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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."
when will a project similar to WINE come out for OSX? I have seen all sorts of apps that run on Mac and/or PC's but not linux. One would think it would almost be easier to "not emulate" the OSX software, as it is mostly unix based. If more software starts coming out for mac and PC, it might be easier to get the Mac software running under linux.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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?
Wow, talk about a strange corollary. Linux desktop adoption has nothing at all to do with Mac market share. It would have been just as valid to write, "Will the pearly gates of acceptance open up for them once they reach the magic 10%, and will that lead a surge in kitten adoptions?"
Personally, though, adopt a cat anyway.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Any browser can induce a boatload of headaches to those who are uninformed on how to use it. Aside from Vista and all of it's obvious headaches such as drivers and legacy software not working, XP and 2k were not quite as bad.
I think anyone will agree that even Linux can cause plenty of headaches as well if one is not careful. Sendmail was one of those battles I had a while ago.
Why is 10% "magic"? This number is significant because that's how many fingers we have?
Because it has reached double digit
To me - it really isn't all that astonishing. While I believe Mac usage has gone up pretty drastically over the last several years. They are the only one selling their product. If someone wants a Mac, they have to go to Apple to buy it. And since they've created a culture, where their product is not only percieved as more efficient and better but also as trendy, I don't really find it that suprising. Still 10% is comparitivly a drop in the bucket.
Back before Windows 3.0 they had the destkop publishing market practically all to themselves.
Was it Steve Jobs who said the world would never need more than 2 shades of black and white?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I argue that it's actually impossible to get Windows to run decently no matter how much of a geek you are because the software is written poorly and is designed to annoy the user.
Ah, counterexamples, the one useful function of anecdotal evidence. I run Vista beautifully. It doesn't get in my way, it runs the software I want it to, it just works. So yes, it is possible. Without much effort, either, I might add.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
And since when have Apple users been considered "normal" around here?
Or did you really mean 'orthogonal'
Apple users are definitely wacky. I bought a MacBook recently because of the stability, ease of administration, nice kernel, reasonable dev environment, etc.
Now I can't stand it. The Apple GUI is a piece of shit. They have gone to weird symbols in their GUI instead of nice buttons with labels.
Example: I needed to add a user. I bought up the little user management app and didn't see any add user button. After a short Google, I found that to add a user, you click the small plus sign at the bottom. Maybe I should have figured that out without Googling, but it sure didn't seem obvious at the time.
It seems like Apple is generally going for a pretty interface over a useful interface. That may impress some people but it drives me batshit. The only question now is whether to put KDE on top of OS X or put some Linux Distro on it.
I heard so many great reviews of Mac and now I'm looking at having paid too much money for a Linux notebook ... sigh.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.
I am referring to the new iPhone - and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build 'native' applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad - and it wasn't even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.
Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code?
What is more worrying is what the next move could be. Now that there is an AppStore with applications in iTunes, why wouldn't Apple move next to distribute all applications through iTunes - both desktop and mobile? There is no reason for them not to - the response to AppStore has been so enthusiastic that it is almost assured that you will start seeing desktop apps distributed in the same way. As soon as users are ground into looking at everything through iTunes, distribution of software in the traditional manner would be near impossible. Apple would become the gatekeeper, and both developers and users will enthusiastically pay the toll in exchange for pretty devices with pretty applications.
Apple has a very strong following in the open source community, and I can no longer understand it nor justify my own support (I am writing this on a Macbook). They built OS X on FreeBSD (a project I have enthusiastically supported, contributed to and been a user of for 10 years or more), they built Safari on KHTML, and are now using libraries such as SproutCore in MobileMe. They have taken open source and everything it built and leveraged it to get to market faster - yet they have now, with iTunes and the new SDK, built a layer on top of it that excludes others. For Apple, open source is great when it furthers their own goals, but not when using it with Apple software where it may further the goals of others.
The solution is simple. If you truly believe in open standards, open source and the good that it has created, then don't accept it. The spirit of open source was about building on the work of others in a transparent fashion, as the gains further the common good of all. Despite not taking over the desktop market, the philosophy and its resultants have destroyed the old enterprise market and many others. Open source and standards keep Microsoft and other big companies on their toes, the movement as a whole and the philosophy is very real. The solution isn't to adopt new licenses to try and prevent this, as it results in the mess that is GPL v 3.
