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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
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?
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.
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,
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.
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.