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."
Most college kids I see at coffee shops have a Mac notebook...
I guess Apple's strategy of marketing to younger people is finally paying off. Also, does this prove the iPod's halo effect is Real?
Let me preface my comments by saying that I have not used in a Mac in 6 years or more. So I am not a zealot. From what I saw at Best Buy this weekend, I think the sales may go up even more. I hadn't realized that they were selling them now, but I saw a crowd ganged around a table where they had the laptops and iMacs sitting out for people to play around with. There was a steady stream of people and you could feel a sense of excitement about it. Unfortunately I was there to buy a washer and dryer...
I find it kinda amusing that either earlier today or yesterday there was an article about how Gateway got bought out for just over a dollar a share and most the comments were tashing the company's business model and how it was driven into the ground.
Then this article triumphs being tied with Gateway as an achievement.
This will get modded flamebait, but I doubt that this bump in sales will be sustainable.
I expect that lot of these new Apple buyers are people who, like me, just grew weary of Microsoft,their attitude, and the endless virus and other problems.
The problem for Apple is that they, and the fanboys, are selling the product as perfection, as complete out of the box, as seamless and needing no attention beyond plugging in the power supply once a day.
The reality of course is much different. Macs have some pretty serious deficiencies, even in the much vaunted user interface. 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.
After two years with a Mac I tell people that really it's no more or less easy to use than a Windows machine, and has just as many irritations and problems. They're just different irritations and problems.
Because Apple sells their computers as the most perfect thing in the world, all of those day to day issues seem that much more disappointing.
My guess is that a lot of these "switchers" will hang onto their MacBooks for one cycle, then revert back to Windows in order to avoid compatibility issues, cost issues, and in some situations the lack of specific software that isn't available on the Mac.
At the end of the day there just isn't that much about the Mac that makes it a slam dunk for every user.
Three Squirrels
How cool is Apple's industrial design?
When I started a new job in January, they issued me a MacBook Pro. The first time I brought it home and pulled it out of my bag, my four year old daughter - who is used to various desktops, LCD and CRT monitors, my and my wife's Thinkpads, and the Toshiba Tecra I had at my previous employer - immediately popped it with "Wow, that's a cool computer!" as soon as she saw it.
She'd never seen a Mac before, has no clear idea about brands and stuff, yet immediately recognized that it looked cooler than the other computers she's seen. Couple that level of cool with OS X and you have a winner, so Apple's surging laptop market share doesn't surprise me.
Macbook Pro happens to sit at that fulcrum point balancing power and portability in a way that bests every other machine I've used. With an external FW800 drive it's a more powerful video production machine than the desktop G5 I was using two years ago, and that was plenty powerful enough for me to cut and do basic compositing for a DV feature. So if you can only afford one machine (most baseline videgraphers or aspiring filmmakers) and you want to be able to go wherever you need to with it (editing suites, pitches, editing on the commuter train etc), then there's really only one solution.
Now, a smart filmmaker will shoot high def, digitize to DV footage to be edited on the macbook, and then uprez and render the high def version on a quad-core Power mac at the post production house where the real heavy lifting needs to be done: color correction, final compositing, sound mixing.
I may be an anonymous coward, but I know a good bargain for hard-earned money when I see it.
I too, used to laugh at Apple Fanboys. I got fed up with XP, thought I'd try OS X, with the ability to fall back to XP on the same hardware, if I wasn't happy with OS X. Well, there was no looking back! (And Parallels lets me run any old legacy thing I need, which turns out only to be MSN webcam, and little else.)
:) (But the more market share they get, the stronger they'll be, and the longer they'll be around for me :). The only reason I want people to convert, is I know it would be for *their* own good, not for validation of myself as a Fanboy.
So crash free, virus free, and great performance, it's a dream come true for me. External displays work as expected. Everything just works, in general. (A few gotchas, but *very* few as compared to XP.)
