Slashdot Mirror
Apple Dominates "Premium PC" Market
itwbennett writes "Macs made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up computer market in June. Not so long ago, $1,000 got you an entry-level machine. Today the average computer sells for $701, while the average Windows machine sells for only $515. Still, Macs only make up 8.7% of PC sales. But is that really such a bad position to be in? Consider an Apples to Apples, that is, Macs to iPhones comparison: the iPhone takes only a sliver of the phone market but a much larger share of the profits."
Windows 7 "Premium" Edition - $1000
Apple dominates the premium priced market, not the premium PC market.
but Mac has no real "economy" option. Part for part, as many mac fanboys will tell you, mac hardware is around the same price as PC. The difference is that you can buy stuff that is a few months old (still very good hardware, but not the latest and greatest) and save a lot of money.
I guess you could call that the "premium pc" market.
I equate it to designer sunglasses. People will spend $300 for this years sunglasses, passing over last years (now priced at $20). I think mac appeals to this market.. people who want the absolute latest and greatest regardless of how much actual added value they are getting.
BMW has about 5-8%* of the auto market, but they make a lot of money in that little niche. You don't have to dominate the world to be profitable.
And yes, this does go to show that Microsoft is right in the laptop hunters ad -- Macs *are* pricier. But to those that buy them, they get something of value for that extra $$$.
*I just made that up.
Go somewhere random
Wow, what a clever manipulation of statistics. Somehow people who spend less than $1,000 don't have "premium" computers? How does that even work? I mean, I blow $1,500 on hardware but no software and it's "premium", but if I'm a poor graphic designer and buy a PC for $700 instead and spend the rest on Adobe's atrocious licensing fees, that makes me "not premium"? This doesn't say anything about "premium" or "not premium" -- this DOES however say a lot about how much people are willing to blow on Apple products. Answering why they're doing this is left as an excercise for the reader.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's easy to make up 91% of a segment when all your products fit in that segment and none of your competitors do. Of the 67 PCs sold on Walmart.com, only 10 are over $1,000
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
So, if I sell laptops for $10 000, I can get 100% of the Exclusive PC-marked? Woohoo!
We've done this before, it's not very interesting. It could be interesting to look at the profits they make, but the percentage of some arbitrary set point?
Bah!
M.
This trend can only last for so long. While Macs have a certain appeal to them that is aesthetic, their usability has not gone up in the enterprise, nor in the home market. They dominate the audio video editing because of their software, but beyond that... they don't (to me) offer a hell of a lot. And their architecture needs only a few targetted viruses (see Pwn2Own) competition before they lose that propoganda campaign that assumes Macs are more secure than Windows.
Either way, time will tell.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Anyone notice the "average" windows machine selling for $515 sucks? If you compare equally powerful machines, you will get _similar_ costs. I would say a mac would still be slightly more expensive, but that's just a guess.
"Apple most popular among those who like to overspend and don't know the value of the dollar."
Same guts marked up and built for aesthetics instead of being engineered to be solid. Never underestimate the "Oooh! Shiny!" demographic.
Yeah, I guess that's why Apple consistently ranks highest in customer support surveys among major PC manufacturers. Yep, not solid at all. Overpriced? Quite possibly, depending on what you're looking for, but not engineered to be solid? Get outta town.
People that are willing to spend more than a $1000 on a PC are probably your key software buyers... I would think at this point that developers who point to Windows masses might be redirected towards those Mac users, that actually have money.
This is my sig.
I don't buy branded PCs. If I need one, usually for a Linux server, I build it. If I want a desktop computer I buy Apple. The hardware is better quality than most branded PCs and is highly similar between units so it can easily be tested and relied on. It also happens to look nicer and come with an OS that works a whole lot better. We use VMWare Fusion for those who need Windows or Linux desktops.
My Dell, which has a bigger screen and faster CPU than my MacBook, is mostly used by my wife and she is wanting to switch to a MacBook because it is so much easier to use and doesn't get to hot when used on your lap. My sister recently switched from PC to MacBook too.
A couple hundred dollars of cost upfront is a lot cheaper than TCO on a PC and in almost every way a Mac is better,
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
NOT 91% of the market. 9 out of every 10 dollars spent on computers over $1000 are spent on Apple computers. Plus, is this really big news? In the first paragraph of the article it says that this is up from 88% in May.
These numbers only reference brick and mortar retail sales. 3 out of the last 4 machines I bought were purchased from the manufacturer's website, customized to my specs, and only one of those was under $1000. They wouldn't have been included in these sorts of 'selective statistics'
As for $1000+ machines, it doesn't cover servers/workstations either (which you wouldn't buy over the counter anyway).
