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Apple Now Selling Better Than One Laptop In Six
Lucas123 writes "Apple's share of the laptop market has grown over the past few years and the company is now beating Gateway in sales, according research firm NPD Group Inc. in Port Washington, NY. 'Their sales are continuing to grow faster than the rest of the marketplace,' the firm stated. In June Apple was responsible for 17.6% of laptops sold (at retail) in the US and is now in third place behind HP and Toshiba."
For those too lazy to read the summary, this doesn't include online sales.
In addition to that, they have hit the sweetest spots on both desktop and laptop markets with their high-end intel based hardware. I am no fanboy, used windows (games, dev) linux and BSD (most everything else) in the past, now I bought the second macbook pro model and I am blown away by the quality of the hardware. My god.. a REAL wireless card that actually supports passive monitoring? And a mid-to-high range nvidia 8600GT with enough speed and RAM to run anything graphical AND support Direct X 10 on Vista, which you can boot up natively like a charm with apple software? I tell you, it's a good laptop, and considering it has the absolute top of the line intel has to offer in terms of mobile processors, plus 2 gigs of main mem, plus all the normal fun stuff, it's worth the 2.5 thou. This is many times better than the crappy plastic dell, alienware and even Asus (which I hugely respect for quality engineering) will sell you. It's not just that the hardware is better, the bootcamp deal gives people al the motivation they need if they have the money. Yes, I'm still pretty sure I'm not a fanboy :)
I won't mod you as flamebait (no mod points today), but I will respond to this bit:
Macs crash just like a Windows computer. Macs experience hardware issues. Macs, if you use them heavily, need regular maintenance to keep them running smoothly.
You're one for three, in my experience. Hardware issues: yeah, I've had a few. But my Mac just never crashes. And I have no idea what you're talking about when you say that "heavy usage" implies "regular maintenance". My Mac runs smoothly all the time, and the only "maintenance" I do is backing it up regularly.
What if I want to play a game here and there? Im screwed.
Screwed? Hardly. Haven't you heard, mac's run on intel now. For a measly $100 bucks you can add an OEM Windows in a separate boot partition and run all your windows directx games. For another few bucks you can get Parallels or VMware Fusion and run most applications from inside windows on top of OSX, including some directx stuff.
You are hardly screwed.
I would have bought one myself if they didnt cost twice as much as they should.
Now, apple upgrade pricing is a scam, but you don't have to buy your 2nd stick of ram or hard drive upgrade from Apple.
Most of the price difference between Apple and PC is actually represented in the 2ndary specs, and build quality. If you were to spec a dell or asus that matches on all the 2ndary features, the price premium for apple is a pittance. (Now whether you want or care about those features is a separate issue.)
Instead I bought a ASUS laptop with 2GB of RAM, a 7200RPM HD, a Core 2 Duo 2 Ghz and a Nvidia Geforce 8600M GPU.
Good on you, for finding what you need. Is it a better deal than an apple? Hard to say.
You paid 1500 for it, and the 15-inch apple MBPro is 1999, or 30% more (hardly the twice you were moaning about). That gets you an 8600M GPU, 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, and 5400 rpm drive. Sounds about even for 499 more, right? Slight bump up on the cpu, but a hit on HD speed.
So... does the asus have firewire? (firewire 800 no less?) gigabit or just 10/100? a camera? bluetooth? a remote control? microphone? is it heavier or lighter? is it thinner or thicker? Does it have a remote? DVI out or only VGA? 802.11n or just a/b/g? is the keyboard backlit? Does it have a magnetic release on the power-cord? express-card slot?
Im sure the asus has at least some of those. But I doubt it has most of them. And if you add it all up, there is a good chunk of value in there, easily enough to justify the extra 400-500 for a lot of people.
And that's before we get into the ease of use, virus situation, unix under the hood, and other soft advantages of the Mac OS platform.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a mac fanboy, and I'm not saying a Mac is right for everyone. My last purchase was a 4GB RAM 3.1GHz (2.5GHz overclocked) Core2 Quad PC with Vista U x64 / Ubuntu Feisty x64 on separate 500GB drives, and an 8600GTS; I have no regrets; the iMac was worlds away from what I needed (hello PCI slots for testing medical video capture equipment). And a Mac Pro simply wasn't a good value for this unit. (That said, my next purchase is likely to be a Mac Book Pro 15".)
