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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."
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).
So you can buy 50 Dell workstations for $1100, and along comes someone buying 12 high end Mac Pros for, say $5,000 (not a price comparison, don't go biting, fanboys) and voila, according to this study they have "more share" than Dell, as a result?!?
I think not.
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.
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
"Unless you habitually trip over your power cord a barrel connector is going to last a lot longer, and it can carry more current."
I kill magsafe connectors in about a year. My current one is still going after a year and a half, which is impressive.
I used to kill barrel connectors at about six month intervals.
I don't see any reason why the magsafe connector should be less durable. They never fail in the connector anyway, but rather where the wire enters the connector. If anything, since the majority of people don't seem to follow mom's "never pull on the cord when unplugging something!" advice, the magsafe probably results in less wear since it takes less force to pull it out.
Plus it's saved my present notebook from at least half a dozen plunges to the floor. And the one before that from a few as well.