like Windows Mobile either -- I'd prefer a nice Linux handheld (and these do exist) -- but at least Windows Mobile encourages third-party development. Even my cell phone, a Java piece of shit, allows me to download third-party apps to it.
And as much as I wanted to thank Apple for supporting standards (Safari passes Acid2) and open source (they sent patches back to Konqueror), I've found that I actually have more freedom on Windows than I do on OS X.
I still run Linux as my main desktop, and I might even still use OS X on my Powerbook (if I got it fixed), but that's because OS X is a good OS, not because I like Apple or wish them to take over the world. They strike me as somewhat less evil than Microsoft (their stuff actually works, and they do actually innovate), but far, far more proprietary.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If 20% was Mac and 5% was Linux, I think more developers would seriously consider spending 25% of their budget on a Mac and Linux port. If the product was developed sanely in the first place, it wouldn't take more than one or two guys to do that port.
Then, if you ended up with, say, 80% of new apps supported on OS X and Linux, more people would consider buying a Mac or downloading a Linux distro. At that point, it would start to be a real competition based on which is really better, not so much which people are FORCED to use.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Users are looking for the ease of using OSX, but for work or play purposes they simply cannot afford to lose the entrenched Windows apps that they have right now. A web developer, for example, absolutely needs to run IE6 and IE7 to ensure that their work is compatible with the vast majority of the world's users, whilst preferring OSX for its simplicity and cleanliness. In that case a MacBook Pro with Windows virtualized with Parallels is quite the ideal solution.
It's funny how MS apologists constantly use the "but Windows run on Mac!" point to assert Windows' superiority. If people truly wanted to run just Windows, they wouldn't buy a Mac, they'd buy your average PC box. It's quite obvious to anyone that Boot Camp other run-Win-on-Mac solutions are there to take the shackles off people who are otherwise locked to PC right now.
All I am saying is that they must be doing something right if people (mostly non-techs or at least non hardware IT people) are willing to go to the trouble of paying extra for a Mac and them setting up a dual boot.
I used to sell PCs and they are a pain to buy, if I had to buy a computer off the shelf I would much rather just buy a Mac take it home plug it in and be done with it.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
They show via a few quick financial numbers that even though Apple is selling fewer machines, they're making more money per machine than your Dells or your Gateways.
No shit. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
Apple builds hard and software to fit. PC vendors still put out large ugly space-wasting and compareativly expensive boxes running an OS that only manages to stay because it was preinstalled. Fact is, considering price/performance iMacs are currently the best Desktop deal. Close behind are the PC laptops with their hardware prices rapidly plummeting. I've been wondering for years why no one puts out their own 'Mac Mini' clone for half the price. There is some psychosis going on from preventing PC builder to step into the comodity area. Somehow even cheap non-gaming PCs have to be big, ugly and hand-assembled. Anything remotely Apple like from Shuttle or hushtechnologies is bizarely priced. As long as that is the case, Apple will gain popularity. Good for them, they deserve it. Nothing new here.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You referenced the only macbook of the 5 models that sucks. Very nice.
It's blindingly obvious. Apple prevents competition in hardware manufacture for OS X. It doesn't matter very much now, because hardly anyone uses OS X, but if that were to change, we'd be in a much worse situation than we are with MS. At least you can run Windows on any x86 processor, and the driver interface is well documented so that anyone can produce hardware for their software.
How many competitors are there in the OS X hardware field?
I like your statement, which is entirely true and relevent, but I think the real message to be taken out of it is, the type of computer you want is going to seem less expensive for its features, no matter which side of the fence you're looking from.
Having three machines may be rather rare, but even with one machine it is really nice if it has a low noise level and a small footprint. It is indeed much more of an issue at home, but in the office it's definitely relevant too.
> I've seen the login screen my doctor uses, but I can't remember the name of the app offhand.
iDeath -- now with iLife integration.
My other car is first.
The only database-related issue that would make using OS X as a dev environment inconvenient would be the need to run MS SQL Server locally. Just about any other database runs fine on OS X and there are several commercial ODBC vendors as well as a free option.
This story and thread is another fanboy fest. Apple does cost more and any consumer who goes out and comparison shops, instead of reading some carefully prepared "comparison" written by some fanboy with an agenda, knows it. That's why Apple doesn't set industry standards and has single digit market share and it's why they will always be in that position.
And for every fanboy who mentions it - other than apple fanboys and a relative handful of people who have specific needs, nobody gives a shit about firewire. most people have no clue what it is and no desire for it, and if they had it, they probably wouldn't use it anyway.
Apple stores suck from a customer service perspective. They're too 1337 and kewl to be bothered to sell or service anything.
Really, Jobs charted Apple's return to profitability on positioning Apple as a multimedia media company. It's not that the computer side of the business is being neglected. It's that the thousands of ancilliary gadgets we are accumulating and the gowth of home entertainment is where the big moeny is and is going to be... No point in really fighting MS too hard on their turf, better to go after areas where there is money to be had. Apple is in the game to make money.
Apple have the potential to take on Microsoft in the consumer space. In many ways they have an advantage here in that Apple customers (currently) don't have to worry about security problems like viruses. That may change in the future but right now it's not an issue. There's very little your average Apple consumer can't do on OS X that they explicitly need a Windows PC for.
Leopard server (when it ships) offers a lot more to the SMB crowd that Tiger currently doesn't, and Apple will be able to leverage some of this new strength to gain further traction into the SMB space.
Where Apple stands no chance at all is in the Enterprise. The majority of Enterprise desktops have too much invested in MS workstations, plus Apple is not producing products targeting the Enterprise that would allow them to mass deploy OS X on the desktop with any advantage over MS Windows. Quite the opposite in fact. I'll give you an example. I was at a VMware presentation/seminar very recently and one products I saw demoed was HP's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This allows you to have Active Directory controlled logins, a set of application servers and a suite of VMware servers virtualising the desktop OS with HP thin clients at the front end. The thin client selects a virtual desktop OS to connect to based on load balanced availability, which is then personalised at login time with the (served) apps and data that match the users profile. It's pretty impressive stuff.
I'm not under any kind of NDA so I can quote a specific usage case given (in production today) as Prudential, who in the UK have moved their call center ops to somewhere in India. Only the thin client exists in the Indian call centers, all the virtual desktops, data and applications are in datacentres in the UK. Access to data and applications is centrally controlled on a per account basis and can be updated and (forcibly) refreshed at any time.
The benefits to the Pru are obvious. The security of their data (SAN storage) virtual operating system instances, user accounts and app servers remain in their protected UK datacentres. And the thin remote client architecture means that implementing a remote desktop pretty much any where in the world is cheap, quick and flexible. If in future they want to move their call center ops to somewhere else in india, or eastern europe, or China or even back to the UK, they have the flexibility to do this cheaply, without disrupting their datacentres at all.
Is this possible with Apple desktops? No! Hell, you can't even do it with any of the Linux desktop solutions. The only technology in Unix history that could have matched this solution was Project Athena from MIT, and that was officially retired 16 years ago in 1991 !!
My point is that current *ix desktops (including Apple) are all about glitz and glamor and capturing the hearts and minds of the consumer, and the small footprint of academia. In the mean time, MS and its partners are listening to the Enterprise and building innovative solutions like virtualising desktops for remote, cheap, flexible access.
The E1505 is a completely different class of machine. It's a full pound heaver, a third of an inch thicker, an inch and a quarter wider, and an inch and a half deeper.
In the laptop market, the price of the machine isn't just proportional to the specifications, but to the size, weight, and build materials. Smaller machines cost more to build, and they sell for more. The E1505 is bigger, heavier, and (from direct experience), more cheaply built. No surprise that its cheaper. Indeed, its no surprise that its cheaper than Dell's own Latitude, which is more expensive than the E1505 precisely because its smaller and better-built.
The MacBook's closest competitors, from the point of view of specifications and form-factor, are the Vaio C series, ThinkPad T 14.1", the Latitude D620, and Asus's 13.3" model. Relative to the Vaio, the MacBook has more features for the same price and similar build quality. Relative to the ThinkPad, it is heavier and a bit less sturdy, but with a better screen and more features at a slightly lower price. Relative to the D620 its better built and has a better screen for a slightly higher price. And its almost identical to the Asus model at the same price.