But I am defending Apples product and pricing as good value, because for what you get, it is. (upgrade pricing aside!) It might not be what YOU or I need, from a given system, but that's a separate issue.
The numbers in the summary do not include direct sales (i.e., nearly all corporate buys) or internet sales. In other words, it doesn't include the two main channels through which laptops are sold. The article, however, does include the full numbers:
Apple's share of U.S. [laptop] sales [is] 5.6%, far behind leaders HP (28.4%) and Dell (23.6%) but tied with Gateway.
In other words, Apple sells 1 laptop in 20 (in the USA; it's closer to 1 in 50 if you look at global numbers), not 1 in 6. Not quite as impressive as the summary or title make it appear, eh?
There are also a lot of tools available in the command-line environment, as well as open source software that can be compiled for Mac OS X. I'll leave it to the user to hunt them down because I haven't used any of them for monitoring.
Sapere aude!
Thinkpads are simply the most solid laptops money can buy. Undeniably number-one support. Also they're a lot more durable than macs. And the included IBM software is really very useful (like Active Protection System for your hard drives) unlike usual OEM crap.
Well now that depends. I just checked the dell and apple websites and here is what I found: (canadian $)
dell xps 1330: $1729
# 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
# 160GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# intel gma 3100
black macbook (std build): $1649
# 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
# 160GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# intel gma 950
So for slightly less money, you get a machine with a slightly inferior graphics card, but arguably better software (I guess a moot point if you're going with linux). Anyways, my point is that for some configs, the price isn't that different between dell and apple at least.
Funny thing about dell, is you have choices.... like
dell Inspiron 1420: $1,159
# 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
# 160GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# intel gma 3100
black macbook (std build): $1649
# 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
# 160GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# intel gma 950
A question for you: What is it about OS X that makes it good for audio/video/graphic work? That's your assertion, so I assume you have at least of some reason to believe it.
If you're confused as to why some choose OS X then I would suggest doing some research into the features that made NEXTSTEP a compelling Unix Desktop and workstation in the 90s. For instance:
That's NEXTSTEP.
Now, say you chose NEXTSTEP as the basis for your perfect operating system and desktop environment. You get to keep all of the good design decisions, throw away or refactor all of the bad design decisions, and do it without any backward compatibility restrictions. What you end up with is OS X.
But why an Apple laptop? Here's why: I can open up a bunch of SSH and X11 sessions to a remote server over wi-fi, close the lid and throw it in my back-pack, go eat lunch, come back and open the lid, and all of my remote X11 apps and sessions are still alive. OS X just works damn well on Apple's laptop hardware.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Apple has Mac OS license support subscription options for companies of all sizes.
You shouldn't complain on what you clearly don't know anything about.
My son was just issued an older iBook from his high school. Their IT department is top notch and tracks the students' activities thoroughly. They have screens in their office which flips through the screens of all students on the school network. At any time, they can remotely lock the computer and send a message to the kid to report to the principals office.
Don't even bother feeding the Troll--Twitter that is. He's a huge troll who frequently brings his sock puppet "Erris" into discussions when he gets modded down.
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Here's a post that sums up a lot about twitter--posting it so that perhaps a few more people might be alerted to twitter's activities! http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=198321&cid=16
And just FWIW, I agree with you about XP. I use OSX almost exclusively now, but I've had some very solid XP installations, and at work our Win2003 server regularly matches our FreeBSD server for uptime (poor power being the main limiting factor)
Let me counter with another anecdote: With the next patch release, the intel mac build of World of Warcraft will be able to record in-game video, filter out the UI, and encode to a variety of codecs and compression levels in the background. The PC version of the game will not be able to do so. Obviously, OSX offers something that Windows does not, correct?
Clearly spoken by someone who doesn't use Windows as a non-admin. I do, and it's perfectly usable. It has a sudo equivalent ("Run as") for admin tasks, just like UNIX, you can configure it to allow writes only to your home folder, just like UNIX, you can install untrusted applications within your home folder, just like UNIX.
People really need to stop using Win9x arguments against WinNT.
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