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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."
That's not the iPod's halo effect. That's the Vista Black Hole of Suck effect.
For those too lazy to read the summary, this doesn't include online sales.
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.
Sounds like a big day... I wonder if he had time for Bed Bath & Beyond.
As soon as my company moves from the red to the black, I'm investing in MacBooks for my entire staff. I'm no zealot, I'm a business man. I want my people to be productive and I want my people to enjoy their work. After spending a few weeks getting used to the interface, I honestly believe that my people will enjoy using their computers. The really amusing thing is that I really like MS Office on the Mac a hundred times better than on Windows. Entourage is actually pretty cool (when compared to Outlook or dEvolution) and after learning it I love it.
When choosing whether to move the company from XP to Vista or just to a Mac, if I can pull it off financially, Mac it will be and Vista will never make it in the door.
greg AT mycoupons DOT com "When you're finished changing, you're finished." Ben Franklin
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.
Well, not exactly. Sort of. For instance, I run Windows XP sandboxed on my dual core MacBook Pro laptop, and that's the only place I run Windows at all. Windows isn't allowed to get to the net where it can get hurt, I just use it to host a few desktop applications that don't have Mac equivalents. With Parallels "coherence" mode, I'm in the OSX filesystem for the images and other files I use under Windows, but I have the Mac right there doing the right things for everything else.
I also run a linux install pretty much the same way (though no coherence, unfortunately.) The linux install is allowed on the net because it considerably more secure "out there" than Windows is. I can run all three OS's at once without any problem and get realistic performance from all of them.
Hence, no need for a Windows machine, and no need to be an "idiot", either. ;-)
As for Vista... No need to go there. We won't be writing any applications using Vista specific capabilities, either. As far as I'm concerned, Vista was dead at the starting line.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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?
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!
When I went to college I got a Thinkpad, my brother got an iBook. My Thinkpad barely made it through 2 years, my brother still uses his iBook (this is now ~6 years later). A year ago I relented and bought myself a MacBook Pro, today's Lenovo Thinkpads don't even compare. A couple people at my office have the new Thinkpads, but far more now have MacBooks or MacBook Pros. It has nothing to do with PC vs. Mac, Apple simply makes excellent machines. For the record, my office is a Windows XP only shop, so all those Mac owners are running XP on their macs (at least at work).
Frag 'em all...
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
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)