When I bought my MacBook, I did some comparison shopping. In its size/weight category, its really hard to find a better notebook at the price. You can get bigger features by going to a bigger form-factor, but lugging around a 15" laptop is a PITA. You can also save money by going with less performance (in particular, dropping the dual core or going to an AMD chip will save you a lot of money). However, if you want a fast dual-core machine in a mid-sized form-factor, the MB is a great choice.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What carefully prepared comparison? I picked the D620 off Dell's website and just matched the major specs (CPU/GPU/RAM/HDD). I didn't even bother to match things like firewire or the webcam, which would have made the Dell even less attractive. And I picked the D620 because: a) it was similar in size unlike the E1505, and b) because I've owned Inspirons and they're pieces of shit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Translation:
Apple charges the consumer more. Big surprise. Apple has always cost more. Back when MacOS was a big improvement over DOS, they used to charge 2 and three times as much.
Anyone who doesn't think Apple isn't vastly more "evil" than Miscrosoft when it comes to bending the public over and taking their money is a fool.
Terminal Server/Citrix solves the problem of having to run Windows apps. Just get a beast Dell server and give everyone a login. Problem solved... :-)
You can pick up a reasonably fast box that sort-of runs Windows at any podunk corner shop reseller. For a few hundred bucks.
Also, getting spares, service, whatever for a Mac (outside US/CA/UK/much of Western Europe) can be a bitch and a half.
I bought my first Powerbook two years ago and I am totally utterly convinced and addicted, and even I have trouble with the cost.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Apple laptops are quite price competitive. Check it out for yourself.
I am uncertain what your gf's situation is, but are you perhapse comparing a 3 year old Mac to an new Dell ?
2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1680 x 1050 pixels
2GB memory
160GB hard drive1
8x double-layer SuperDrive
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM
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A comparable laptop with half as much memory (1GB) costs $3,699 from Dell. With a slower processor, the Dell comes in at $2,873.
Infact, most people who know Microsoft don't even know what a Apple computer is.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The Mac market has grown substantially, as was stated in the context you took your snippet from: Mac sales across the last two years were nearly 10 million (more if you include the last quarter reported), up from ~6 million in the two years prior.
6 -> 10 is substantial growth, and the majority of that growth came just this last year, when Intel Macs appeared. The iPod helped to build Apple's retail stores, which are selling craploads of new Macs to non-Mac users.
Watch what happens in 2007.
As far as Apple's growth making "no lick of difference to Microsoft," you also missed that every Mac sold is more than one OEM license unsold, because it also means fewer cheap PCs needed to replace to the cheap PC after it quickly goes obsolete in a couple years. Further, Mac users are unlikely to go back to Windows after making the jump.
I posted about the issue earlier: here and you can read an AVALANCHE about the issue at this Ars Technica thread. I linked to it elsewhere in this thread, as it's as much detail as anyone could want on the subject of an xMac and why Apple doesn't produce one (or should produce one).
My friend's Dad worked for Apple back in the early nineties, and I do remember an ad campaign for Apple called "The Mac is not a toy". Ironic now when people say that video games are key for Apple's adoption into the mainstream...
Most likely File Maker Pro
Let's face it, most people really don't care what OS they're running. They don't buy a computer to run an OS, they buy a computer to run applications... be they games, office automation, home accounting, music, movies, anything...
Windows Vista's biggest competition isn't OS X or even OSX *and* Linux, it's Windows XP, Windows 2000, and even the holdouts running Windows 9x and Me (yep, there are quite a few of them). And what the competition is over isn't even customers really, it's developers. Software publishers, programmers, and the like. Because they're the ones writing the software that people buy computers to run, and the people writing the software that people buy the computers to run, write for Windows. Because that's where the money is. Because most of the people who just buy computers to run applications, who buy the applications instead of writing their own or putting something cool together with Applescript or the UNIX shell, are running Windows. Because that's where the applications are.
Microsoft's got more of a problem convincing developers to cut loose the Windows XP (and Windows 2000 and Me) users so that they'll be forced to upgrade to Vista, than they have convincing people not to buy Mac OS X. Because unless OS X gets enough market share that it starts smelling like serious money, it's nothing they really have to worry about.
So while Apple may remain profitable on the margins, none of that profit translates into anything that can "take Microsoft on on the desktop". And most of the article is all about how big and important Apple is *as a business*, which is interesting and useful to keep in mind, but it's an article that really needs a different title... because the one it has is just plain silly.
> Which is why my first computer was a ZX81. The first computer I did real stuff with was a Commodore and my first "really real" computer was a PC XT. I could afford them.
.. )
Most probably because you were working, and so had considerable money to spend.
A whole generation of computer enthusiasts grew with ATARI ST and AMIGA machines because the PC was an overpriced computer (with a retarded architecture and a retarded CPU. not even talking about its OS
It's so difficult for me to understand why people are still making this argument. It's as if they lack even a basic understanding of how computer manufacturers work.
CASE: I worked for a major computer manufacturer (HP). They have basically two lines of notebooks, each with several options: Consumer grade and Business Class. Consumer grade notebooks come with all the bells and whistles - built in cameras - extra media controlling buttons, glossy screens, etc. etc. etc. These were your run of the mill $500-$1500 computers. The business class machines had far fewer features. They were very basic in nature, lacked what HP deemed as modern styling, and only had basic hardware. Yet the business class machines were much more expensive.
How could this be? The same is true of Dell, by the way, and any manufacturer that makes both grades of notebooks. Do you really think there is no difference between a $500 notebook and a $2000 notebook that have the same amount of ram and the same size hard drive? You would have to be mentally handicapped to think that your $600 Acer even compares in terms of quality to any machine that costs 3x as much. Sure, it had all the specs that make it sound great, but the fact is it's a piece of shit.
You see manufacturers use whatever hardware is available for the cheapest price THAT DAY when making consumer grade laptops. That's why they are much less reliable and prone to problems. The quality control that goes into them is limited compared to what goes into a business class machine. You could buy two of the same model Acer computer, and find they have different internal components. One is a lemon, and one works great. With a business class HP, Dell, or Apple computer (yes, Apple's would be compared to a business class machine - not your shitty $600 computer) a run of computers all use the best hardware they were designed for and are the same across the line. Businesses are willing to pay more for the reliability and the ability to use one disk image across all the machines. You can't get that with your $600 notebook.
The bottom line is this: You get what you pay for. There are $50k cars with smaller engines than $20k cars, but do you really think they compare? If you're a naive consumer you'll buy whatever is sold to you. You'll shop based on price and always end up with shit. If you're a discerning consumer you'll make decisions based on things that actually matter and end up getting what you paid for.
Apples, Sonys, and other high end laptops are not overpriced. They simply lack all the cut corners that make your piece of shit $600 acer possible.
or else!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
What "fringe audience"? You think selling premium quality goods is a silly business concept? Tell BMW, Porsche, LVMH and other well run luxury goods companies that they are wrong. Apple does not need to be large because they have loyal and very valuable customers that come back again and again. They even proselytize and convert!
And who says OS X is really that massive compared with say Windows? After all Mac OS only has to work on their hardware. Apple can deliver a controlled environment and experience - something customers love because it just works.
If I am one to judge by Apple will continue to earn money in the years to come. Last year I bought my first Mac after being introduced to some old G3 iMacs and "information" from an Apple fan. I quickly got rid off the MacBook, bought the MacBook Pro and then an iMac 20". I have loads of MP3 players but I ended up getting an iPod 30GB because of the integration with backup software and iTunes. And let us not forget the excellent software I have suddenly begun buying from Apple and others.
Perhaps their reputation is only good because Apple deletes any accusations on driver issues?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Remember years ago....most small to medium businesses ran Netware. The stuff was everywhere. Around Netware 3.11 or 4 MS started making inroads with NT server, NT workstation, and windows 95. How did this happen?
The Novell Network client for MS operating systems did much to integrate MS products into these networks and slowly, through the natural replacement cycle, Novell went away and Windows came in.
OS X could do this the same way. The AD plugin for OS X is a good start. Better support and integration of Active Directory and Open Directory will make it possible for OS X to directly replace Windows servers and workstations.
It might take 5-10 years, but it is possbile.