What this says to me:
1) Apple has a decent retail store presence :)
2) Macs are frakkin' expensive
3) By selectively applying filters to your stats, you can say whatever you want. Ladies, I have the biggest dick you'll ever see (in this room/of all males within a five foot radius/for the next five minutes).
I'd be interested to know how many of those macs sold primarily run vista/win7. It many be unique to seattle/redmond, but I've noticed a fair number of designers and devs sporting the hardware but not the software.
People that are willing to put $1,000 into their PC probably don't want the limited choices offered by OEMs. They are going to build it from parts.
Both at work and at home. I don't have to reinstall my OS at least once a year, run defrag on a monthly basis, worry about anti-virus updates every week, or spend hours trying to find and compile drivers for some piece of hardware as I always seem to with Linux even today. It just works. That's what I want, and I'll pay the price difference upfront. I got a good 4 years out of my old PowerBook. It needs a new power adaptor (fell on a ceramic tile floor and busted). but should still work and my QuadCore PowerMac G5 is still going strong and it's 4.5 years old. Most I've done to it is add an extra 500GB internal to store video files for video editing. (before external drives came down in price).
I now have a MacBook Pro provided by work. Does everything I want and can even boot into XP if I need too for testing (or to play an occasional old game from my PC collection).
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Is it possible to use the license of an old XP-Home machine to run XP run under VM on a linux box?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm glad they put Premium PC in quotes because that's exactly what it is.
This article only proves that Apple's are expensive. That's it.
I could have written a article stating "Lamborghini made up a whopping 91 percent of the $200,000-and-up automobile market in June". Duh, because how many cars are over $200,000? But who'd you rather be, Lamborghini or Toyota? In 2007 Lamborghini sold 2,406 cars and made a ~70 million dollar profit. Toyota sold 2.6 million vehicles and made 14.9 billion dollars in profit.
Thanks Apple but you can keep your Lamborghini, I'll stick with my PC and my Toyota.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
...on waiting on ports of games and apps. That is priceless.
That's not particularly surprising considering Macs are (or at least were) about twice as expensive as their comparable PC counterparts. You can already get a damn good laptop (or desktop) PC for less than a grand, but a Mac? Forget it. Just goes to show that they are overpriced.
Macs made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up computer market in June... Still, Macs only make up 8.7% of PC sales. This type of statistics has Apple's signature all over it. I'm not aware of $1000 being any official threshold where "commodity" ends and "premium" begins. Still, we can make the following conclusions:
1. Only 1 in 10 people believe they need a "premium" PC, and buy such.
2. Only 1 in 10 of those who believe they need a premium PC, go to non-Apple products.
3. From personal observations, only 1 in 10 people truly need a Mac, the rest are led to the purchase by Apple's PR machine (including Apple fans who just need to convert everyone around them).
So in short, 90% of the customers of Apple are suckers, and the comprise about 73% of suckers in the world who bought a computer. That is indeed amazing news for Apple's shareholders, but also very poor news for Apple's customers. Enjoy.
These numbers only reference brick and mortar retail sales. 3 out of the last 4 machines I've purchased were purchased from the manufacturer's website, and customized to my specs by upgrading components - with only one being under $1000 - but they wouldn't be incorporated in these sorts of specs. This also rules out servers/workstations. By selectively filtering statistics, you can put a positive spin on a statement like 'Macs make up only 8.7% of PC sales' (which is a number that probably has some filters of its own applied, for instance, being personal computers sales ONLY and not business/server/etc).
In related news:
-Solid-state hard drives are common (in netbooks).
-Motorcycles dominate the market of two-wheel vehicle sales with 99.999% marketshare, while Segway sales lag far behind at .001%.
-Barack Obama represents 100% of current U.S. Presidents.
-Ladies, I have the biggest dick you'll ever see (of all males in a ten foot radius/in the next five minutes).
if you check the specs of iMac's, you'll see that the internals are laptop parts. they use so-dimm RAM and have laptop graphics adapters. Dell sells the Studio Hybrid desktop which is about the same price but a lot less included software. If you compare the performance of iMacs compared to the same price PC then the PC will leave the iMac in the dust. Anandtech even had a nice article on Mac Pro graphics in the last few months and it seems Apple engineered the iMacs just powerful enough to handle the expected load.
if you want performance you get a PC. if you want a pretty computer to save desk space and electricity you get a Mac. But Mac's are far from premium.
