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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."
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.
Either way, time will tell.
We've been hearing this line for almost a decade now, and time has told to a tune of nearly 6-fold gain in shareholder value since 2000, giving Apple today a larger market cap than Google, HP, and Dell. I keep waiting for this grand charade to end, but Apple keeps raking in $8 billion dollars a quarter.
They've succeeded by every rational metric of business.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
Don't forget: For a while, PPC *was* better than Intel. And for new users (i.e. anyone who hadn't grown up with using mice), 1 button was less confusing than two. But you know what? Things changed. Intel got off their ass and made great chips (while Moto/IBM sat on their ass with PPC) and the number of people who knew how to use a mouse became a majority of their market.
And windows users don't have to do any of those things either. Every piece of anti-virus software under the sun updates itself, completely without any human intervention, at some god awful time of night so as to avoid doing it while you may be using your computer. Similarly, right out of the box windows runs a scheduled weekly disk degrag at something like 3 am every wednesday or some other silly time. These things happen and I do nothing to cause them, I didn't even set them up originally -- they were just pre-configured that way and if I don't like them I can change them.
Nor do I have to reinstall windows yearly -- Vista on this machine has been installed for 18 months and everything is as snappy as the day I brought it home.
Try to understand, when you buy a mac you're not choosing between OS 10.5 and Windows 95. There's really major selling point of Mac over Windows at this point other than simple preference.
If you PREFER MacOS, by all means by a Mac -- but don't kid yourself into thinking you're getting something the rest of us aren't getting. We're all getting the OS of our choice and more or less the same feature set. Your preference costs more, but if you prefer it, and are willing to pay the money, then go for it.