Slashdot Mirror
Most Mac Owners Also Own a Windows PC, But Not Vice Versa
Barence writes "More than eight out of ten Mac owners also own a PC, according to a new piece of research. The NPD survey found that 12% of US computer-owning households have a Mac. However, 85% of those also own a Windows PC, suggesting that the Mac/PC divide is nowhere near as clear cut as both Apple and Microsoft suggest. Mac owners are also far more likely to have multiple computers in the house. Two thirds of Mac owners have three or more computers in the home, while only 29% of PC owners have two or more PCs."
Just sayin'
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
How many Linux households have a token Windows box? There are good reasons to keep a Winders box around for the occasional piece of Windows only software (I use mine for video editing) but there isn't as much compelling Mac software. And you might buy a PC that already has Windows on it and it's a pretty popular gaming platform. So there are several paths to a token PC.
In video editing, the Mac app would probably be FCP. But a full price copy of FCP is over $1,000, plus you have pay through the wazzoo for the hardware. There are several Windows NLE's that rival FCP in features and undercut it in price. And, if you have a PC for any of the other reasons outlined above, that makes the Apple investment that much less attractive.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I wonder if my setup is typical as a long time Mac user? Primary machine is a Macbook Pro that I only boot into Windows whenever I want to play games. An old PPC G5 that still soldiers on connected to the TV in the bedroom, and then a couple of super cheap Hackintoshs for family use: a Dell Mini 9 and dual bootPC desktop, and then a bunch of old Mac laptops and desktops that have been given out to family members.
Going forward, it looks like that will be the template. One "real" Macintosh, a Macbook, for primary use and Hackintoshs and hand me down Macs for the rest of the family.
None. It's just by controlling the hardware to a limited set of hardware, they can control the errors that they will have and build their SDK for a specific set of instructions. Windows on the other hand has to support a million different varieties of hardware setups with software and as a result can have stability issues across different setups. Windows could have the same stability of Mac if they built their own boxes too and geared the OS toward that specific hardware configuration.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
If we assume that 15% of people have a mac and the other 85% have a windows (I know, a terribly insulting assumption on Slashdot!), and that everyone's computer choice is independent of the other computers in their household, then statistically a 2 computer household with 1 mac will have an 85% chance of having at least one windows computer. A 3 computer household - almost 98%. Likewise, a 2 computer household with 1 windows computer is only 15% likely to have at least one mac.
The one thing all this does not explain is why mac households have more computers than windows households. Maybe younger, more techy people own macs (college students and 20 something geeks) than windows (grandmothers).
The more money you have to spend on a mac the more money you have to buy multiple computers? ~____~ Connection seemed obvious to me.
Or simply after getting a PC people are more likely to attempt a mac? Or mac users decide to try a windows box. I guess boot camp will be cutting into the mac->windows purchases as of late mind you. Since you can try the windows experience without a new computer.
Btw, Computer savvy people may use macs... But techies use windows or linux often both. Why would we spend extra money to have a closed source semi broken non configurable standard hating version of linux? Mostly windows/nix are more tweakable and have more tools/toys for us to use which makes them our targets. And mods, feel free to just read the first part of my post if you are a fanboi.
I think you hit on something there. According to sources laid out here The upper middle class (high 5 figure to well over $100,000 range) is about 15% of the population. Since Apple has about a 12% market share it could be extrapolated (hypothetically since we would need more empirical data to corroborate) that a good portion of that 12% are, in fact, upper middle class and thus are more likely to have the funds to spend on multiple computing devices. With the middle, lower middle, and working class making up the bulk of America it does indeed seem to support your suggestion that Apple lower it's prices to garner a larger piece of the demographic pie, as it were.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I can't say that this is surprising at all. Most Windows people who bash Mac, do so out of ignorance. Most Mac people who bash Windows, do so out of direct personal experience with both. If I was surveyed, sure, I have a PC in the house. 3 or 4, probably. Haven't been on in years, but, by Crom, if I ever need a PII-450 running Windows 98, well, it probably still works. Also, as pointed out, any Intel Mac can run Windows, or Windows apps with Fusion or virtualbox or whatever, so the lines get fuzzy. I haven't used a Windows instance of my own (work laptop doesn't count, I think?) since the Windows 98 I bought back in the day. I love having a Unix box at home, that I don't have to fix. Got enough of 'em at work that I _do_ have to fix.