-ted
I'm curious if you've tried it? I find most people that dislike Macs and OSX haven't used them much. Most people that have find them addictive. The primary advantage is fewer hassles. It takes little or no configuring and updating and upgrading are painless. If you feel the need to fiddle then you are stuck with Windows and Linux but if you are into computers to use software with the fewest hassles then Mac wins hands down. There are also a lot of handy utilities built into the OS. I'm a sucker for widgets and I have dozens I can call up with one mouse click. Leopard looks amazing and has some intensely cool functions built in. For pure productivity there's no comparing the two. For hardware Mac is stunning. Yes you can't build your own system but I find with PCs it takes a while to settle them in. With a Mac it's called an "on" button. I upgraded the memory on mine and I didn't have to crack the case to do it. The pro towers are even more stunning. You can install secondary hard drives by opening the case and sliding them in. There are three words for Mac simple, painless and fun. For Windows I'd say complicated, annoying and a hassle. I've got three machines on my desk. Two are PCs and one is a Mac. The Mac is just more fun to use and far less stressful. If you approach Macs as a Mac hater you'll have a bad experience but if you sit down at one for an hour and just have some fun I think you'll be shocked. No one is trying to make you change religions here it's just a computer. The hardest thing I find is when I switch back to the PCs is remembering to be paranoid about viruses and spyware. I have a whole ritual involving Spybot and taking deep breathes when I down load files. Not to mention running defrag on a regular basis. The hard part is I do none of that with the Mac so I have to remind myself I'm on a PC now so I have to be careful and remember to do my maintainence.
The article suggests the possibility of Apple dethroning MS from the desktop. My original comment points out that, as bad as MS is, they're far more open and responsible with their market power than Apple.
Step out of the reality distortion field.
As a sort of related question does anyone know the details of that 100 Million dollars "loan" Microsoft made to Apple a long while to prop them up so they (M) would not be a monopoly. Does it still exist and does it come into play if Apple gets too big?
I don't think they will beat Microsoft (on the desktop) if the desktop will keep on existing as it now is. Linux? maybe.
Yes! And Duke Nukem Forever will be preinstalled on it!
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Oh, you mean those expansion slots that are collecting dust in everyone's empty case? Or perhaps the $1100 Dells with integrated graphics? 3.5" Hard drives are in every Apple non-notebook computer except the mini (for obvious reasons).
You say Macs have features you don't want to pay for--well your cheap desktop tower has features the market in general is increasingly less willing to consider virtues. End users don't care about expansion slots, and if they don't play games, the only reason they don't like integrated graphics is because they read people whining about it on the internet. I hated them too until I put together a cheap Core Duo machine with a GMA950 onboard. It went into a low-profile case, and so I didn't have a graphics card on hand. I never bought one--I don't game on it, and it handles screensavers and Google Earth perfectly. Most average users have the same experience.
On the other hand, users do care about compact systems, design, and power efficiency. They also care about overall value and ease of use. Yeah, they can find similar specs for cheaper, but they can also find similar specs for HIGHER prices. I have found that no current Apple system is at the top of any specification range. For every "I can match the iMac for $300 less" poster, *I* can match the iMac for $300 more.
Well for me 2006 was the year of the Linux desktop (err sometimes server when I want it to be be) and no viruses.
What is sad is most people who look at my machine think I am running MS Windows Vista. I try to inform them otherwise but I have found that walls do seem to listen more.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
How else would you define default? it ships with it. Therefore it is the default. If yo uwant something else, you have to specifically install it.
It doesn't necessarily. I'm just using as an indicator of Apple's target audience... which clearly isn't corporate america. Because corporate America wants all those snazzy reporting/development tools that Microsoft ships with SQL Server and sells as options. MySQL and Xcode don't even compare.
Well, DUH! I said MySQL was the default... not the only option.
Sure, but have you actually tried to use Apple ODBC manager? It blows. Maybe you can technically get ODBC to work, but the point is the low level of attention it gets from Apple and the lack of business related development tools.
Then again, I'm not much of a business developer myself, so I could be missing something. I just know people who do
Of course, I guess there is always Java, but man I hate Java desktop apps. Especially on the Mac.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
So let's begin. Find a laptop from the above manufacturers that is cheaper than $1300 and matches or exceeds all of the following, and you'll get $25 to your paypal account. Winner to be picked by mod points and the general slashdot discussion, and contested answers will be settled by Senior Slashdot Editors.
- 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 4MB shared L2 cache
- 1 GB Ram
- 80 GB HardDrive
- Double-Layer DVD Burner
Easy, huh? Now it gets a bit harder.- Gigabit Ethernet
- Firewire (6 pin is nice, but 4 pin is acceptable)
- Integrated Video Camera
- Remote Control
- Optical Audio in/Optical Audio Out
- over 5 hours ACTUAL battery life, not theoretical battery life
- Bluetooth and Wifi
- One year hardware warranty
So you don't think I'm purposefully being difficult, the following items are NOT needed to win the money, but are here to remind you to keep your trap shut next time you yap on about mac's being overpriced.Microsoft has a tough choice to make? Last time I checked they had a near monopoly.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Apple is already a successful and profitable company, and they have been for years. There is no "win" or "lose". Microsoft makes tons of money and Apple makes a good deal of money. Everybody wins. If Apple's "market share" never changes much, they will continue to be a successful and profitable company in perpetuity. What's all the fuss about market share and "who wins"?
I find what your saying is only true to a point.
I use a PC for Scada apps there is nothing out there for apple.
so im stuck in a pc world likewise for my PLC programing Siemens or Alanbradly.
But one program and chunk of hardware I can use on a Mac or a PC.
so there is some cross over.
the program is Tracktion a DAW program and the hardware is a RME Fireface800. firewire audio interface.
There are apps and hardware out there. You just have to know were to look. I am sure it will get better as more Apples are sold. Cannot lock it down forever.
I use Linux at home, so I am accustomed to things not being the MS-norm. And I use Gnome, so I am not pampered by the Microsoft-like KDE UI.
Yesterday, I had to set up a wireless network for both Windows XP and Mac OS X computers. I can honestly say that the iBook made less sense and had a less intuitive interface than the Windows laptop. I figured them both out easily, but the Mac took much longer and seemed pickier.
I always blindly believed that Macs had a better interface and were better designed... but I don't believe that at all now. In terms of usability, Mac OS X is behind Linux by far. It honestly reminds me of Linux from a few years ago - a few utilities poorly cobbled together with nondescript error messages.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
What exactly was so puzzling and cobbled together about Mac OS X's IP settings?
I'm very interested in hearing the details, because I can't picure that. In fact I think you invented that entirely.
Tiger's System Preferences:Network isn't the most amazing design (particularly compared to Leopard), but the IP settings in Windows are no better. Windows doesn't even show you your DHCP IP lease or let your renew it without the command line! WTF.
So yes, I am accusing you being full of crap.
"There is no average common machine. Example: The mac mini is slightly underspec for a developer ( mainly: harddisk sucks, only 2 GB memory max ) and the design is completely irrelevant: we have all plenty of lost space under the desk. My company buys beige ibm/dell boxes with the same spec as the mini and roughly the same price, but the fact that the dell/ibm come with standard disk in a standard ugly box is seen as a benefit, unlike in my livingroom."
This is a great point that explains a lot about why Apple has not sold more machines. I'm a long time Mac user and developer and have often found it a bit frustrating to have to choose between inexpensive machines with little expandability or go into very high priced machines. And then got burned when I bought the original PCI-X based dual G5, and the expandability I expected to have vanished as the rest of the industry settled on PCI-Express.
All that said, Apple's strong point is in the laptop market, where expandibility isn't such an issue. As long as people can add RAM and maybe a new hard drive they seem to be happy. Apple is a very strong competitor in the laptop market, and that's the market that's seeing most of the growth.
Apple isn't taken to court because they don't have a large enough market share to exert any force. The article proposed that they might gain that market share. From their past and current actions, it's clear that they would be much more heavy handed with that power than Microsoft is.
I'm not defending Microsoft. I'm just pointing out that Apple is much, much worse. Fortunately, they haven't the power Microsoft does.
> The thing is with Apple you only have one supplier, Apple, and one price, what they say is what you pay
Yes, but they have a variety of price points, and each price point gets you a complete system. Whether it is an iMac or Mac Pro or whatever it has all the ports that you'll need, it has the fastest CPU in its class, it has all of its drivers built-in.
And when you look on the disk you will see software from a broad variety of sources. For example, you will find iLife on there, but you will also find Apache and PHP. Out of the box you can run Mac apps, Java, BSD, X-Windows, or standard Web applications featuring HTML 4, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5. To get that much choice out of a PC you have to be a very technical user. You have to know how to get around the Microsoft stuff and get at the rest of the world.