The Macs I've owned over the past few years (starting with a Powerbook for my wife) have been excellent. The hardware and construction are top-notch. The design (worth a little bit, anyway) is superior to pretty much everything produced in the Wintel arena.
Most important, though, the OS kicks ass.
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable. Combine the excellent hardware engineering, and the superior UI design of OS X, and you have a machine that is worth the extra money. (Which really isn't extra. As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.)
Me, I still gravitate to Linux. When my wife ran MS-Windows, though, I had to either lock her machine down and manage it myself, or let her manage it, but re-install the OS every six months. With OS X, she can manage the machine herself, and I don't have to lock it down or re-install all the time.
My sig still holds. MS-Windows (and the machines it typically runs on) is like Budweiser. Cheap, but not worth the price. Once you get used to the good stuff, it's hard to go back to the shit peddled as "The King of Computers."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
As usual, this is a US-only thing.
In Europe, 1,000 EUR (1,422 USD) and more computers are commonplace, and Apple is not any more expensive than the other computer manufacturers (on the contrary, for laptops, they probably offer the best deals at the moment).
Yes, we are being exploited.
No, I won't compare Apple's market share to Mercedes' . But just think in absolute terms : even if Macs cost double more than an average PC, the difference is only a few hundredths of dollars, which is the extra price you pay to have a "luxury" item. Now think of cars : how many people spend thousands of dollars (or your favourite currency) to have a flashier car ?
I spend much more time in front of my computer than driving my car. Hence, I am ready to spend a little more to have a luxury computer...
Yeah, I guess that's why Apple consistently ranks highest in customer support surveys among major PC manufacturers. Yep, not solid at all. Overpriced? Quite possibly, depending on what you're looking for, but not engineered to be solid? Get outta town.
(emphasis added)
Which just means that all the other PC manufacturers make apparently worse hardware, not that Apple's is good. And by apparently, I mean apparently... Apple stuff feels and looks really solid, especially compared to say, Dell, hence people give it good reviews. Also, people willing to spend the extra premium for an Apple product also tend to buy the latest version even if their current one is only a year or two old (not always true, but definitely a tendency), unlike say cheap Dells, which people generally keep for at least 5 years, and hence tend to notice if they actually wear out.
"Apple most popular among those who like to overspend and don't know the value of the dollar."
Same guts marked up and built for aesthetics instead of being engineered to be solid. Never underestimate the "Oooh! Shiny!" demographic.
I take it that MSCE isn't getting the chicks the way you thought it would?
#DeleteChrome
I've been using different GUI front ends for programming and work for over 10 years now - and Apple laptops for the last 5 years of so.
Open office is now a fully acceptable spreadsheet and word processor. Gimp is fully functional for photos. Most other services are web based. VLC, media playing, etc are all working on Linux too. Issues that used to be common are now well supported in the open-source community with networking, video acceleration, disks, USB, drivers, etc.
Apple with it's BSD-based kernel and more open culture than Microsoft, could openly embrace the open source community, however, it seems to be working actively to prevent open access to a large number of their software-hardware combinations, and refuses to embrace and support the console-using, computer-hacking crowd (like me). It is understandable from a short-term financial standpoint, but long term, I think this is a mistake for Apple. I think taking the position at the genius bar of "if you open Terminal, we won't help you" alienates the most dedicated and supportive users in the marketplace. It is that community that could rocket Apple forward with more contributions and functionality - but now they continue to be pushed to support Linux instead.
It is disappointing to me that we live in a world where large companies like Apple still grow primarily based on marketing, selling and distributing physical things over digital products, or from monetizing the support and services (and maintaining a community) around increased productivity.
The difference in price between all these products is small compared to the value of ones times spent dealing with issue that arise. Regardless of how one values their own time - after any major screw ups taking many, many hours to fix - you have already surpassed any difference in price between the systems. Reliability, functionality, and real security (and how much time you have to spend later to get those) are the real value of owning a laptop for several years, not just the initial price.
But all in all, lack of Apple support for hacking means I'll be looking seriously at a Linux-based laptop (at 1/2 the price and more open standards) for my next laptop.
Say you're about to write a virus or worm, which OS do you use? Windows has an extensive installed base, offering a richly interconnected malware network, with more nodes.