The funny thing is, I don't consider myself a Fanboy. But when I talk about the Mac, I get excited about how well it works, and people accuse me of it! Well dammit, I *am* excited about how well it works for me! And want to share it with others. At the end of the day, I don't care if people convert, as long as it's there for me.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I live in Boston, Mass. and here it seems that most of the computers are Macs (as far as laptops go). Go into any coffeeshop, and well, it's all Macs. We hosted a Plone Sprint and training session here, and it was about 70% Macbook Pros (we converted one guy halfway though, and I bought a new MBP then as well). The office I worked in, which is a co-working suite called the Betahouse in Cambridge (it's all web developers) is 90% Mac.
Maybe it's just the huge number of 'creatives' in the city, but it seems that around NYC and Boston, that Apple's pretty well taken over. Hell, my office has 70% of the people carrying iPhones (and that was true the first week they were out). I have yet to actually see anyone with a Zune. Period.
What's odd is that I lived in North Carolina for about 8 months, and most of the computers there were Windows-based PCs. My 4 macs were seen as oddities down there. Here it's par for the course.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I am no Apple fanboy, been around /. for enough years to be pretty cynical about all corporations and technology cheerleaders but I bought a MacBook Pro about two months ago and am surprised to have come to the conclusion that it's the best piece of hardware I've ever owned.
I don't mean that in a fevered, evangelical way because, really, I don't care what the rest of the world uses but for me, personally, switching has made a big difference to my productivity and enjoyment of computers - I'd kind of forgotten the excitement I used to feel back in the day.
Over the past couple of years, Apple seem to be have been slowly but steadily getting it right in a sustained manner that I suspect will come more clearly to fruition when Leopard is released in October. I was kind of slow to notice this build-up, kind of resistant to the idea of buying into the cult of Apple and probably should have made the switch sooner, could have used this productivity boost a year ago, but, whatever, I'm glad that I eventually cottoned on.
Again, I don't much care what the rest of the world does as long as my experience and working environment keep improving. Some enjoy treating this as a spectator sport, like a never-ending baseball match between Apple and Microsoft, enjoying each play that seems to bring victory that little bit nearer. Bollox.
Sure, Apple probably will see quite a jump by the holiday season but Microsoft have simply dominated the market for too long to be pushed aside - the vast majority of people don't know and don't care to know much about computers and will happily "upgrade" to Vista when their existing machines die. What we will see, however, is a fairly fast and comprehensive migration towards Mac by programmers and other people who need to be creative and productive with computers. That probably represents just 15% of the market but it's an important 15% and giving those people better tools to do what they do is going to be beneficial for everyone.
In the meantime, I certainly recommend giving the whole Mac proposition a closer look, you might find yourself as surprised as I have been.
That same three year old thinks its cool when the doggie drinks out of the toilet and drags his ass across the carpet as well.
I just bought my first Mac. A Santa Rosa macbook pro. And I use it almost exclusively now.
Here's what I don't like.
Ok, so why do I LIKE it (a lot)?
There's nothing not to like about this hardware.
Pair that up with the fact that their design team is solid and is producing exceptional quality designs such as the iPod line and the iPhone. (I don't own one and won't based on cost and that I have a good PDA phone but my colleague has one and I've tried it out and it's a good design.)
Apple made three pivotal moves:
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Keynote. Keynote alone might force an upgrade from my iBook to a MacBook for lecturing/conferences.
Photoshop. Fortran. Run simulations while on the road without having to perform yoga contortions to get the machine to act like a proper UNIX box.
Just get work done quietly and unobtrusively, without the computer/OS having to announce its presence every minute, lest I forget the blessings that Redmond hath bestowed upon me.
My dream laptop would be an IBM X31 running OS-X, but since those were never made, MacTops it is.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I'm (non-teaching) graduate-level support staff in astronomy at a state university known for its graduate-level astronomy program, and from what I see among the post-docs, professors and staff I work with, both at the university and elsewhere through collaborations, I think Apple's market share in some of the sciences is significantly better than one-in-six laptops, and has been for the last few years. A friend who did database work for an observatory told me of going to an ADASS conference a couple years ago, and getting looks of pity because he had the only non-Mac laptop in the room.