It should be very possible to attach a simple BSD license to code, and if a large company utilizes the effort from others in a way that is unacceptable - the market should be able to sort that out, we simply wont buy it. The community needs to do more than just wear their support for openess and standards on their sleeves (and on their laptops). The problem with Apple is that the blind demand is driven by a distorted reality, so those same developers who poured thousands of hours into the BSD kernel now turn around and purchase an iPhone running that code, but it is now tied up in DRM, licenses and restrictions placed there by others.
it makes perfect sense to switch to another company that even more protective of its source
What, something happened to Apple Open Source?
Oh no, it's all there, still tracking the latest release of OS X.
Damn, you scared me for a second...
(yes, I know they're only 99.44% pure and hold out a few kernel components, but "even more protective" than Microsoft? Give me a rotating plaid gold-decked break!)
Hard to tell, but it's good to see that normal people (not just us geeks) are choosing to go with a different OS
Most of the Mac owners I know are normal people. Either students that got an imac laptop from their school, older people who wanted an easy to use computer, or an artist (musician, photographer, graphic designer, etc.) who wanted a powerful machine that wouldn't get infected with a ton of spyware and viruses in a week.
None of the Mac owners I know (besides myself) are very tech savvy, they just know that their iPod works great, their PC is always infected with "viruses" (usually some spyware they installed cause it promised free smileys), and their friend's Mac never has any problems. Personally I didn't buy a Mac just for a different OS. If I want to toy around in something other than Windows, I just go install Linux on whatever old computers are lying around the house. I bought the Mac specifically for Aperture, and Final Cut Pro since I do a lot of photography and video work. I know there exists open source software or expensive Windows software to do that stuff, it's just none of it is as powerful or easy to use as the Mac versions. I don't need Mac OS to have a stable computer, I just like the software that exists for the Mac.
I use linux/*nix all day long at work, and I have a mac at home, yet there's very few things that I use on OSX that are *nix related. Maybe running 'top' is about it, and that's a rarity. I picked OSX because of the applications and how they are all integrated in with each other, pure and simple. My laptop at work is a company provided XP system and while not having the polish/eye candy that OSX has, it gets the job done.
When linux distros have the same ease of use, smooth upgrades and most importantly application integration (with each other AND the OS), then I can see people like myself thinking about saving a few bucks and going with Linux instead.
I assume that when I buy a dishwasher, the interface is intuitive and it just works, why should we treat computers any differently?
So what are you doing wrong? XP works beautifully for me and everyone i know. Worked really well for the 100+ users and 150+ machines for which i was sys admin.
Also, learn the difference between facts and opinions.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I know a person that was forced to use Linux at work (now she's forced to use Windows, just like me). Altough she isn't a computer expert (ok, she doesn't even know how to click "next - next - next" and have a piece of software installed on Windows), she does nothing but complain on how restritive Windows is.
Rethinking email
I find the user interface to be very good. But I did run into these kinds of troubles with getting acclimated. It just takes some time to get used to the subtle differences. We could all do it in windows instantly (well, after the long delay for the control panel subscreen to open), but how many years have we had to familiarize ourselves with Windows?
I'm not saying that I'll never get used to OS X. It's just ... painful. I also recently installed Ubuntu with KDE on my desktop ... and found the GUI pretty easy to figure out.
Maybe I picked a bad example, but there are tons of other things that annoy me in OS X. The maximize button doesn't work properly (I've had this flame war on Mac boards before ... bottom line is, I want to be able to click a button and have a window be fullscreen. Period.)
The doc is terrible. I would much rather have all the windows of a particular application grouped together and see their titles rather than have tiny images of the windows that I can't see. It also just looks less clean than the KDE or Windows task bar. There other things that I hate. I just can't remember them all because my Mac is essentially mothballed at this point until I can fix it (i.e. run either KDE or another OS).
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
I find it suspicious that Mac adoption has exploded shortly after the release of Bootcamp. I'd like to know what fraction of this 8.5% of Mac users is dual booting to Windows.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I figure the Mac revolution would have happened when OSX was released, or maybe when the iPod was launched. Why should the surge happen today?
Yes, there are a TON of tools that are windows only. Linux is great, my home server runs it as does my little CNC milling machine (EMC baby!) But until the other OS's get enough critical mass for the major software packages to be ported I've got to have some windows capability everywhere.
