Slashdot Mirror
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."
With Vista firmly planted on the rocks, Apple are in a strongest position they have been in since the original Mac.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No, it's the Windows Black Hole of Suck effect.
Vista just made things worse.
The simple truth is that at least for IBM (now Levno) laptops and HP... and probably others... the build quality is just not there compared to Apple.
Plus, the risky gamble of allowing people to run Windows on their MacBooks really did work out. People can talk their employer into buying them a MacBook, instead of being issued a winblows machine.
Gentoo Sucks
You can run FreeBSD or Linux on the "expensive" Apple machine as well. Heck, you can also run Vista on one, if you must!
The cheapest of the cheap laptops are generally sucktastic, big, and heavy (And generally come pre-installed with Vista). My MacBook Pro is far more stylish and compact than almost every other equivalently priced Windows notebooks. OS X is a joy to use, and coupled with an AG-HVX200, Final Cut Studio, and a couple of big external drives... and I am a production unit on the go. It just works best for what I do. Which is why I "drank the koolaid" in 2003 and bought a Mac to start with. After 17 years of using MS-DOS and then Windows... I am loving being an "Apple Fanboi" and I cant see going back to Windows for anything other than the occasional game.
I think a lot of people are discovering that OS X just works, and doesnt need the sort of tinkering and maintenance that Windows rigs generally do to stay in top running shape.
I cant remember the last time I did a virus scan or a defrag...
Oh...
Last week...
On my roomies computer, so the damn XP rig would actually work again.
Three years ago I helped my parents find a great deal on a Dell laptop for my sister, who was just heading off to college at NYU. I was rather pleased with myself too; we used one of those 50% off coupons I found and got a great-spec machine for the price.
When the family got together for the holidays I asked her how the computer was working out; she complained to me that all the cool kids had MacBooks and she was "embarrassed to be seen in public with the ugly Dell next to all the sleek Macs."
So I can honestly say the Apple's success here is unsurprising to me; the laptop market is one that is well-suited to Apple's core strengths. Though a desktop is largely perceived as an appliance - it's an utilitarian box that you use to do stuff with - a laptop has the additional function of being a status symbol and expression of personal taste. Your desktop stays at home, but you can carry your laptop around with you. An iMac may look great, but its usefulness as a signifier of taste is constrained by the simply fact that it stays in your room. Now that the laptop market has become so important, Apple is in a great position to capitalize on their previously under-exploited brand identity.
And this is before we even consider Apple's incredibly devious "buy a Macbook, get an iPod" promotion. If Mom and Dad offer to buy you a computer for college, are you going to choose the PC or the Mac that comes with a great MP3 player? Unless you're a gamer, you're going to opt for the latter (and even if you are a gamer, you may just decide to get your fix by playing networked games with the roommates on an 360 anyway),
It is definitely not my reason for owning a macbook, but I heard that several times:
....."
".... and it can also run Windows if I really need it for something
I think the Intel switch and the option to run Windows is a huge selling point for many.
For me on the other hand is that it is the only laptop that actually runs UNIX out of the box with a functional desktop, without constant headaches for drivers and all.
I respect, love and use Linux every day, but when you face all the little quirks of a laptop when trying to put Linux on it (especially a new one) you know what I am talking about. And when you think you solved it all, you realize that your battery dies a lot faster, or your backlight just does not go out when the screen saver starts.
I myself own a Macbook, and while I have seen many OSes, touched and owned many hardware devices, I have to say that this was my best ever computer/OS selection. I admin servers and develop mostly for LAMP web, if you wondered, and yes I also enjoy having a decent DVD player program with a remote under UNIX (yes mplayer + lirc + whatever - but i mean out of the box, not after 3 days of hacking)
Enlighten me to which features SP1 and SP2 added that come close to:
Quartz Extreme, FileVault, Spotlight, Dashboard, Smart Folders, Core Image, Core Video, Automator, Time Machine, Spaces, Boot Camp, Resolution Independance... And Last but not least:
1 Install DVD For PPC 32 bit, PPC 64 bit, Intel 32 bit & Intel 64 bit with complete binary compatibility between all versions.
At first your comment seemed like a funny snark. But the more I read it the more I realize that it is what you said that is, in fact, the mark of a poor businessman. You might need some cash on hand or in short-term investments, but other than that you absolutely should be thinking of how to spend the money, with the eventual goal of gaining even more money. Your other option is to return it to the owners, which, depending on the business model, could be a dividend or a withdrawal or whatever, and you might be an owner, in which case, you can still legitimately think "how can I spend this?"
Work. (As opposed to "fiddle with a computer.")
Are you adequate?
The application menu constrained to the top of the screen hides information present in other applications and forces the user to either learn all the shortcut keys or suffer rediculous amounts of additional mouse travel.
Said applications should be designed to show whatever information might be useful in some other location than a menu bar. And the extra mouse travel distance is not a problem because it's easier to hit a target always at the top of the screen than one that might be mixed around other menus (In Windows I've found myself accidentally raising windows I did not mean to when I mistook which menu bar was for the active window).
A single mouse button was NEVER a good idea.
You say that now but when you realize how much more manageable a single large button is that you can chord into two, vs. two mouse buttons on a laptop where at least one is awkward to hit... on top of that applications are designed to work with one mouse button instead of requiring two,
The single button design aspect across all Mac platforms is what allows the laptops to be especially usable.
The iPod. A product that outclassed the competition by a mile. This made them profitable and restored people's trust in apple producing a reliable, desirable product.
Apple was quite profitable, and had a huge cash reserve, well before the iPod when they were just selling iMacs and OS X. The iPod did vault them into a new straosphere of awareness and is obviously having an effect though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This version of the Flame War requires win2k or better, or OSX. There is a linux port, but it needs 2.6.x, and is still in beta.
Sorry 1995, you can't have this one.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Yeah, a non-admin account on Windows. Real usable. That's a good one.