> you can't shop around at all. With PC's you have dozens of supplier to choose from.
Who will all sell you basically the same system with exactly the same crappy Microsoft software. You fell right into their trap. It only LOOKS like choice. No matter whose box you buy you will look on there and see Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft. What kind of choice is that for most people?
> So finding a PC maker that is selling a system at a similar price to a similar Apple system is not difficult.
Finding a PC maker who is selling a system with a similar VALUE to Apple is unfortunately impossible for most users. The exception would be a Unix nerd who can do just fine on an AMD box they built from parts and compiled all the software themselves. For those people, I heartily recommend today's PC industry if they can find someone who won't charge them the Microsoft Tax. For almost everyone else you are better to pick the price point that suits you and get a complete system for that and get down to work or play. Spend your "video driver time" writing code that is more productive.
Sony, HP, Gateway, Lenovo and Dell are not going to roll over and die.
As long as these companies continue making cheaper Windows computers Microsoft will continue to dominate the home desktop market.
Now, if Apple would allow computer manufacturers to make clones again it would be a different story...
What's to win? The objective of a business is to turn a profit for the stockholders. Apple is doing that, and has been doing that for some time. The only time that gaining market share is really relevant is if it contributes to the bottom line. It does not always do so. In Microsoft's case, having a large market share seems to work for them. In the case of General Motors, for example, it does not. The company has a huge (if shrinking) market share, but has not reliably turned a profit for some time.
Thinking that gaining broad market share is the goal shows a general misunderstanding of the function of a business.
It may be corny, and especially so when Ballmer says it, but it is true that a major reason for the popularity of Windows and Microsoft products in general is the large and well supported Microsoft Developer Network (with articles, documentation, and sample code), Visual Studio, and the ability to produce and sell software without getting explicit permission from Microsoft. Now, I know that such things are available on other operating systems, especially Linux, but it seems like Apple gives much shorter shrift to their developers than Microsoft. The apple website has the developer info buried a few levels down and the tools and libraries seem to be much less well known and publicised and more black art like than the corresponding tools and documentation available with Windows or your favorite Linux disto. If Apple wants to win back the desktop then they have to be more open to and supportive of third party developers. So perhaps in this instance Ballmer was right...developers, developers, developers...yeah.
In any case, if Apple really wanted to take on Microsoft, they already have everything they need. All they would have to do is drop the idea of insisting on the customer using their own hardware. If people were allowed to buy a copy of OS X to run on generic Intel or AMD hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if people flocked to it.
There are enough people out there who groan at the constant necessity to prop up a sagging defective-by-design OS, who aren't ready to try Linux, but who have seen enough exposure to Macs to accept them as an alternative. Although I'm not a Mac fanboy, this is a situation I'd be very happy to see.
---
Cocoa and the Death of Yellow Box and Rhapsody
Is that, at last, people can ask this question with a straight face. Now that's progress :-P
you had me at #!
Unfortunately, this is exactly what MS is doing with the next version of Office. They are removing support for VBA and replacing it with AppleScript. So, the most compatible version of MS Office will remain the current version [Office 2004]...
Just as NeoOffice is adding VBA support.
I have to admit - I didn't see the day coming when NeoOffice would be more compatible than Office X.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Inspiron E1505: 1.42" x 14.02" x 10.45" 6.18 lbs
MacBook Pro 15": 1.0" x 14.1" x 9.6" 5.6 lbs
Because BSD is d e a d!!!
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
The consumer market is 40-50 percent of the total PC market.
You think that Apple is mostly selling to consumers? You're wrong.
"Apple's Macs are primarily targeted at three core markets: consumer segment (25% of Apple's PC business), education (33%), and SMB with a strong focus on creative professionals." (Deutsche Bank report citing IDC figures)
Apple is selling hundred thousands of Macs in the education sector, in this earnings call transcript Tim Cook mentions two large contracts totaling 50,000 units and this is not an uncommon occurrence.
"Ten percent of the Company's net sales in 2006 were through its U.S. education channel, including sales to elementary and secondary schools, higher education institutions, and individual customers." (Annual annual report 2006)
Apple is also doing well outside of the U.S., last year a Gartner analyst told Macworld: "For the first time, Apple is number one in the EMEA education market with 11.6 per cent of the market in Q3/2006 against 9.6 per cent in Q3/2005."
Apple is gaining market share in the consumer segment, in Q2 2005 Apple's share increased to 5.5 percent in the U.S. and 3.1 percent worldwide (Deutsche Bank report citing IDC figures). It must be higher by now, but nowhere near 33 percent!
I see they have it installed by default, but still not enabled by default. Which is a sensible solution. In my experience Compiz is somewhat adequate on a system suited for it (eg: the GMA950 in my MacBook runs Compiz in Fedora Core 6 just fine), but it doesn't work well on a lot of other machines.
Of course, even when it works, its still not even at OS X 10.0 levels. It's pretty fast it doesn't support critical things like synchronized buffer swapping. What's the point of spending all that memory on a compositor and double-buffering if you don't synchronize the buffer swap, and thus still get tearing during resize and move operations?
You might think I'm nitpicking, but the tearing during window reconfigure is really a major sign of the immaturity of the infrastructure. Doing proper double-buffered resize and move is a complex operation, involving synchronization of the toolkit, compositing/window manager, X server, and graphics driver. The fact that its not there yet suggests that there is a lot of work to go before the stack is even at OS X 10.0 levels of maturity.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
If anything, history has been that technology moves from the corporate sector to the home sector, and not the other way around (C64 and Amiga ruled the home, but never moved to corporate. IBM PC was a pure corporate machine, ended up dominating the home).
Problem is vendor lock-in. If I'm sick and tired of Microsoft sheniagans, the last thing I want to do is to go to Apple, which is even worse (nobody else makes hardware, software doesn't run on anything else). If I make the big jump, it makes a lot of sense to go to Linux instead.
And regarding the "don't bash it if you haven't tried it", I have stepped up and tried OS X in Apple stores a few times, and I am not blown away. I have an iPod, and I am not so impressed by the user interface and I don't like iTunes. Biggest problem is the "one button" philosophy, I'd much rather have context menus rather than clicking the damn button four times to get to the ratings screen, whoever thought that was simpler?!?
It's a laptop not a purse.
Like most arguments I hear from MacOS advocates, these are all advantage of not using Windows - I get them with a decent desktop Linux. Dependency hell is a thing of the past for me (its been a while since apt-get failed to resolve dependencies automatically for me), and install/uninstall in a nice GUI in Synpatic also seems to me to be as good as trashing the program icon.
Apple is a far worse monopolist than Microsoft. Fortunately for the world, their monopoly is restricted to a little used niche.
I've not made any claims for you to accept or reject, I've stated easily checked facts. Apple does not allow market competition in the OS X ecosphere. Microsoft restricts competition in the Windows ecosphere, but it does exist. Disputing that is moronic.
Take the readily available cracked versions of OS X, and start selling either alone or installed. See how long Apple refrains from preventing you.
This is very good and accurate information, and almost the same thing I tell people who are considering purchasing a new notebook, but said in such an inflammatory way that the very people who most could most benefit from this information will refuse to listen. A $600 Acer is not necessarily a piece of shit, it is just designed for a different user/purpose than a business class notebook. I have a $2500 ThinkPad and an inexpensive Compaq. Both do what I want them to do very well, because I understood my requirements and the limitations of each computer before I acquired them. I think of a MacBook Pro, and to a lesser extent a MacBook, as being a combination of a business class and consumer class notebook, because it has the features that (to some) justify the price of the former, but the bells and whistles of the latter. If I were buying just one laptop to replace both of my current ones, which I am considering doing since I will be traveling a lot more in the future, my choices pretty much come down to the MacBook Pro or a Z-series ThinkPad, although the latter requires more compromise.
Do you enjoy making yourself miserable or can you just not help it? Cheer up, mate.
When my phone boots, it shows me the Java logo. It also has a store from which I can buy and download games and such via EDGE, and I can only assume those would have to be running on Java for it to work on a sufficient number of devices to be worth doing.