The intel switch with the mac was HUGE for me. I was dancing the day that was announced. I now have a mac that can run ALL software.
The parent is 100% correct, windows is a fact of life for certain tasks. That may change, but I doubt it will change quickly.
Sheldon
And then there are things that OSX simply won't do. In Windows if I want to delete something I can click on the file, icon, object or whatever and press the Delete button my keyboard. In OSX I have to drag it to the Trash Can. Ya... that's a really efficient "workflow". I have another gripe with the way OSX doesn't properly utilize the Delete key. I will use the example of typing in a web address. I want to go to www.google.com. So I type it out but accidently type www.boogle.com. Now if I want to delete the B, I have to put the cursor after the B and press backspace. I can't put the cursor in front of the B and press Delete. WTF is up with that? Everyone knows... Backspace moves the cursor to the left and deletes text to the left of the cursor. Delete keeps the cursor in place and deletes text to the right of the cursor. What is so hard about that?
Is there a solution to that? Every OSX geek I've talked to just brushes me off like I'm stupid for wanting to use the Delete key. That gives me the sense that there really isn't a solution to it and the GUI Gods at Apple do suck, but they suck differently from the guys at Microsoft. Or maybe there is a special key on an Apple keyboard that acts like the Delete key on the computers that hold onto the other ... what, 82% of the market share?
How many macs have been built by the owner?
Three here. OK, I started with an Apple motherboard, but I had to get a third-party processor, replace the RAM, add cache, video cards, case... XPostFacto let me install OS X on "unsupported" Macs. 7600 upgraded to a G3/400, G3 upgraded to a G4/533, and another G3 upgrade for my daughter. After Apple abandoned the headless desktop in '97 I didn't have much alternative but extreme upgrading until the Mac mini came along.
1 - Registry bloat. No other OS keeps app settings and preferences in what really amounts of a gigantic text file. Many apps do NOT remove registry entries correctly (or fully) when uninstalled. Inevitably this file will bloat, bloat, bloat, bloat until it takes forever just to get anything out of it.
No application is required to do this, either.
The applications themselves could easily read from a text file they keep in their own directory. Sure, if you want your Auto Play handler to list your program, or if you want to hijack the icons and registration of every media type known to man, you're gonna spam the registry.
It's not the fault of the OS that applications don't play nice and don't clean up after themselves upon uninstall.
2 - System folder bloat. No package manager in Windows, yet things insist on storing dependencies in a shared manner. This is pain, since *nobody* dares remove any library from your system upon uninstall because nobody is sure if anyone else needs it. As you install/uninstall things from your system, this folder will bloat, bloat, bloat. It's incredible how much larger a Windows install can get just 1 year after a fresh reformat.
Are you joking? Stop downloading random shareware programs. Every damned program I uninstall prompts me with a "This file may be needed by other applications, should I really delete it when I uninstall myself?" and I always say "YES PLEASE". If something does break (extremely rare) just reinstall the broken program, or if you're an enterprising individual, just replace the individual files.
Again - not the fault of the OS. Many apps will keep a separate copy of dlls in their own directories, in case another program uses the same dll and removes it upon uninstallation. And if you have an issue with dlls causing your windows installation to "bloat, bloat, bloat", you need to stop downloading every program in existence, and maybe get a hard drive measured in gigglebytes instead of maybebytes.
There is no package manager in windows, true. Once would be nice to have, but how many packages are available for Linux? How many applications are available for Windows? Yeah, YOU be the guy who has to manage the package manager.
These things are unavoidable. Your users may well have avoided these issues if their machines were locked like Fort Knox and they were unable to install and tweak to their liking. As a heavy dev who's always trying new tools, the constant install/uninstall cycle takes its toll VERY VERY quickly in Windows, whereas in OS X and Linux the system remains squeaky clean.
The constant installing and uninstalling is your fault. YOURS. If you hate the bloat, stop using programs that don't clean up after themselves. Use a registry cleaner. Or use on of the various uninstaller apps. They track changes to your registry/system folders/files and undo them all for you.
Oh, and did I mention that I need admin privileges to do ANYTHING? I can't even install a flash plugin for *myself* without needing full admin privileges to the system. This is lazy programming, and Windows is full of it. If I were a sysadmin I'd be tearing my hair out. It's either: "screw you guys, use the pre-installed software and nothing else", or "have fun with full admin, I'll be here waiting for your f'ed up computer". There's no happy medium.
