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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
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.
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.
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.
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.