Malware doesn't follow the economic rules that normal software does, and the usual market forces that normally make people write software for Macs aren't present. The only marketplace decision is made by you as you write it- not like normal software which has to appeal to actual users. Your customer base is some gang in Suffixistan. Competition is virtually nonexistent in malware. Nobody thinks "my machine is already infected, so I'm all set for viruses". Provided other malware on the machine doesn't target your code or starve it for machine resources, you don't really care. Competing operating systems aren't as compelling. Normal software authors have an untapped market for Mac software to consider, with wealthy fanboys itching to spend money, but that untapped market aspect makes little difference for malware. Even if you want to augment your existing network with Mac nodes, porting the worm offers less than a 2X increase in network size. And the exploit code will be different; plus fewer people are looking into Mac exploits. As long as Windows has more than a 51% market share, it will be the dominant OS for malware.
when surely the bigger question here is who was dumb enough to believe that fucking stupid and clearly made up statistic in the first place? I will eat my PCs if anyone can prove that Apple get anywhere even close to 91% of all PC sales over $1000. Remember folks, approximately 87.93% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Nick
But there's an app for that!
I am a PC. :)
Factor in online sales and I think this percentage would be significantly less.
I've seen this comparison a number already here.
Here comes a car analogy.
For me, a premium car has nice interior materials and a good balance of comfort, performance, build quality and a few intangibles.
If I just want pure perfomance, I could get a Mustang or a Civic and slam it out for much less than say, an M3 or an IS.ï
My gaming computer is the equivalent of that Mustang or Civic. I use it run games with everything turned up to 11 but for everyday computing, I vastly prefer my Mac.
I am an IT director for a small private school (public districts send us kids). We have adequate resources at our disposal, but I wouldn't call us a "rich" school.
We have finally replaced every Dell desktop with a Mac as of this year. We are still solidly Windows in the server room, but every other machine in our two locations is a Mac.
Yes, they were a bit more expensive than what we could have bought from Dell or HP, but the usefulness of Mac OS on robustly built hardware is worth the expense.
Out of 100 or so iMacs and 200 or so MacBooks, we've had about 15 keyboard failures (the keys were popped/ripped off), 2 cracked laptop screens, and 2 hard drive failures - this has been over 3 years.
Students are extremely hard on the machines, yet they keep right on working. Contrast this to the Dells we used to have. Keyboards and mice were constantly being replaced, USB ports and power switches routinely failed, many LCD screens were thrown away due to panel or backlight failure....etc.
Now here's the clincher - only two Macs in three years had to be re-imaged due to "software" issues. Our windows machines were being regularly reimaged due to numerous software problems.
Our switch to Macs has been a resounding success. I can't imagine that we are the only company in the world to realize the benefits of the Mac platform.
-ted
Yeah, I guess that's why Apple consistently ranks highest in customer support surveys among major PC manufacturers
Most Apple users don't get in touch with support if something goes wrong; they just go out and buy a new Mac/iPod/iPhone.
>> backlit keyboards that have a sensor
They have two sensors, one on each side of the keyboard. This trips up PC manufacturers trying to rip off this feature. PC manufacturers are a bunch of cheap bastards, so they put in only one sensor. This means that if that sensor gets obstructed with anything (the LCD among other things), the screen and the keyboard immediately go to max brightness.
I use Linux, troll. So predictable with the Microsoft retorts when they don't even apply.
you can get a mac pro level system for $1000 and apple wants $1500 more for one with a low video card and only 3gb of ram. For $2,499.00 you can get a pc with SLI with 2 or more high end video cards and 6gb or more ram.
For about $1000 you can get a core i7 with 6gb ram and much better video then gt120.
The imacs are not much better $1,199.00 $1,499.00 with only on board video when older imacs at the same price point had real video cards.
The mini is a joke should be $500 with 2gb+ ram and not $599.00 with only 1gb and slow cpu. Get rid of the $800 mini way to over priced for it's hardware.
Laptops need to have a $1100 - $1600 system with a real video card and $1,699.00 just to get a 15" screen with on board video is too high try $1000 or less with 15" and on board video. Same thing with 17" $2,499.00 can get 17" pc laptops with mate displays and better video cards for about $600 - $900 less with blue ray.
;-)
While I'm typing this up on a MacBook Pro, I can't help but wonder if this price spent on high-end PCs also endorses self-built PCs. People who spend a lot of money on Windows machines often prefer to buy a basic package and then buy the high-end cards, RAM, and other plug-in parts to outfit it from there. I'd seriously be surprised to find out that any high percentage of expensive PCs currently owned by people is on Mac OS.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
91% of the $1,000+ computer market? I don't buy it. Not for one damn second, and here's why.