Right click my computer, manage...
You can set up all the permissions you want and more. If you can't trust yourself to run as administrator, then THAT'S a valid reason to turn in any "geek card" you may have illegitimately obtained.
If you're administrating a machine for a user who can't be trusted, they should NOT have the ability to install random plugins and crap. Do that for them, backup the entire drive, and hand them the keyboard and the login details for a limited user account. I hope you set that password to expire on first login & every x months, because they WILL leave it on a sticky on their monitor.
Your post boils down to "Whaaa. Windows is hard. I don't know what happened, so I'll blame the operating system!"
You're no different than the people who blame Bill Gates specifically when their computer gets a virus from that e-greeting card email they got.
Most games ARE ported. FPS types typically take a couple months, many are released simultaneously. I know there's always a really good title or two that never crosses over (looking at you Far Cry) but most games make it to the Mac.
You might just not see them as they don't carry Mac versions in most stores that sell PC software.
I think you have to be a little insane to use some Apple hardware. Does anyone remember the puck mice? The ultra-flat desktop keyboards they're selling now are almost as bad. The earbuds that come with iPods are all universally crappy, both in build and sound quality. It's bizarre that, with Jobs exerting such obsessive compulsive control over Apple's output, crap products like these somehow slip through the cracks. It's almost like Jobs is schizoid.
Then again, if Apple just isn't good at designing certain things, what are they supposed to do? Start selling updated IBM Model-M keyboards with their high-end desktops? Grado's with the iPods? Paint microsoft mice white!!? It's almost unimaginable, and I see that as a problem.
This is my main beef with Apple. They're too image conscious. Admittedly, some of their user-base just wants to be fashionable, but is being fashionable really a long-term plan for success? Given how much of an asshole he is, sooner or later Jobs is going to become "uncool". Increased market share and, hence, lessened uniqueness isn't going to help. Normal people will use uncool hardware if it's *good*. This is a lesson I feel Apple needs to learn.
.
Top Operating System Share Trend
August 07 - June 08
Windows Vista 16%
Up 10%
The MacIntel 5%.
Up 2%
The Mac 3%
Unchanged.
Linux 0.8%.
Up 0.3%
In these stats, adoption of Vista appears to be accelerating and the Mac stagnating as we head into late summer.
MacIntel is where the action is for OSX and the MacIntel has BootCamp.
Desktop Linux draws flies.
Top Operating System Share Trend
Windows 91% - All Versions
Down 2%
The Mac and the MacIntel 8%
Up 2%
Apple sells an upscale urban life-style. Microsoft solid middle class value.
Apple has the boutique in Manhattan. Microsoft the big-box retailer in every township populous enough to rate a single traffic light.
Long term and with the economy in recession, who do you think holds the stronger cards?
Yes, but it's stored in many text files, each of which keeps to itself, and doesn't slow down access to the others.
OS X keeps configs in XML files, but these are stored in very strictly named folders - which is to say that, even if the app doesn't play nice and remove these files on uninstall, you can easily go in and clean these suckers out yourself without fear of nuking something important.
...and at this juncture some of the best Windows computers are Macs. You heard me right. They also make some of the best Linux computers. Now that MacIntel is the standard architecture for Macintosh, some people are actually running Windows or Linux on them. The reason why they do it? It's because quality control at the major PC manufacturers is down in the dumpster. If you want something that's built as good on the PC side, you have to go with boutique manufacturers like VoodooPC or Alienware, and even those are questionable because VoodooPC is now owned by HP and Alienware is owned by Dell. Since Lenovo took over the ThinkPad and ThinkCentre lines from IBM, quality has gone down the crapper quicker than you can say "ni hao."
Of course, part of the experience of Macs includes Mac OS X. And the folks who buy Macs only to put Windows or Linux on them are kind of unclear on the concept, in my not so humble opinion. Mac OS X is right now the best Unix or Unix-like operating system on the desktop. Now that Leopard is at 10.5.4 it is just plain awesome and just plain works. 10.5.2 was good for me too and so was 10.5.3, but I had no occasion to use 802.11n connectivity and I know that broke with 10.5.2. With 10.5.4 even those with 802.11n wireless access points are happy.