And there may not be a cause/effect relationship, but there's certainly a pattern. 99% of all cellphones run Java and are a piece of shit in exactly the same way mine is: Plenty of 3rd-party software, but no custom (consumer-written) software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Alright, I did not know that about the iPhone, and I apologize if you're right. But:
Yes, they do, and you yourself admit this. You're simply arguing motive here, and you're wrong there, but the simple, obvious fact is, no one except Apple is allowed to manufacture a machine that OS X will run on. Good or bad, that is the truth, you know it, you even said it. In what ways is this not true?
If that was true, then why is the licensing such that it's only legal to put it on Apple hardware? Why does the product actually attempt to disable itself when run on non-Apple hardware?
I seem to remember they used a Trusted Computing platform to do this. Essentially, if it doesn't trust your hardware, you don't get to run the OS.
And Steve Jobs doesn't like DRM? Bullshit. If it was just about hardware support, isn't it enough to simply declare ordinary PCs totally unsupported, but let people run it anyway if they want to? Even make it illegal in the licensing, but why did they have to include the technical measures?
I am not under any obligation to answer your comment reasonably, instead of just giving you a GNAA/Goatse/Tubgirl/Lastmeasure link.
It can still be the decent thing to do, even if you're under no obligation to do it. So again, why does Apple go out of its way to make sure no one can run OS X on non-Apple hardware?
Well, duh. It's a form of lockdown that Microsoft dreams of -- the entire system is one, shiny package, and there is no competition for any part of it.
What does HP have to do with anything either of us said?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm not going to source what should be common knowledge for anyone remotely familiar with Apple. GE light bulbs are manufactured to a standard that GE does not control. Ford cars drive on standard roads and take standard gas. Apple operating systems are hobbled to run only on Apple hardware. Apple has a monopoly on OS X hardware, but thankfully not a monopoly on the desktop (though the article this is attached to proposed they may some day).
Apple is not a hardware company. They are both a hardware and a software company. Dell is a hardware company.
But they do care when things aren't where they expect them.
Which is why it's really strange that both Microsoft and Apple make so many gratuitous changes from one version to the next, because what they're doing is making it harder from them to compete against their own previous versions. As a system administrator, I had people get upset at me when I wouldn't keep Windows 2000 on their new laptop because Windows XP made so many changes.
However, there seem to be more people who don't care about differences in the OS than who do. And that's something that people who are passionate about the system software really need to get, and that's true whether they're Mac *or* Windows enthusiasts.
Your typical secretary knows all about the Start Menu, how MS Office works, how to get onto the network volumes, how to check the printer queue. All that stuff.
You couldn't prove it by me. Hell, an attention-deficit PhD engineer who knows all about writing code to solve systems of linear equations in Fortran or C++ can still come up with bizarre questions about "where did my J drive go" after an upgrade ("I don't know, that's not in the standard load, where did you have it connected?" "Connected?" "What server was it on?" "Server?"). A lot of people in the office - at any level of supposed technical training - never seemed to get past memorizing how to start the six or eight applications that they actually used (whether it was Hummingbird Exceed, SAP, Firefox, or Word).
But change their *applications*, and they go totally NON-linear.
Things like removing the menu bar from Office are about two-the-the-power-of-your-phone-number times more annoying than clicking on a dock icon instead of a desktop icon to get into Office in the first place... because Office is what they're actually interested in using.
But neither of these is even in the top three reasons why Apple can't "take Microsoft on the Desktop". No, the top three reasons are "Applications", "Applications", and (yes) "Applications".
In the workplace, simply not having those applications on the Mac is a much much bigger problem than whether you click on the picture of the printer in the Dock or go to Start->Settings->Printers. And not having Macs in the workplace is the biggest reason why the applications aren't there.
If standardization is good, why did Vista randomly change the names of control panels?
I don't know, why did Panther hide people's login programs under the "System: Accounts" preferences?
1. Nobody's got clean hands here.
2. You're *both* obsessing on trivia. Unless a secretary can run the obscure application he needs to do his timecard or check his boss's expense report on the Mac, he's not going to care whether some setting that only the network geek ever touches is in the wrong place.
You seem to think the worlds IT problems can be fixed by putting everything onto web servers providing anywhere access. All well and good, but what that doesn't address is the thousands of desktops in an organisation that have to be installed, patched and tailored to the configuration the user of that PC needs, i.e. fat clients. The big problem with this model is that it requires a huge investment in manpower and time to make it work. Plus in many cases it ties people to just one PC/workstation, or a small group of PCs/workstations with the same config. There's no flexibility and it's an expensive management headache.
Project Athena fixed this by having the workstation do an extremely fast network boot that loaded a root f/s and a skinny OS, with the usr and var filesystems remotely mounted on centrally controlled servers. Data and applications (if I remember right) were provided using AFS (the Andrews Filesystem) and bundled into containers. The whole thing was centrally managed and at its height there were 20,000 campus workstations supported by just 6 members of staff. Any student could use any one of the 20,000 workstations and guarantee their environment would be the same. This should have been a smash hit, but it was the 15K to 5K price difference between RISC workstations
HP's VDI solves the same problem. The thin desktop clients are cheap and dumb. They connect to generic Windows instances running under VMware and the user environment is layered on top at login time. The thin desktop clients can be deployed en-mass as throw away items, which means you don't need a small army of support staff in your remote offices to manage them. It solves a very real management problem in the Enterprise today, one that's not solved by just converting all your apps to web based apps.
Do Apple have anything like this today? No. Do I wish they did? Yes. But Apple are not targeting the Enterprise (yet) and you should know that in your position. You don't do Apple any favors by pretending otherwise.
"If only Apple had another example of a company that tried this, i.e., just selling their operating system, but without proprietary hardware, to see if this crazy strategy of making profit from software would work!"
Like for example DR DOS, BeOS, OS/2?
"Nah, you're right. There's NO WAY a software-only company can make any money."
Software-only companies can make money. There is however only _one_ operating system company that makes money, and it does not tolerate competitors, as Digital Research, Be Inc., and IBM (to name but three!) found to their cost. While the only way you can get OS X is by buying a Mac, the Eye Of Ballron will only settle on them for short periods, and move on, but change that, and Apple will find themselves locked in a battle against an entrenched and massively powerful monopoly with enough money in the bank to give Windows away for several years without going bust, and dwindling Mac sales because hey, you can get OS X for a Dell, so why pay Apple's higher prices? As for the iPod, iTV, and iPhone, how long would they last if every Windows service pack "accidentally" broke any software required to use them with all those hundreds of millions of Windows PCs?
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
> You see manufacturers use whatever hardware is available for the cheapest price THAT DAY when making consumer grade laptops
I hear all the time from my IT friends about times when they would go to work on what seemed to be 30 identical computers only to find out they have 30 distinct individuals on their hands.
> Businesses are willing to pay more for the reliability and the ability to use one disk image across all the machines.
This is also why Macs have great resale value. People are willing to pay for a used Mac because you can easily find all the specs for that model online, find out if it can run the latest OS very easily and how well, and it is even easy to find out what RAM to buy for each model. Then you can buy the latest OS for $129 and it will all just work. No drivers to hunt down, no "integration" to do even though it is an old system with new OS.
I was speaking with a good friend about the direction that both companies are taking. We agreed on some items and disagreed on others. But in general we both see dramatic flaws in the way both companies operate.
They are not in direct competition with each other as many would like to believe. Apple is a hardware company that gives it's operating system away to get consumers to buy their computers. Microsoft is a software company that relies on the abundance of cheap hardware producers so that it can sell their software.
Though with some of Apple's recent decisions this could be changing for them. Forcing Apple to compete in a software market and not depend on their inflated hardware prices to keep the profit margin high. This comes from Apple's decision to switch to Intel (an X86) platform. Though they are doing their very best to keep control of the hardware that "OS X" their flagship operating system that is given freely to entice consumer to buy their hardware. Even with Apple doing all they can to keep control of the platforms which their operating system runs on many people have been successful in loading and running OS X on non Apple hardware. Do a Google search on hackintosh and you will see what I mean.
