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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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Linux requires less support from people with more knowledge. Which is more expensive, I do not know.
...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.
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.
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
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
Great assertion. Nothing to back it up, no shred of logic behind the claim, but hey! It's great to fling stuff like this about!
Apple also grind up live puppies to make iPods. Microsoft shred kittens to make those new Vista boxes, and many Linux kernels are built using slave labour from China.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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!
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.
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...
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... :-)
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!
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.
Yes! And Duke Nukem Forever will be preinstalled on it!
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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