Still, if it means more people with Macs regardless of what OS they run, that's fine by me. More Macs sold equals more visibility for Mac. Everyone assumes that Macs run Mac OS X so the bigger the market share the more likely people will consider Mac users as more than fringies.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Well, I have a Powerbook at home, and work on an Ubuntu Box at work. Sometimes, I have to fire up a WinXP inside VirtualBox to check what workarounds are needed to compile my code with VC++, but that's only once in a month or so.
I actually like INI files (reminds me of Linux, UNIX, etc.) during Windows 3.x days. Easier to manage! Registry sucks!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yeah, Linux uses tons of text files in random unpredictable locations, which vary by distribution, which all have their own grammar, comment style, and which also aren't removed when you uninstall software (check our your dotfiles some time).
I really don't get why people love to rag on the registry so much. Perfect it ain't, but seriously, the registry provides a fast random access database with a standard API, integrated security and robust toolset for administrators. Why do you think GNOME created their own registry work-alike 10 years later? It's because the registry actually has a lot of advantages for managed networks and app developers that UNIX fans don't like to admit.
As a bonus, it's accessible from kernel mode so you can configure drivers with it as well. The equivalent on Linux is ..... well there isn't really an equivalent. Drivers are configured using a collection of random config files, scripts that read those random config files and then poke state into the kernel through yet more bizarre custom interfaces that are made up on the spot. In Windows, you set some registry keys, the driver reads them ... done.
Linux takes a fraction of the time as Windows to get it fine tuned? What world do you live on? Just getting drivers working properly can often take weeks of research and experimentation (assuming there's a driver that will work). And yes, that's even true for Ubuntu. In my experience with Windows getting the drivers working properly has never taken more than a few minutes (except once for a printer for which there was no 64-bit driver). And just so you know, I do prefer Linux once I've gotten everything working properly, I just hate the getting everything working stage.
The only thing I know is that I don't know anything; and I'm not even sure about that.
Um no. ECC stands for Error Correcting Code. Parity only allows you to detect an error, to correct it you need: a) two extra bits b) a bunch of extra logic to detect which bit failed and correct it. This is the same type of memory what's used in servers, and is therefore a much smaller market with more testing and much smaller economies of scale than you get with commodity DRAM. That's also why it's not the latest DDR3 bleeding-edge speeds, because you tend to be more conservative with what you put into a server because you have lower levels of acceptable risk than what is OK in the commodity hardware used by Joe Sixpack. Of course, there is still some gouging. Look at the markup that HP or IBM put on their server ECC RAM compared to what you pay to 3rd party suppliers like Kingston. However, the gouging is not as bad as you think.
It's true that I do have a windows box at work... but it's just because we build our software on windows too.
It's computer number 7 after the redhat laptop, the solaris workstation, the 3 SuSE and redhat boxes and the HPUX server.
So it's 1.25 hours for the install, not counting the time it took to get all the drivers beforehand.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You do understand that just because Dell owns Alienware and HP owns VoodooPC doesn't mean they necessarily changed, or control, their design and production process, right? The point of a business merger like those is to get the parent company into the niche the bought company ocupied and to SHARE beneficial technologies (like Dell's purchasing power to lower Alienware's cost of parts). It would be a complete waste of money if we had bought Alienware and then just decided to make them Dell's with an Alienware exterior. We learn from them, improve our XPS systems and maintain their brand by allowing them to continue producing high level products and make even more money by paying less for the parts through our suppliers. /Dell Ops Manager
Not really. We use macs at corporate level. Besides, if corporate requires me to use Windows, I just change the fucking job.
Try counting to ten. Apparently the deep breath didn't help you much.
So Apple sold 38% more computers last year in the US, compared to the industry average growth rate of 4%. You're right, that's hardware sales, but what OS do you suppose most of those people buying Macs are running on them? Sure, a few might buy the pretty hardware and install Vista on it, but I bet most of them are running... OS X, a non-Microsoft OS.
Amazing, hey?
PS: Yes, I agree, your comments have been a waste of space thus far. Kind of entertaining though.
Speak for yourself. I have an 95% Mac environment at work that I help administer. It's a computer science department at a university. I have two work computers, a dell running MidnightBSD and a intel iMac. The only windows installs are a server and one lab with parallels.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
> Anyone who says Windows is easy to install has either used pre-made image CDs, has only done upgrades, or has never actually installed it.
It's called nLite. Windows *is* easy to install....