Most people who want a high-end PC (not a mac) are hobbyists. As a hobbyist, I know that I like to assemble my computer myself in order to save money, have fun and gain experience. So when I invested about $1,500 into my last machine, I didn't go out and buy it all at once. I bought all of the parts separately on Newegg and assembled them when they arrived. So even though I spent $1,500, the most expensive individual item I bought only cost $400.
These statistics are highly skewed, I'm sure. All this tells us for sure is that macs are dominating the niche market of people who aren't computer savvy, don't want to assemble their own computer, but are still willing to pay $1,000+ for a "premium" machine. Which, when you think about it, shouldn't be surprising at all.
This article is total FUD. I'm sure Apple loves it though, this sort of rhetoric drives up the stock price.
Perhaps you ought to *use* a Mac before slating it...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Duh! Macs ARE Pc's, just pc that are limited to apple approved ($$$) upgrades and software. Damn, mac use some of the cheapest Taiwanese motherboards out there (Foxconn). I think you are mainly paying for the chassis. Plus they have some behind the scenes deal with intel to give them to 1st and cheapest xeons.
Again, you are missing the point. The criteria of this "study" was NOT the feature set. The "premium" tag was about the price, not features.
GP might understand your argument better if you used a Monster cable analogy.
ie "Monster gold cables made up a whopping 91 percent of the $1,000-and-up cable market in June"
It's just not.
PC hardware is cheaper. PC software is cheaper. PC software 'just works' despite people claiming it does not.
Windows is very stables these days, despite claims to the contrary. There is far more software available for it than any other hardware, and it will run on any hardware of my choosing(within range of course). When I use a PC, I know that I will have access to all the applications, have the freedoms to choose between operating systems and hardware, and that if I want to, I can make it look just as pretty as a Mac. Let's not mention Apple's atrocious security record....
The excuse that Apples just work is just crap. Stability is not the issue it once was, and those people have watched one too many "I'm a Mac" ads.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Exactly. It's brilliant isn't it? Only the RDF could twist Macs being expensive into being a good point!
I mean seriously - $1000 for a whole PC? It's 2009 for god's sake.
(We see the same thing with the Iphone. Nevermind that the Iphone is a niche player, it's a common tactic to redefine the market to only look at really expensive phones, and then brag that the Iphone has better market share in that minority niche...)
Parent clearly states MacBooks and iMacs. The closest he comes to saying "pro" is when he says "pro"blem and "benefit."
Both at work and at home. I don't have to reinstall my OS at least once a year, run defrag on a monthly basis, worry about anti-virus updates every week, or spend hours trying to find and compile drivers for some piece of hardware as I always seem to with Linux even today. It just works. That's what I want, and I'll don't even have to pay extra as PCs are so cheap these days. I got a good 4 years out of my old PC. It needs a new power adaptor (fell on a ceramic tile floor and busted). but should still work and my QuadCore PC is still going strong and it's 4.5 years old. Most I've done to it is add an extra 500GB internal to store video files for video editing. (before external drives came down in price).
I now have a Windows laptop provided by work. Does everything I want and can even boot into XP if I need too for testing (or to play an occasional old game from my PC collection).
[Okay, my history of PCs I've owned is slightly different is different, but the experience on Windows is the same: it's been years since Windows has said my drives need defragging, I've never had a virus, everything just works (the only exception being Apple software like Itunes and Quicktime), I haven't ever had to reinstall Windows, and I've had multiple machines running for years (possibly you are getting confused with Windows 9x, which was an entirely different OS line? I might as well point out flaws in the joke of an OS that was classic MacOS...)]
[I also love how Mac users bitch about Windows - and then brag about being able to run Windows as an advantage! Which is it? That fact is that Mac hardware today is now using PC hardware, so if you're also running Windows, there's no difference.]
I recommend you take a step back and look up the "facts" you've presented here.
Why? Because they are wrong, plain and simple.
The interior of my old titanium powerbook is one of the cleanest bits of engineering I've seen in a laptop. The equivalently-priced xps I use at work is, by comparison, a hack job in cheap plastic.
Doesn't mean the PC doesn't have better specs, though.
What about in 3 years? My MacBookPro will sell for almost $1000...how much will the "comparable but loads cheaper" PC be worth in 3 years?
There isn't so much reason to spend over $1000 these days. Even if gaming is your thing $1000 gets you a Core 2, 4GB RAM, a 4870, a big disk and so on. That is enough not only to run any game on the market, but to run it well. So even if your usage is fairly "premium" $1000 may be all you end up spending. If you are more of the web surfing/e-mail type, a much lesser computer probably does just fine.