Why is this the case? It's not about iPods and it's not about Vista. It's about UNIX, X, and Boot Camp/Parallels/VMWare. The professor who used to have a Sparc, a PC and a PPC Mac in his office now just does his number-crunching and scientific visualization on an 8-core Mac Pro with dual 30" displays, and takes a MacBook Pro places with him. (I'm low on the totem pole, so I have a plain black MacBook.)
What's really amazed me lately is that this isn't just a US thing. I work near a major Japanese facility, so there are always Japanese scientists around. For years, they've always had these cute little Panasonic/Toshiba/Sony/Sanrio/whoever laptops that we never see at stores in the US (except at Shirokiya in Honolulu, I guess). Earlier this month, I actually worked with three of them one night, and they brought 2 laptops with them - both Macs. I never thought I'd ever see any "American" brand become that popular with the Japanese scientists.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Nobody's forcing you to upgrade, but you'd think a company with no other leg to stand on, would be a little nicer about the software that drives the sales of their overpriced hardware.
Also you should realize after a new version of the OS is released of OS X they still support the old ones and you still get upgrades and update to the OS. Every dot release is actually a major upgrade Like from Windows 3.1 - 95, 95 - 98, 98 - ME (That may not be a good example), ME - XP, XP - Vista (perhaps an other bad example) From 95-XP there were new version of Windows every couple of years, much like OS X. OS X Gets minor Update like 10.4.1, 10.4.2, 10.4.3... These are equivalent to service pack releases, where sometimes you may get some minor features, and increased stability in the OS. The 10 Dot releases offer a lot of new features and the OS looks and Feels different.
Apple has a faster software development cycle then Microsoft, it is not a bad thing, it means you have the option to use the most current technologies and fully utilize modern hardware.
Mac Hardware is not overpriced it is competitively priced., the problem is that Apple offers little in options they have sub class groups
Dells Website...
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T7700 (2.40GHz) 4M L2 Cache, 800MHz Dual Core
NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M, 512MB Turbo Cache memory (256 dedicated)
15.4 inch Wide Screen WXGA Anti-Glare LCD Panel
4.0GB, DDR2-667MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMMS
* 160GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 7200RPM
8X DVD+/-RW w/Roxio Creator(TM)/Cyberlink PDVD(TM)
Dell Wireless® 360 Bluetooth Module for Windows XP
Intel® 4965 802.11a/g/n Dual-Band Mini Card
Standard Touchpad
$3,427
Apples WebSite...
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x2GB
160GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
MacBook Pro 15-inch Widescreen Display
* Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
Accessory Kit
*iSight Built in Camera,
$3,199.00
*Better then the competitors.
Granted that the Dell has a couple of features that are slightly higher performance then the Mac such as a faster drive and perhaps a better video card. But I would expect those difference in spec would be about would account to about $150 difference in the price. But the apple has a built in video camera light sensor and glowing keyboard, motion detection, and the magnetic power adapter (don't mock it until you tried it) which would account for about $150 different in the prices as well. Then dell depending where you go on your website and coupons and such... You may be able to get an other $100 or $150 off but still after all this extra hassle you are not really paying much more for the Mac compared to Dell similarly spec are actually about the same price.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Now... everything you said and showed was fine, the machine worked without a hitch... the question is what did you wear?
It shouldn't matter what things look like but it does. You can have a functional laptop that an industrial designer hit viciously with the ugly stick, or you can have a functional laptop that looks good too. You can wear the suit you bought at Target or the one you bought at Armani. You can buy a solid, reliable Toyota or you can buy a solid, reliable Mercedes.
The choice is yours, and people will judge you accordingly. Branding is not something marketers alone do, you do it also, consciously or not all your actions and choices indicate who you are. Again, it's not ideal but it is human.
As for the screwdriver thing... I know a few tradesmen and they definitely have opinions on which brands make a good screwdriver and which ones are shit. They may not laugh at you, but they'll see which one you have and it becomes a part of the opinion they form of you.