Well at least you can still "do things" on a ten-year-old PC (with Win98, or upgraded to XP), whereas a ten-year-old Mac is completely unsupported. You can't even find any third party software.
Even a 5-year-old Mac is difficult to keep up-to-date, since Apple is so quickl to obsolete old hardware and thereby force its users to go buy new equipment.
Uh oh... here come the Apple fans with pitchforks.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Is that the only reason? I'd be staggered if the only reason PC owners don't buy Mac is because they can't afford them. How cheap do Macs need to be?
If that's true then most PCs must be of the "low end" type, Celeron rather than Core 2 Duo - right? Is that true?
I believe TFA's point, which the headline fucked over, is that most primary Mac owners also own a secondary Windows machine but most primary Windows users don't own *any* kind of secondary computer, even a Windows one.
In fact, if one were a bit fanboyish about it one could say that it's proof Windows is a more complete OS than OSX, as the owners of the latter still need a Windows machine by their side, whereas Windows users have their needs satisfied by it alone. Though of course that's ignoring the myriad of other factors affecting it, such as household income as noted by TFA, but it should serve to illustrate why is it Slashdot-worthy news.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
What I took from it was the people with one single PC find that one single PC can do everything they need it to do so they do not have to buy another computer. I wonder why people with a Mac typically have more than one computer and why is that computer likely a PC? They obviously need or desire the PC functionality for some reason. Don't mod down because you disagree, post a reply instead.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Mac Pro with two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors and 6GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Warcraft will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2x 2.26Ghz 8-core machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Isn't it great, a fee that allows you to not buy what you didn't want to buy in the first place. But as far as the specs go: Compare a Mac Pro with the Dell T7400 (both the same exact hardware) and you will see that the Dell comes out somewhere between $1000 to $2000 more expensive. Even the Mac Mini is low priced for what you get. Of course you can do it cheaper when you do it yourself but that doesn't include any support or warranty nor your time that you spent assembling and sending back and forth parts.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Not to mention, this is similar to saying, "Most households with a sports car also have a vehicle that is not a sports car but not vice versa." Over time, car aficionados tend to buy nicer cars, such as sports cars, but they don't necessarily get rid of the SUV because of it.
Windows PCs are practically ubiquitous. My wife an I have switched to Macs and have several of them but I've been in the computer industry for over 25 years so of course I still own some old Windows-based systems. I just rarely use them. They sit in storage to be pulled out and installed with Linux if a need should arise. In fact, I suspect far more Linux users own a Windows PC than vice versa, too.
A few people I know have Mac laptops even though they primarily use Windows PCs. I even know a couple of dudes who bought Macbooks and then installed Windows on them, for the shiny case I suppose. Even my friend who is Apple Or Die (tm) and buys everything that ever comes with an Apple logo has a Windows box running. I've been looking at getting a cheap Mac (relatively cheap; we're still talking Apple here) for iPhone development on a supported platform versus a VM or Hackintosh, but I sure as hell wouldn't use a Mac as my primary computer for the same reason.
For a lot of us to do what we use our computers to do, running anything other than Windows is a matter of convenience or personal preference, but running Windows is a requirement. At the same time there are certainly plenty of people who can get by just using a Mac, but most of them could get by on an eMachine just fine and so have no reason other than personal aesthetics to drop the extra coin.
Personally I own PCs as well because I already had them before I switched to Mac. When they die or become too slow to be useful, they will not be replaced. Honestly I haven't booted my "main" PC in about 3 months, and that was just to grab some files. So, I "own" PCs, but I don't "use" them anymore. My ancient Sun E4500 sees more use than any of my PCs these days, and at this point that thing is just a power-hungry toy.
Frag 'em all...
The same? No. There is a markup.
However when Apple releases a new model with a new CPU/GPU/TechonologyX the markup isn't bad at all.
The problem is, the Apple stays around that price for a long time while Dell has reduced its prices and moved onto a slightly faster CPU in the same time frame. Minor speed bump here, better GPU there, price depreciation on their older stuff, etc.