So it surprises me not at all that there aren't so many sales of $1000+ PCs. At work we buy plenty of PCs around or below the $1000 mark because they are plenty for what is needed. That isn't to say we don't get more expensive systems, but they are not the majority.
Macs, you don't get so much choice. They've got a somewhat reasonably priced low end PC in the Mini and that is it for under a grand. The iMacs are all above $1000 and their towers will generally start at $3000 and up (you can get them cheaper, but only be leaving out the kinds of things that you'd want if you are getting a system like that).
You are also completely correct in terms of B&M being a manipulation of the data. There are a LOT of computers sold on the web these days, and that is where most higher end PCs are bought. At work we have on occasion bought a lower end PC B&M for whatever reason. We have NEVER bought a high end PC B&M, those are always ordered on the web, customized to the particular need. Same for workstations, same for severs, and so on.
If you limit it to B&M, you are excluding a massive part of the market period, but a massive part of the high end market. The sorority girl that wants a desktop to do class work doesn't really care about the specs and will just go to Best Buy and pick something up, probably something cheap. The engineering researcher (the people I support) that wants 5 workstations to run HFSS simulations is going to have each and every one built to order. When you are spending that kind of money and doing hard work on them, you better believe you spend to get precisely what you want, not just whatever is in stock.
Whatever you may think of their pricing models and market shares, it remains that Microsoft's net profit margin is 25% whereas Apple's is a mere 16%. (WolframAlpha)
Microsoft 1, Apple 0.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
There was a time when even the highest end PCs were slow. You could have the latest and greatest and it STILL sucked at many tasks. I remember my family got a 486. It wasn't the highest end 486, but it was up there. Most people were on a 386 those days, some less. Even then, the thing sucked. For simple things it was slow. If I went to print out a 5 page paper for school, that was often a trip to the kitchen to get a snack. It took so long for it to process the formatting and send it to the printer, which in itself was a slow unit with no internal memory. Now the print job is submitted to the printer before I can leave my desk.
Only got worse if you did higher end stuff. I was in to audio processing even back then and it was PAINFUL. The professionals used extremely expensive setups with dedicated processor cards for mixing and effects, and expensive disk arrays. We are talking $50,000 minimum for a rig. For us consumers it was a painful, all disk based system. You'd load your project and then go to a channel, pick an effect, apply it, wait 5 minutes as it processed, wait longer as it built the multi-track mix, then see if you liked it. If not, undo and try again. Now I mix everything in realtime. Sample playback (in the gigabytes per instrument), multiple audio tracks, lots of effects, all done on the fly. When I tell the system to bounce it down it happens much faster than realtime. I can bounce a 5 minute track in 20 seconds.
Now the point of all this? Back in the day, you ALWAYS wanted a faster computer, even if you had a fast one. The best wasn't good enough, you'd wait on the damn thing. Even doing fairly low intensity tasks required you to wait. This is no longer the case. Now, all normal tasks and even a great many higher end ones are extremely fast. The computer waits on you, not the other way around.
Thus you find the need to upgrade isn't so great. Ya, requirements grow and eventually the computer is too slow, but it happens at a reasonable pace. You are happy with what you have at least when it comes out. It isn't the case that you want something faster, even when what you have is the latest.
I think of it as an American market thing, with one parent company owning many brand names. A Honda is a Honda, and all the Honda's are good.
---
I like the Dell Adamo vs MacBook Air argument, the Adamo is a piece of shit in every way, its more expensive, slower, and hideously ugly. I dont even know if its on sale in New Zealand, like the Zune isnt.
Why must non-Apple tech be utter shit in terms of design and quality?
---
I'm sure the 93 Escort Wagon is all you need.
I'm sure the 93 Escort Wagon is all you need.
Hey, it's still running! Mostly to and from the train station, but still...
#DeleteChrome
I have a feeling that this is the "home" market, not the business market. The US government alone probably buys half the premium PCs produced, and they don't buy Macs. (yes, I'm sure there are a few sitting around, but you know what I mean)
Am I the only one seriously doubting this claim? 91% of the >1k market yet 8,7% of the total market means less than 9,56% of the total PC market is >1k machines, and less than 0,86% of the PC market are sub-1k non-Apple computers? Is this realistic? More than 99% of non-Apple PCs are less than 1k? I don't have any numbers to refute this; it just seems completely unreasonable that such a large majority of PC sales would be so cheap. Looking at two prominent Finnish web stores, 50-70% of the laptops for sale are over 800 euros and the same seems to hold true for desktops. Obviously machines for sale != machines sold, but >1k$ non-Apple PCs just cannot be this rare?