It seems that Apple has lost touch with it's market. People are not switch from MS Windows to Apple. The biggest increase of people buying Apple equipment is not former PC owners but UNIX/Linux people that like the fact they get all the power of BSD and all the GUI love that OS X provides. A good example of what represents the current PC consumer is a person who was asking me advice about buying a new laptop. I first asked if they had thought about Apple? She immediately responded "NO, I don't want to learn something new". Even after telling her that the new Apple hardware could run both OS X and XP she just couldn't get over the fact that going Apple meant change. This and the fact that MacBooks start at $1099 and she priced out a pretty descent (not entry level) Dell laptop for $650 sealed the deal. While walking her through the Dell configuration screens (website) we came to the operating system section. She had the choice of 4 different versions of Windows Vista. I think most of you would have figured out, just from reading my post, that my friend is a novice when it comes to computers. But, she had been exposed to enough water cooler talk and bad press to come to her own conclusion that Vista was not ready yet, if it was every going to be "ready". Plus, she saw Vista having the same disadvantage as Apple does and that is change. For her to start using Vista means she is going to have to learn something new. For now she is putting off her laptop purchase. She wants to make sure that if she buys the Dell laptop, with the cheapest version of Vista, that she will be able to take her copy of XP and completely wipe it out and use what she knows.
This is how I see the average PC user. How many of them are watching those funny little commercials with the PC going in for major surgery while the Apple is being all super cool and think WOW I'll switch to Apple. I can't imagine that the numbers are very high. In comparison I have spoken with large numbers of Linux users getting an Apple because they love Unix but don't like any of the GUI alternatives. It's like there is to much versatility in what you can do. Yes, I can make a Linux desktop look and run like MS Windows XP or Apple OS X or anything I can imagine but the truth is I don't want to take the time to bother doing any of that. I just want my desktop to work so that I can be productive doing all the boring stuff people buy desktops for. So, what I would imagine makes up the largest growing Apple market is the computer savvy Unix advocate. So, what does Apple do? They make their OS run on X86 architecture. Now these would be Linux converts are either patching together their current PC into a hackintosh, building their own with hardware that is the most compatible with OS X (saving hundred of dollars in
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
>>Not being beholden to Microsoft gives them a big advantage when competing with traditional PC sellers
Huh? You either buy Windows, or you buy MacOS-X. Where is this an advantage to Apple?
> ou have to move up pretty far into Apple's line up to get features found on basic and mid-range PCs
> like a 3.5" harddrives
Mac mini has a 2.5" hard drive as well as the notebooks of course. AppleTV has a 1.8" hard drive, same as iPod video. Of course nanos and shuffles and iPhones have flash.
Otherwise you have 3.5" SATA drives in iMac and Mac Pro and in XServe they are either SATA or serial-attached SCSI.
Same storage as in PC's.
> expansion slots
What are "slots"? Nah, I'm half-kidding. Is there even such a thing as a "consumer PCI card" anymore? I used to use a pro audio card but it has been years since I got a FireWire sampler, which also works with notebooks.
Apple has had a workstation system with an easy-access door since 1999 and that is what you buy if you want PCI it is not hard to see that. Same as with PC's you wouldn't buy a notebook if you need PCI.
However with Apple there is a murderer's row of ports on every system and all the drivers are already there they just work. What are you going to add?
What the hell are you guys plugging onto PCI in 2007?
> and non-integrated graphics
That is a low-blow only Mac mini and MacBook has integrated graphics and that is the same as PC systems in their price range.
And the odd applications that do require an installer I tend to look on with some level of suspicion. So what are you doing and why? How do I uninstall you when I decide I don't want you any more?
/Library/Application Support/appname, and that's it. The Installer is often there just to make sure things get placed in the Application Support (or whatever) folder. Few apps will hide things in weird locations. Not as nice as an effective uninstaller, of course, but knowing that there is no opaque "registry" to dig through is comforting.
/usr/local/bin, which you can just delete with no trouble, just like the app. There's no magic involved.
It depends on how friendly the developer wants to be, and what kind of installer they used. Frequently you can just delete the app, the preference file in ~/Preferences, and
TextWrangler has some method of enabling command line tools which doesn't have an equivalent disable which leaves me feeling edgy about what kind of cruft can be left behind.
Most apps that do this simply install a tool in
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
The MacBook Pro seems to be getting traction in our senior management and anyone who does web design.
Maybe us developers will get them when the next round of purchasing starts.
*sigh* back to work...
So what's the downside? I mean, if Latitude is so much more expensive than E1505, then surely the E1505 is missing something that the Latitude has? What is it? There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Well, my girlfriend has a powerbook which fills anyone who's using it with static electricity. Also, the power cable socket doesn't keep the cable stuck at all, which often causes the laptop to quickly alternate between receiving/not receiving current. That can't be good for the battery... Also, the laptop is fucking heavy for its size...
Those things make me wonder why people say that Apple's hardware is better or better designed
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Besides, having used Vista for two weeks now, I reckon Microsoft have covered their asses. The OS still requires a service pack or two because things like UAC are a pain in the backside but otherwise the desktop experience is actually pretty exemplary. Aero is a very nice UI indeed.
I disagree. We wouldn't see nearly as much Apple ads and billboards as we currently see (in the US, at least) if this were true.
Unless I'm mistaken Macs are NOT price competitive, unless being 800 or so dollars over is competitive. Look at the top of the line Mac Book Pro, compared to this http://www.powernotebooks.com/product.php?itemId=1 430 computer. If equipped with the same specs then the Mac is about $800 more expensive. Unless of course OSX's price tag is 800.
Sounds like you stand to make yourself $25 if you can put your money where your mouth is.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Either most posters here have missed the point of the article, or didn't bother to read it.
He's not saying Apple will win larger market share than Microsoft.
He's saying that Apple could capture the most valuable part of it, those willing to pay a high-end premium for their machines.
The premise of the article is that Dell and other pc makers would be left selling very, very low-profit computers. (which from a business stand-point, is not a good business to be in)
This has nothing to do with game computers or those willing to build their own boxes.
It's a business story.
- dj
no mod points today... but I just want to echo this statement... When I was buying for PCs for one of the largest medical/research institutions, the fact that vendors could not build to a 'locked spec' really drove us crazy.
Today's Macs are certified to work with it's OS and key SW... XP/PC based OEMs 'sort of kind of' make their HW work with XP, and depot repair is a crap shoot. While not perfect (Macs change specs without notice), Support/Integration teams want someone who 'own's' both the HW and the SW for the desktop (Oh, it sucks when you hear a DeLL Tech Support person say "We'll submit a bug into Microsoft... HOPEFULLY, we'll hear something in the next couple of weeks).
The downside is single source... MS had 'driven' a semi-open HW environment... if you can make it work with MS software you can drive the market price down in the commodity competition... If you are a purchaser (not a tech), this is a panacea you give up with a single source supplier of OSX/Macs. Just the threat of inviting in HP or Lenovo for an open bid on business every other year will make a Dell or a Gateway turn the pricing screws for selling another 12K systems over the new contract period. Apple, not having any competition, and the perceived 'initial' higher price (note: that when you 'require' commitment to agreed specs pay as much or more for vendors to support lock step batches) sours many procurement and Tech leaders where the desktop budget has a huge (or small) multiplier.
I will elaborate. Here is something off the top of my head:
Humor: a family of plugin type element for Human Interface Protocol (H.I.P.)which provides sometimes essential modifiers for communications taking place via the H.I.P.
A variety of plugins exist, such as Satire, Sarcasm, etc.
Dependencies exist for these protocols.
For the Humor class of plugins to operate effectively, the must exist certain data structures and or elements for the plugin to operate with and modify.
One such essential element is an affinity for some element in the Viewpoint object being accessed. Conditions where certain statements are asserted as true, when they come into conflict with other data sets where these conditions are asserted as false, and when these assertions can not be over written, will cause a crash of the humor plugin on the local system. Extreme quantities of such contradictions can cause error recovery routines to be invoked.
Correct implementation of the humor plugin can overwrite some previously accepted assertions. The primary mechanism to to revalue an assertion via a logical or emotional contradiction, complete with a recognition that contradiction so that the intended contradiction, together with some increase in data connections, such as affine relationship or understanding.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Forcing a Windows session from an NT-based server--recalling that NT was never designed to be multiuser--across a network to a client that is fat only because Microsoft couldn't figure out how to market anything but a PC running Windows--is hardly a model of sophistication.
Microsoft is trying valiantly to make NT into Unix. It started with the Citrix hack to pretend that NT had some multiuser capacity. A decade later, Vista still uses the same crufty, ill designed hack as the basis of Remote Desktop and Terminal Server.
The fact that HP is stretching Windows instances beyond absurdity to create a solution that orbits around enriching Microsoft rather than solving a solution doesn't help your case.