Given enough time the Apple price is then viewed as ridiculous as Apple releases their products at a snail's pace compared to other companies,
There's WAY too many assumptions in your conclusions. Just because the upper-middle class is 15% of the population and Mac ownership is 12% of computers doesn't mean that the two numbers are linked at all. Indeed my guess would be that computer ownership PERIOD (a statistic that wasn't stated) is slightly shifted towards the "upper class" side of the divide already. All in all though, all such guesses would need statistics to back them up rather than just trying to intuitively connect the dots on unrelated pieces of data.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I have a Powerbook G4, bought a year or so before the Intel Macs came out, so it's, what, 5 years old? There's nothing wrong with it at all, but it's had its last OS upgrade, because Steve won't release Snow Leopard and followon versions for PowerPC Macs. And even before that, Apple started crippling versions of the iLife products for PowerPC Macs. It really pisses me off that a computer that's otherwise fine is doomed to obsolescence years before it either became too slow to use or physically broke.
10 years, well, that's maybe pushing things as far as I'm concerned. I've got a Windows box of that vintage too (upgraded to XP at some point in its life). It's so behind the times that I just don't find it that useful anymore. I do like to wring as much use from my machines as I can, but at some point I do want to replace them.
I REALLY wanted a Mac Book Pro 17", but I couldn't justify the price tag at over $2k. I was able to purchase a fully-loaded Dell XPS 15" with a 3 year warranty for around $1,500 because Dell was running a nice $400-off special
So, without the the $400-off special, a 15" Dell cost only around $100 less than a 17" Mac? You don't think the extra 2" of screen real estate on a notebook is worth at least $100?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Our house has had Windows, Mac, and linux (ubuntu, knoppix and OLPC right now) systems for a long time now. The interesting case is my wife's machines. She has long worked for several local medical organizations (HMOs), and at work everything is Microsoft (with IBM mainframes). She has also worked part-time from home for several years now, because she gets so much more done there where the schmoozers can't reach her). So she has always had to have a Windows machine at home. She hates it, and loves her Mac(s).
But for the past year, she has no longer had a "Windows machine" at home; she just has "Windows". The reason is that she replaced her creaky old Mac Powerbook with a new iMac (with a huge screen). While talking to the folks at the Apple Store, she learned about that new "virtual" stuff, and along with the iMac, she took home disks for the software that would install a virtual XP. After it had been working for a couple of weeks, fully networked via VPN with her office network, she donated her old Windows box to me, and I reformatted it as a linux machine that's our firewall/gateway/etc.
So, while she has a Mac and a Windows machine, they're the same machine, her iMac. A couple of months ago, she decided that another laptop would be really useful, so she got a Mac Powerbook - and installed a virtual XP on it. A month ago, we were on vacation a couple thousand miles away, and she impressed the folks at work by connecting to the office network from her Mac/XP via VPN, and helped them out with some problems they were having. Actually, it didn't impress everyone, because most of the employees are Mac users at home, and several of them had already followed her lead when they got their new Macs.
There are a couple of interesting possibilities implied by this. One is that, if you like Macs but "need Windows for work", there's no need to pay for any hardware for your Windows machine. You might want to get an extra GB or two of memory, since Windows is a bit of a hog. And you'll have to learn how to get one of the Mac's several virtualization schemes to work. You will have to pay (somebody ;-) for a release of Windows. But you can run it on your Mac., and you're free of the hassle of dealing with the Microsoft-based hardware market. She has also found that the Apple Store people and online Mac forums can answer questions much better than, say, Dell Customer Support can. In a few years this might have an, uh, "interesting" effect on the PC market.
Another thing to think about is the problem of crappy security on Windows. It's hard to get a straight story on this, but there are hints that the "jail" (or "sandbox" if you prefer) that Windows runs in under OS X is significantly more secure than Windows on a bare machine. We'd like to learn more about this, because as I mentioned, my wife does computing work for medical organizations. Here in the US, people are waking up to the serious problems with the (overly slow) computerization and networkization of medical data. Some fairly stringent security requirements are being written into law for medical data. And the medical industry almost everywhere runs on MS Windows, the most insecure system on the market. It doesn't take a genius to see the problem here.
Virtualization has the potential of at least limiting the damage from the latest exploits, since Windows is run under the control of another system that has better security. We know from the history of IBM's VM system that this can be effective, assuming that the low-level system is accessible to knowledgeable developers (which isn't always true in the small-computer market). But imposing security on an insecure system that has "no user serviceable parts inside" isn't easy, so we can't really say how effective this will be.
Her management never allowed upgrading to Vista, in part because they learned about the network-update (discussed here on /. several times) that can't be disabled for some portions of the system software. They und
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Even the maligned Mac Mini is a pretty good machine for MOST sub $700 machine buyers.
