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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.
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!
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)