Exactly why you think that--after watching a vendor seminar--another overextended, PC based solution designed sell huge server farms that sell Windows licenses and client PCs as a replacement to dumb terminals is some how a better solution than deploying an open, proven platform... well there really isn't much that can be said.
Ten years ago, you could be excused for using proprietary crap solutions because you didn't have IP networks. Today, threre's no excuse, and you should be fired for not being able to think without a brochure telling you which HP server you should by in order to run Windows sessions to India.
The fact that you don't get how ridiculous you actually are doesnt' help your case: "Thin clients (effectively a display server) + a virtualised OS is not the same as a webserver serving web based applications. They are completely different technologies" -- yes, no shit sherlock: running a fat PC as a terminal server for a virtualized OS on a server farm is "really" a better solution than simply running an application on a remote server without all the licensing and massive overhead of pretending that NT is multiuser, and maintaining a PC with a VM is really easier than putting an embedded web client on a cheaper bit of hardware, and running a closed, insecure, POS like NT is really better than Apache on Linux.
Do you know why IBM, Oracle, Novell and other vendors are aligning behind Linux, open protocols, and web? Because they woke up and found themselves next to a really ugly bitch: Windows. Perhaps you'll wake up some day too.
"Does Apple have anything like this" -- do you mean a Windows sales machine? No, but they did kick Microsoft's ass in selling music, using a web based custom thin client unlike anything Microsoft was able to deliver in its partner stores, didn't it? Apple's WebObjects apps also aren't down 10% of the time, as ASP sites, including Microsoft's own.
Who would buy software solutions from a vendor that can't even operate their own web servers? Ever used Knoledge Base? Worthless - you have to search it using Google because the site itself doesn't work worth a crap.
Wake up jackass - next time you sit through a vendor seminar, remind yourself that its an advertisement, not a religious convention.
No Scooby Snack for you!
You covered so much FUD ground that it's difficult to point out what you said that is accurate.
"organizations with over 20 users are pretty much screwed. their mail server doesn't even allow vacation autoreplies" - bullshit. Among the users of Mac OS X are $75 billion companies, like, well, Apple.
"if malicious code is installed on the system, there's no way to find it and eliminate it." - bullshit, its Unix. There is no Registry hiding places that apps can run, and there is no mystery as to what threads are packed into a single process. Everything runs as a process, and apps aren't launched from some arcane and bizzare Windows construct in an uninstallable way. You lied.
"The simple lack of documentation for the system makes it so that manual scans are pretty much impossible as well since Apple hides a tons of places where code can start up." bullshit, and bullshit
"There have been tests where 500 mac users and 500 Windows users were sent and e-mail stating "Important: From the IT Department" that insisted that all users run an attached executable for their systems" giving you the benfit of the doubt on your bullshit story, what did this exe install?
"The IT staff at the company was able to remove the Windows exploit but were entirely baffled by the Mac exploit and were forced to reinstall the system to remove it." - bullshit
"were forced to reinstall the system to remove it" - absolute bullshit
"Apple has a long long long way to go on preparing the system for a corporate environment" bullshit!
"SSH is the only method of remote administration shipped for Macs with OS X" bullshit!
"and the command line documentation is as lacking as it is (for example, finding stuff like how do I move an icon on the desktop from the command line" - OMG you are an idiot. You need help "removing an icon?" yeah, where would one start with that project?
You should be fired immediately.
Thanks for presenting your cards so I can point out how fallacious your arguments are.
And yet hardly anyone is using it for business apps.
Sorry, "Crystal Reports" is just what I think of when I think of when I think of business data reporting and management. Heck, I don't even know if it is used anymore. It was just an example. There are many more. What I am saying is (and I thought this was pretty obvious) is that Apple does not cater at all to business application developers. That doesn't mean writing a business app on OS X is impossible. It just means that the platform doesn't attract business application developers like Microsoft does. Do you disagree with this?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Or you could just install dBpoweramp on windows. Then it's just a context menu click...
BIYC Records
Most operating systems associate user login apps (that's a login.bat to you Windows enthusiasts) with the user's acco[u]nt, so I fail to understand the problem you describe.
Er...
login.bat? Err, no, the closest thing in Windows to the user-selected startup programs in OS X is the "Startup" folder under the applications menu. Or wherever that's moved to in Vista. In any case, *all* the preferences the user configures are associated with the account. By that logic they should all be in "System: Accounts".
The point is not that Apple is particularly bad about gratuitous changes, or even that this is a particularly bad example, it's that, ah, hell...
I have supported secretaries on both Windows and on the Mac for over a decade, and have a pretty good idea of what the support problems are. They are not related to learning Mac OS X.
20 years, friend, with Netware and UNIX as well, and I agree that "learning the OS" isn't the point. I just said that in pretty much as many words. The OS is the least of the problems.
At some point, the Windows enthusiasts will figure out they they're being used to maintain a broken system, and will switch too.
And that's pretty much irrelevant as well. Most of the people in IT who are selecting Windows aren't "Windows enthusiasts", and it's not the "Windows enthusiasts" who need to switch. If it was a matter of having plenty of "enthusiasts", Apple would have 80% of the market, Linux 20%, and Bill Gates would be making a living asking "you want fries with that?".
Windows could be a LOT worse and people would still buy it. Because they don't care, because to them it doesn't matter. It's the applications that matter. And the application developers follow the money. And the money comes from "whatever people are already using".
Turn your enthusiast brain to figuring out a way to break that cycle, instead of worrying about the OS.
If they get to the 5% range, then they could start to approach even being the #1 home computer.
In France, Apple currently has a 3 per cent share of the market (overall market share, not just home users).
One year ago, Apple had circa 2.1 percent.
In its best time, Apple had a market share of around 20 percent in France. The situation should be pretty much the same in the other European countries that once had been strongholds of Apple over years, namely Switzerland and Sweden.
As long as Apple has yet to "septuple" (i.e., multiply by 7) its market share just to get where they have once been already, the horizon will be full of clouds. Changing the company's name from Apple Computer, Inc to Apple, Inc. might not be too helpful, either.
Tomorrow I am buying a Macbook for my daughter, and a Macbook Pro for myself. This replaces two Windows boxes in my network (which will be reborn as Linux servers).
I know a host of others at my office who have the Mac bug, resulting in sales of several Macbooks, Mac Minis and a Mac Pro. Later in the year I plan on replacing my wife's PC with a Mac Mini.
I think this might be the year we see a dent made in Window's stranglehold on the home market. Of course, I won't really care too much about all that because all of my home computer hopes and dreams won't be pinned on Microsoft any longer.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Ok, gloves off. I've been very civil to you through out this dialogue, but now you're getting unnecessarily fucking rude. A few things you should know about this "jackass" before you go any further.
1) I started my career using VMS for about 4 years before switching to Unix and I've been a solid Unix man for the past 16 years. Today I specialise in designing, implementing, integrating, tuning and troubleshooting Unix cluster solutions based on Tru64, HP-UX and Linux. I've only ever owned a Windows laptop once, for about 2 years, and its was the smallest little VAIO I could get away with for use with MS Office and because it was before the days when Open Office was really that useful.
2) I switched from that little laptop to my first PowerBook in 2002, primarily because OS X ran on top of a flavour of Unix, and because it allowed me to ditch my work MS laptop and home Linux workstation and combine both functions on one platform. At that point I was self employed, though now I work with 3 other guys and I've used nothing but Mac OS X on my desktop (exclusively) for the past 5 years.
3) I'm a terrible Apple evangelist to all my family and friends and have converted a modest number in the last couple of years. I hope to do better in the future.
You, in your rabid MS bashing frenzy for anyone who doesn't share your OTT hatred of Gates and his spawn, can't see the fucking wood for the trees. And you think I'm some kind of MS fanboy! You're way off base pal.
What I am is a pragmatist. I would love it if I could pitch Apple solutions to my Enterprise customers, but as I've tried to tell you over and over, Apple do not tailor their products to sell into the Enterprise. You may be happy sitting there in your little bubble world, writing articles about how great Apple is and how crap MS are, but what you do not have is a finger on the Enterprise pulse and half a clue about the problems they are trying to solve?
Answer me this riddle then oh great and wise Oracle.
Enterprise businesses are turning to Virtual Machines in a big way. Everyone's doing it. MS is working on a VM server; VMware is one of the fastest growing software companies in the world right now; Novel SuSE ship and support Xen; Redhat will do the same in RHEL 5; HP have a VM for HP-UX; Sun have Solaris Domains, and there are other solutions out there like Virtuosso (aka OpenVZ) and KVM is in development and included in the Linux kernel source tree.