Ridiculous. For less than $800, I just built a Core i5 machine with 4GB of RAM, 1.2TB of hard disk, and a Radeon HD4850 video card (which can drive 2 monitors).
With some cost cutting (less RAM, fewer hard drives, cheaper video card), I could add a bluetooth dongle and match the Mac Mini on all regards...except nothing I could do would make the Core i5 as crappy as the processor in the Mac Mini.
The only thing the Mac Mini has going for it is the form factor, but if that small size isn't important, it's worth less than nothing, since the easy upgrades on even a mini-tower case are a huge advantage.
Actually, this discussion has happened millions of times, always to show that if your comparison starts with "I'll configure a PC to be comparable with a Mac", the Mac is a great deal; whereas if you start with "I'll pick a sane PC configuration and find a Mac that is comparable" you would have to be quite eccentric not to buy a PC.
A good portion of Windows "freeware" I've found seems to be complete crap. In addition the noise to signal ratio is rather large. There are very few closed or open source Windows applications I think are great (Putty, Lanchy & FF come to mind).
In comparison there are quite a few closed source Mac Apps I use that look like they could have been made by Apple themselves. Maybe it's Apple building the 'UI Guidelines' into XCode's interface builder that makes it easy, or the fact that most Mac developers are Mac users and know how the stuff should work.
Not to mention with MacPorts/Fink or plain ole GCC I have almost every project ever uploaded to sourceforge at my disposal. Even if it has an ugly X11 interface there has been some progression in getting Quartz for X11 apps.
No you don't.
Here's more of this "linux sound nonsense" that creates more churn than
anything else as people listen to the idiots. ALSA did very nicely with
common desktop apps. The fact that musician wannabes might have had some
problems is not and has never really been generally relevant.
DVD playback: You will have to install this yourself if you install Windows
from scratch. It's odd that someone that claims to have installed
Windows would bring this up.
Flash and codecs are automatically installed in modern Linuxes and this is smoother ...and the fact that you are intentionally using a poor choice of video driver is just
than it is in Windows.
you trying to sour the results so that you can have something to complain about.
I use the binary nvidia drivers. Having full 1080p VC1 acceleration on a $200 machine is the bee's knees.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The Cupertino Cheerleading squad must be out in full force today.
Every time you replace a mini with an ION, a fanboy cries.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How is purchasing someone *elses* previously broken Apple at a "20-30% discount" a good deal? I'll buy certain things referbed (routers/switches, cable modems, some audio equipment, etc), but a computer? No thank you.
I've bought a few refurbished Apple products, including Macbooks, and apart from the packaging they're indistinguishable from new - including in terms of reliability.
I have someone in my office who just returned a brand-new Toshiba laptop because "the wrist rest rubs on my wrists wrong". There's nothing wrong with it, and it will be resold by the manufacturer as refurbished. Not everything refurbished is "previously broken", and my experience has been that after the second pass through Apple's quality control, the refurbished stuff is just as good as new. Just without the fancy packaging and the extra 20-30% on the price.
Putting moderation advice in your
Hmm. My previous laptop was a DELL XPS 1330. It was an OK computer and I had it for a year. The graphics system carked itself just after the warranty expired (known fault in this model), but DELL sent a guy out to replace the logic board, which was pretty good of them, I thought.
Anyway, the point: I watched the guy pull apart the XPS. I have never seen such crappy assembly and quality in my whole life. Everything was plastic, everything. Thebase that held the logic board was so thin that I could easily bend it with one hand.
I then sold it on ebay for about 30% of what I paid a year ago, and bought a MBP 15" just to see what all the fuss was about.
Now, I've been a PC guy all my life, but I work as a developer on windows systems, so I thought it was time for a change. Boy, have I had my eyes opened. Without a doubt, this is the best engineered gadget I have ever seen. It does everything I want to do, with absolutely no fuss, no bother. Now, I know, my anecdote means little, but as I say, my eyes have been opened and I am firmly an Apple fan, not only for the excellent hardware, but the unbelievably good OSX (a real eye opener). Of course, YMMV, I am not trying to convince anyone, I really don't care what anyone else does. But I know I will be buying Apple from now on. Flame away!
I'm in to sadism, bestiality and necrophilia. Am I flogging a dead horse?