Apple Climbs Into Third Place In U.S. PC Market

Tibor the Hun writes "According to Gartner and IDC, Apple now has between 7.8 and 8.5% of market share. While those numbers are not astonishing, they are not insignificant, and their growth does not seem to be slowing down. Will the pearly gates of acceptance open up for them once they reach the magic 10%, and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption? Hard to tell, but it's good to see that normal people (not just us geeks) are choosing to go with a different OS, rather than staying with the headache-inducing Windows."

Comments

Re:Normal People?

[bigstrat2003]

My favorite part are the people who complain about trollish summaries, because I get to imagine how their panties got in such a tight knot.

I believe a far better insult to use against me would have been "sand in their vagina" (no, I'm not a chick). ;)

Anyways, it doesn't really make me lose any sleep at night, or rant and rave and foam at the mouth, but it does make me scratch my head and wonder how that got in there. Surely editors should at least make sure the submission is troll/flame free before posting it?

Mac Users are Silly

[jimmlegsgmail.com]

I may be in the minority when it comes to OS preference and Slashdot but does no one recognize the fact that Apple has been making shitty business decisions that take years to work out if they ever do. What about their unwillingness to genericize their hardware? It took them 25+ years to standardize on an Intel chip? Really? (not to mention only Mac Zealots will extol the PowerPC chip). What about the iPhone lacking Exchange support? Real enterprise class, huh? The fact that the AirBook is not upgradeable (not to mention fucking expensive), the battery life sucks and guess what? It's soldered in. What about the fact that end of life means end of life. I currently have an old PowerPC G4 with Jaguar on it and can't get much current software to run on it, and the kicker is that developers remove their old versions of the software so simple things like an FTP server (I'm not even going to get into the crappy UNIX "integration") -- A PSP is more useful than this thing. I would upgrade it but guess what, the hardware won't support Leopard and what's the point of buying an old OS? I can't even get a Linux Live CD to operate dependably on the PowerBook. I have clients that still run Windows95 and 98 (not that I agree with it) and they can readily find archives of older software and utilities. The point is old hardware, old OS still humming along. I leave you with an aside and perhaps a post for later: Without M$, no matter your opinion on the company, IT jobs would be a lot rarer and many of us would be in different industries. Switch that with Apple and the computer would probably be a specialist/hobbyist tool and there would probably not be a Mac on each desk and in each home. Just for giggles my OS of preference is the Ubuntu Linux distro.

Re:Mac Users are Silly

[jimmlegsgmail.com]

Hey, I never said their designs didn't kick ass. Besides, it's easy to gain market share when you you twist arms to upgrade and charge twice as much as an average PC. Not to mention (although I am) the fact that most of Apples market share has been derived from iPod sales -- Apple stock was less than $11 a share in December 2001. Let us not forget that good business decisions do not get companies into situations where their #1 competitor bails them out ala 1997 Microsoft. My point is variety is good but what purpose does the Mac serve? I mean if you want to be a hardcore admin then build some Linux boxes if you want to focus on business applications go with Windows. There was a time when graphic artists and publishers needed Macintosh, but that time is quickly fading into history.

Re:Normal People?

[moosesocks]

You're faulting Apple's UI paradigms by using a Microsoft application as your example?

Apple does indeed violate its own UI Guidelines in many cases, though Microsoft, Adobe, and the other remaining holdouts of the Carbon toolkit tend to shit all over them. Not apple's fault.

Re:Normal People?

[hostyle]

You were winning until you mentioned Java ...