Most of them can run multiple OSes from different vendors (apart from Solaris Domains and OpenVZ) but they can all run multiple copies of their own native OS. Why? Because it's what Enterprise customers want.
Oh, hang on a minute. There's one exception to that rule. I wonder who that would be? Why (shock horror) it's Apple.
Apple stands alone on this. They have one VM implementation in production today (Parallels) and one in beta (VMware) yet they are to my knowledge the only VM capable OS vendor that don't allow their own OS to run inside VMs on their own platform.
Tell us then smart ass. Who in their right mind will buy an Xserve to run a single instance of OS X that's tied to that one box, when they can spend similar money to buy a similar box from HP, Dell or IBM and run a dozen specifically purposed VMs with Linux and Windows in them. VMs that can be shunted elsewhere on the fly to balance compute resources or free up hardware for maintenance courtesy of VMware's VMotion or Xen's Live Migration?
Bullshit. It's got nothing to do with enriching MS, and it very much solves a problem (not a solution, duh!). I like thin client solutions. I've worked with them in the past (X windows based) and they are a much smarter way of running a corporate desktop than the fat client for everyone abortion that MS push
Mac mini has a 2.5" hard drive as well as the notebooks of course. AppleTV has a 1.8" hard drive, same as iPod video. Of course nanos and shuffles and iPhones have flash.
Otherwise you have 3.5" SATA drives in iMac and Mac Pro and in XServe they are either SATA or serial-attached SCSI.
Same storage as in PC's.
It would be nice to have a 3.5" harddrive in a basic Mac. They are cheaper, and they hold more stuff, they are faster. On a semi-related tangent, it would also be nice be able to add more than one harddrive in anything other than the Mac Pro.
What the hell are you guys plugging onto PCI in 2007?
It makes the system more future proof. I've put a lot of $20 USB2 cards/Firewire cards in older systems to get more life out of them. I bet a lot of iMac users wish they could do that since Apple dropped Firewire support on the iPod. Also a few SATA cards. I've also put in extra Nics, upgraded sound card, 2nd video card (for more monitors), though granted this out of "normal user" territory. Don't forget extra memory slots are nice too. For the Mac Mini, maybe I could consider it a "throw-away" system, but if I'm going to spend over $1000 on an iMac, I want to get more use out of it.
Also, no expansion slots on the MacBook? C'mon Apple....
That is a low-blow only Mac mini and MacBook has integrated graphics and that is the same as PC systems in their price range.
Cheapest Mac notebook without integrated graphics (and a decent resolution screen for that matter): $2000.
Cheapest Mac desktop without integrated graphics: $1200.
Plenty of choices in the PC world for less.
I keep hearing this "there's no registry that can get corrupted" -
.plist files scattered hither and yon. True; you can screw up the windows registry so bad, you won't be able to boot. The same kind of screw up on a Mac, and you will very likely still be able to boot single-user, and manually edit those files with vi to fix them. In any case where you've blown the system apart this badly, 99% of people, even experienced Mac hackers won't have a clue how to fix it. Pretty much the same with a Windows registry.
I've used Windows computers for 15 years, professionally. Don't get me wrong, I'm a true-blue Mac fanboi.
But I've never once had a registry get corrupted.
I've seen installers write junk into the registry.
I've seen skript kiddies shoot themselves in the foot with registry hacks.
None of that is any different than the things that can happen to the OS X equivalent of the registry: a bunch of
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Thanks for the background. It's good to know that generally there's nothing wierd going on. And not having a registry to get corrupted is always a bonus.
I haven't really looked into the available options yet, but even coming in too unprepared to give you a point-by-point rebuttal, I see serious problems with what you're claiming.
Before there ever was an Active Directory, there was a YellowPages (later referred to as NIS) by Sun, and a netinfo by NeXT. Active Directory itself is a response to the implementations of software for maintaining users and groups on a network with LDAP-based systems. And because Active Directory refuses to play nice with other non-Microsoft platforms, it should be the last thing any reasonable person would ever consider using. If for some reason you would prefer commercial support for your network user directory, why wouldn't you use eDirectory from Novell since, like the free software implementations, eDirectory can work with Linux and Mac OS X clients as well as MS Windows clients? Active Directory has no benefit over other systems, and has a serious drawback with respect to networking with other platforms.
As for Linux/Unix thin clients, I remember years ago logging onto X terminals instead of onto workstations. The only reason the thin client went out is because PCs became so incredibly cheap. A Unix flavored thin client would be easy, but you would need a specific reason for doing it now that the expense of workstations is not really an issue anymore. And with Unix/X Windows ``thin clients'' you could log onto several different desktop sessions for a single user running at the same time. Even thinking of doing something like that with MS Windows is just crazy.
As for reaching Linux or Mac OS X desktops anywhere in the world, haven't you heard of VNC? I'm not putting in any links for it because there would just be too many. And there other things besides VNC but that's just a start. Apple also has its own proprietary software, Apple Remote Desktop, for doing the same thing. As for load balanced access, jeepers, where I work I can log onto a Linux cluster and it sends me to the most available node. Clusters are capable of load balancing, and you can cluster with both Linux and Mac OS X. Mac OS X makes it easy in simpler cases with Xgrid which comes with the server version of the OS. And just so you know, it isn't clients, thin or otherwise, that do load balancing, it's servers.
I don't have time to go over the rest of your letter, but it goes on and on, and on. Everything you've said can't be done on Linux/Unix or Mac OS X is already being done, and in every case better, cheaper, and first.
Well you posted under AC this time, but the style of writing is the same so I'll assume it's you.
I'm just really amazed at how out of touch you are with what enterprise customers want from their systems. "Thin Client" has nothing to do with access to data. I've already said that, repeatedly. It's about taming the beast when you have thousands of desktops to try and manage.
I mentioned Active Directory once, just to give you a clue that centrally controlled user account administration is part of the demo I saw. Replace that with LDAP or Redhat's Directory server if you like, makes no difference to me. Given a choice I'd propose one of those first anyway.
LOL, funniest thing I've read in ages, you need to read more about VMs. You've completely missed what I've tried to tell you about average server utilisation in the industry and how customers are using VMs to consolidate their compute power to improve their ROI (Return on investment). That's what's its all about and what's driving it, plus the flexibility they get when they are able to live migrate VMs from one lump of hardware in a cluster to another. It has a massive impact on:
So calling me a jackass and such instead of responding to the technical points I've made isn't ad hominem? I see, thanks for the english lesson (not).
You consistently ignore the technology use examples I give you with respect to their advantages to business because you have no answer. Instead you respond with laughable statements like "VM is still emulation" clearly demonstrating that you don't know the difference between either. Let me spell it out for you. Microsoft VirtualPC and QEMU are emulators because they emulate the x86 chip architecture on non-x86 platforms, as well as the PC hardware environment. Virtual Machines like VMware, Xen and Parallels are not because they run native and don't emulate chip set instructions. Their only purpose is to provide a high performance hardware abstraction layer that multiple operating systems can sit on, that's why they're called Virtual Machines, not Emulators (duh!).
They are so important to the future of this industry that both Intel and AMD have changed the design of their chips to accommodate them, implementing concepts e.g. VT technology (Intel) and in future, Extended Page Tables (Intel) a.k.a Nested Page Tables (AMD) and loads of other improvements are in the pipe line. Even the PCI Special Interest Group is working on changes to the PCI standard so that for example a network card's capacity can be split among different virtual machines.
According to you, all these pillars of industry are "silly" because VM's are "inefficient", "undesirable" and "to be avoided when possible". Maybe you should put your money where your mouth is and write a column article about this and tell them publicly why they're wasting their millions in development costs. Please do
As for continuing here on Slashdot, you're right, you shouldn't bother. You're clearly unqualified to comment on what I'm talking about, as most of it seems to be going straight over your head. Why don't you give your Ego a rest and admit when you don't understand something instead of pretending to look clever by responding with bullshit. You think that access to data is the only thing that matters. LOL, you're an idiot. Do you know anything about running a business and why people pay for computers in the first place? Do you know anything about why businesses buy the systems they do and what technologies drive those decisions? Clearly not. You need to give up writing that column, go get yourself a real job in this industry and get some real world experience.
Netcraft confirms this