Split the computer/R&D and entertainment/communications businesses into separate units
A ThinkPad is a really nice laptop. When I was contemplating the jump to the Mac (which is what I ultimately did), I knew that if I got a PC laptop, it'd be a ThinkPad, because they're worth the extra money. Like Apple, Lenovo does things right. I've never heard a complaint about ThinkPads.
You're comparing premium to premium.
I picked up a Macbook 2ghz core2duo nearly 3 years ago now, my brother thought I was insane and bought a tricked out Dell for about 1/3rd less, he now has a Toshiba and is thinking about selling it and getting another...in the meantime im still using the Macbook without a bit of trouble in fact the only time I have had to do anything to it was when I upgraded the harddrive and added memory about 6 months ago. My total cost of ownership including the 320 drive and 4gigs of ram is around $1600, so far his is around $2000 and will go to nearly $3200 if he get the laptop he supposedly needs now.
So, if I customize same hardware for Dell laptop or Lenovo laptop or Sony Vaio, I always get from 50 to 150 USD more expensive than Apple one. Including Apple Care and equivalent support, of course...
Now this is called "too expensive"? WTF?.. I find equivalent Lenovo laptop more expensive and, frankly, more ugly, although I like them. Just compare tablet Lenovo laptop hardware specs and a regular MacBook. You will find that MacBook is expensive about 100-150 USD (depends on config), but tablet has that shitty hardware with a very slow CPU, little HDD and a small slow memory!
Sure, if you ask for a machine with a slowest bus, cheapest motherboard, crappy AMD processor, 600MHz speed RAM, overall cheap hardware and shitty plastic case, NoName vendor... yeah, sure you can get it for $500 USD. But I saw these machines dead after one year pretty much. Even HP that makes those cheap laptops, owners often visiting HP repair shops to resurrect from the dead their half-a-year machine.
Keyboard: I am a programmer. Only two vendors can withstand my abuse: Lenovo and Apple. Dell fanboys, please don't waste your time to reply here: I used Dell stuff, used HP stuff, NEC things, Sony Vaio, also had some Samsung shit and had other company's crap that just sucks money and needs to be replaced soon. As I said, the only machines that really works for me without failure: Apple and Lenovo. Recently I own Apple stuff, because I don't have much budget to buy Dell XPS or Lenovo stuff as well as I need to run OSX (and Linux, and OpenSolaris, and Windows etc). I'd say, battery could be much better in Apple thing and glossy screen still a bad idea (I don't really need such colors), but overall it works to me well.
+1.
As English people says: "We are not so rich to buy cheap stuff". I have exactly the same experience: you get a Mac that is even cheaper than equivalent XPS and it just works and works and works. My PowerBook G4 still up and running and I am using it for 4 years daily! No problems to make a website in Ruby On Rails or some Python with it.
P.S. Yes, I can run GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Dia, Pidgin and Inkscape too. But I can also run iWork, iLife and things that really good (OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, Aperture etc
And windows users don't have to do any of those things either. Every piece of anti-virus software under the sun updates itself
What is this "anti-virus software" that you speak of?
Does this include people who build their own computers? I have a feeling it doesnt, cutting out a lot of the gamer market who will often spend money at or over $1000.
Windows 7 Pro will run you an ice cold $300, and Ultimate, the real "I am rich" edition, cranks the cost up to 11 at a please-just-kill-me-but-leave-my-wallet price of $320. That's well over half the cost of an average computer, or about the cost of a low-end netbook...for a consumer-grade OS. It's mind-boggling.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That's complete crap. Mac's aren't for everyone, but I can tell you that every single person that I've convinced to buy one since I made the switch in 2006 raves about them. I'm typing this on the first Mac I purchased, a $400 Mac mini with a G4 processor and 512 MB of RAM. I don't have any anti-virus or anti-spyware software installed and I've never had a single virus or a single piece of malware or spyware. I've never had a single piece of hardware fail, I've never had to reinstall the OS or any program on this system and I've only ever had to do a hard reboot twice in the entire time I've owned it. With the exception of a hardware failure I can not say any of the above about my shiny new Dell PC at work that I got in January of this year.
I've convinced 6 friends and family members to switch to Mac's over the years. I've received a total of 3 calls to help them with things since they got off the ground with a good understanding of how to use the Mac. In the last two weeks I've had to help 3 of my Windows using friends with things (one was hardware related and the other two were malware infections and they both did have name brand anti-virus / anti-malware software installed).
