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...
For those too lazy to read the summary, this doesn't include online sales.
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.
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.
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.
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),
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?
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.
That overload is going to have to get a hell of a lot cheaper in order for me to accept it. :-)
In all seriousness, what do you guys actually do with your Macs that justifies the expense? I completely understand if it's just that it's aesthetically pleasing, too, I have an impractical car that runs fast and looks cool.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
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.
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
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.
2 64293
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)
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.
Yeah, a non-admin account on Windows. Real usable. That's a good one.