I can't rave about Mac's enough. The extra few hundred dollars you'll spend on a Mac is completely and totally worth it if you value your time at all. I used to be one of the biggest Apple hating flame throwers around. My buddy in high school had one and it was POS. Not anymore. It's worth every penny plus some. Get yourself a 6 month old Mac mini and try it for a while. You'll be happily shelling out over a $1,000 to get a better model within 6 months and 5 years down the road you'll still be using both.
Apple's are for people that are too busy getting actual work done to want to waste time updating AV software, reinstalling the OS, defragging their hard drive, re-installing screwed up software, removing malware, and installing hundred of OS updates.
And thanks to brilliant open source software like NeoOffice (an Aqua port of Open Office) that exists for the Mac, outside of the OS and the apps that came with it, I haven't spent a single additional penny on software. I spend all day at work fixing fubar'ed Windows PC's. The last thing I want to do when I come home is do the same thing.
And should I come up against some situation on the Mac that's too much for me to handle I can make an appoint at the Genuis Bar at the nearest Apple store and get help with it for free from a real live American citizen making a decent wage and not some dude pretending to be named "Phil" who I can barely understand located in a call center in India making $2 bucks a day. Again, worth every penny plus some.
Just check which Windows Vista versions can be officially installed inside a Virtual Machine.
If there is one thing that has been true throughout all of computing it's that computer scientists always, always, always overestimate the nerdiness of the average user.
The "configurability" that Microsoft attempts to provide for their users is seen by the users as "assembly", as in "IKEA". If I buy a system and then the first thing it does is ask me to pay more to turn on other software features, and then I have to buy a bunch of anti-virus and security software, and then I have to buy and install and configure even more software in order to do even basic things, that is not a luxury feeling. When the DVD burner stops working after the first OS patch, that is not a luxury feeling. Crashes and other misbehaviors are not luxury.
I could easily list 10 features that are worth the price difference between a PC and a Mac all on their own. Any one of these features is worth the extra few hundred on top of your HP/Dell to get a Mac. These are luxury PC features that prompt people to pay $1000+:
- Unibody (one-piece aluminum body)
- Time Machine (completely automatic backup, restore, and versioning if the user just plugs in an external disk of any kind)
- Quartz (OpenGL PDF compositing graphics layer on every system since 2001)
- Unix (multitasking, networking, Apache2, PHP5, HTML 5, much more)
- gorgeous typography (with letterforms shown as they were designed instead of shown on a simplified grid to make them easier to render with legacy technology)
- ColorSync (accurate RGB color spaces system wide so you see the same colors on your Mac as you saw in your camera)
- iLife (digital media creation suite)
- 8 hour batteries (so easy)
- UTF-8 system wide (no legacy text encodings to deal with as you work)
- service (Apple Store and Apple Genius and Apple Care)
These are all things that simply aren't available on any Windows PC you can buy today, or will be able to buy for the foreseeable future. How are you going to sell me a $1500 Windows PC and the thing can't even back itself up? It doesn't even have Apache in there. It wants to store all my text as Windows-1252. It's not really even compatible with the Web. And it has a huge I-T burden attached to it, which Bill Gates sees as a feature but which users do not.
So now the price of a Windows PC is about $600 and for that you get a nightmare in plastic. It's pretty obvious that Apple is going to expand the iPod line upwards in size and features and fill up the whole spectrum from $79 to $999 with iPods. The "netbook" is basically a hardware Web browser, and the same philosophy is seen ing Chrome OS. But if you expand MobileSafari to work on a full-size screen, then you have something that really is worthy of the title of hardware Web browser. Flick to scroll, pinch zoom, advanced typography, HTML 5, 3D accelerated animations, and a UI that has the equivalent of big padded bumpers everywhere so anyone can use it.
I've been using an iPhone for many tasks over the past couple of years that before that would have required a PC or Mac. The only limiting factor has been the size of the display. With a bigger display you have something that consumers are going to lose their minds over. Especially when you consider the very low quality of keyboard and trackpad and display on a $600 PC ... a big iPod will feel like a dream by comparison.
In short, luxury iPods up to $1000, and luxury Macs above that. On the PC side: kits for $600 or $700. Yuck.
Actually, we were running a mix of Dell Optiplex machines - their "business class" machine and we replaced all of them with iMacs.
The Dell business class machines held up OK, but the iMacs have been better.
We did not run any Dell laptops for student use. We went straight to Macbooks when we decided on laptops for student use. This decision was based on the success we had with the iMacs.
-ted
Having recently perused the latest App Store offerings, I must say I find no evidence to back this claim.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods