Apple Devices To Outsell Windows For First Time Ever In 2013

zacharye writes "Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have long been considered the future of computing and a new projection from market research firm Gartner shows just how important the mobile market has become. According to the firm's estimates for 2013, Apple devices will outsell Windows devices for the first time this year. The estimate takes into account sales of Apple's iPhones, iPads and Mac computers as well as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones powered by Microsoft's various Windows operating systems..."

Comments

The King is dead

[beastie456]

Long live the King. Again

Re:The King is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean the DOJ will finally pay attention to Apple and their "fair for everyone, especially the consumers, no this isn't an abuse of power or monopolistic tendencies, hey look over there, there is nothing to see here" policies?

Re:The King is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, this is just being posted to wake up the iFans and get their rabid page-clicks.

Android has been outselling Windows for a long time now, and will pass the entire Microsoft installed base in about 18 months.

Re:The King is dead

[AvitarX]

Probably not, their markets have healthy competition.

Re:The King is dead

[jamesh]

Does this mean the DOJ will finally pay attention to Apple and their "fair for everyone, especially the consumers, no this isn't an abuse of power or monopolistic tendencies, hey look over there, there is nothing to see here" policies?

If Apple devices have just outsold Microsoft, then it would imply that there is a somewhat decent balance in the marketplace and the word 'monopoly' is probably misplaced here.

Re:The King is dead

[ackthpt]

Probably not, their markets have healthy competition.

That's correct and they are suing them like crazy.

Re:The King is dead

[Miamicanes]

If Microsoft doesn't back down and quit trying to cripple desktop PCs into second-rate tablets, Apple just might beat Microsoft for new desktop and laptop sales in some future year, too. Especially if PC hardware continues its relentless race to the crap commodity bottom & Apple can resist the urge to do the same with its hardware.

Don't laugh. Back in 2008. if you told a group of guys with Windows Mobile phones that it would be dead from Microsoft-induced suicide by 2010, you would have gotten laughed at. The original iPhone was a dumbed-down crippled toy by comparison, and Android was just a whispered rumor. Microsoft had a device that was largely dysfunctional for making voice calls, but one hell of a kick-ass pocket laptop with wireless internet access.Then, right around the time they finally started to look like they were learning how to make a phone... they pulled the plug.

Three years ago, Microsoft crawled from the Vista abyss and gave us Windows 7. The skies parted, the angels sang praises not heard since the midnight release parties of Windows95... then Microsoft threw it all away two years later in the wretched name of Metro.

Microsoft is proof-positive that corporate insanity (or alzheimer's) is real and exists. They're going to put themselves out of business, then wonder how they could have fallen so far, and so completely, in so little time. And if they don't, it'll only be due to thirdparty developers working tirelessly to give us the Windows we actually *want*.

Re:The King is dead

[fangorious]

Microsoft and Google.

Re:The King is dead

[nzac]

Especially if PC hardware continues its relentless race to the crap commodity bottom & Apple can resist the urge to do the same with its hardware.

The race to the bottom happens because the consumer wants and will buy cheap products. The only reason they will pay more is if the cheap product is not good enough. The problem is that Android and ChromeOS can go far lower than windows can. Future generations of ARM chromebooks are far more of a threat to Microsoft than Apple will ever be.

The apple brand is too strong for OEMs to make significant sales at that price-point so they need to go lower. If you can go lower than everyone else while still providing an adequate product then you corner 30 to 50 percent of the market. If the race to the bottom is not happening then anti trust laws should be brought out.

Re:The King is dead

[knorthern knight]

> Please describe the abuse of monopoly power that you accuse Apple of doing.

Ask and ye shall receive.

> Now in the MS days, MS persuaded, threatened, and outright bribed OEMs not to install Netscape.

Apple bans non-webkit browsers in their app-store... period... end of story. That's why there's no Firefox for non-jailbroken Ipads... http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/156392/mozilla-firefox-not-coming-to-iphone-ipad-until-apple-relaxes-ios-browser-rules

Re:The King is dead

[UnknowingFool]

Apple owns their own store. It is not a third party. They can do whatever they want in their own store. If they threatened Best Buy that's another story. Apple has the right not to carry Windows in their brick and mortar stores as much as MS has the right not to sell Apple products in their stores. Please try again.

Re:The King is dead

[FirstOne]

Android based products outsells Apple by a significant margin. Then throw in the sales of all sorts of NAS/set-tops Sat&Cable boxes/xDSL routers/Blu-ray players/Media players/Tivo/Smart tv's running linux.

Makes Linux the world's Dominant Operating System.

Unfortunately.. few people are aware of that Linux OS is behind a large portion of this technological revolution.

Re:The King is dead

[BasilBrush]

Sure, there are other mobile device software stores.

You can't define the market as "software stores for iOS devices" because Apple makes all the iOS devices, and you can't be guilty of having a monopoly of your own product.

See inkjet printers, games consoles and razors. It's perfectly legal and non-monopolistic to tie a base product with add ons and consumables. So long as there are other viable choices of system.

Re:The King is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

And we Nokia guys (which in Europe was pretty much *everyone*) laughed at the crashing piece of shit that Windows Phones were, and laughed even more at the ridiculously limited iPhones.

You idiots don't even know history. We had "one hell of a pocket laptop" in freaking 2002! It could do everything you'd expect from a small PC. Hell, I ran Putty on that thing, tested web applications, chatted via IM+ (all networks), played games, listened to music, watched videos, ordered files, edited documents, and changed whatever setting I wanted... all with every hardware bell and whistle you could want back then.

If Nokia would have kept its balls and not run after shitty Apple but aimed *higher* (which is not hard, considering Apple aims and complete morons and *only* those), and if Microsoft wouldn't have injected their mole (piece of shit and all-time enemy of half of Europe), Nokia would still kick everyone's ass today.
Hell, even with the mole, their hardware still easily blows everything else out of the water. And Jolla will steamroll the market again, in a few years.

Re:The King is dead

[DKlineburg]

ok, so MS owns it OS, yet the EU told them they had to put in a different browser? How is this different?

Re:The King is dead

[jbolden]

A Macbook is not God's Chosen Computer -- there are plenty of ways to leave Apple in the dust hardware-wise. If you can't make a computer that's a 2/3mm thick laminated-glass slab like Apple, the solution isn't to make one that's 5/6mm thick and try to undercut Apple by $10. The solution is to say 'fuck Apple', make it an inch thick, give it a mechanical keyboard, and pack the empty space inside with 4 pounds of Lithium Ion gel that can run an i7 at full bore for 16 hours without breaking a sweat. Let the bitchy fashion queens who think the world begins and ends with Facebook have their credit-card thickness tablets with soft keyboards, and let people who use their computers to get real things done not be crippled.

Those were available in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and now in 2013. People don't buy them. The fact is the people who use their computers to get things done and are willing to pay mostly buy Apple, 85-91%. The rest are very scattered in what they want and create a variety of small niche markets.

Re:The King is dead

[Sique]

Here, it gets complicated. The main reason is Dalvik, a layer above the kernel itself. From a pure OS point of view, it's a shell, allowing the starting and stopping of applications. At the same time, it's also the only available interface to the kernel. Thus, from an application point of view, it acts like the OS itself. Often, it's called a platform, abstracting the real OS. Google could replace Linux at any time within Andoid, and for the applications, it wouldn't make any difference. That's why you can develop Android apps in the Android SDK on your computer which is neither ARM based as the Android devices the apps will later installed on nor necessarily runs Linux as its OS - Dalvik is presenting a layer against which the apps are built, and which acts the same on any OS it is running on.

Re:The King is dead

[BasilBrush]

A product isn't a market.

Re: The King is dead

[Rational]

I can only buy a 911 from Porsche. Obviously, they are a monopoly that needs breaking up.

Not the whole picture

[pcjunky]

Mobile phones really skewed things. However if you take things like Andriod into account Apple's share is still quite small. It just that Microsoft has almost no presence in the mobile phone market. Bill would not have let this happen had he still been in charge.

Re:Not the whole picture

[dc29A]

Bill would not have let this happen had he still been in charge.

Ah yes, Bill Gates the visionary. Almost missed TCP/IP (had to be begged to implement it) ... and the Internet. Was the SPAM problem supposed to be solved in what? 3 years in 2004? Bill let the whole tablet market slip from his fingers, at least a good 9 years before the iPad.

He was in the right place at the right time. Nothing more. Definitely not a visionary.

Xbox and Windows CE?

[Megor1]

Did they include Xbox and windows CE devices?

It's not so much Apple's superiority. . .

[whozatmac]

. . . Microsoft has done this to themselves. Having failed to come up with a compelling mobile space product, they decided to force the half baked mobile OS on desktops, where they had, for better or worse, at least established themselves. No one is buying windows 8 machines that owns any previous windows computer. . . and those who hadn't bought a computer yet are buying tablets and phones and other internet consumption products. Now Microsoft wants to kill of thier segment of the content creation space. It's baffling.

And the Cozy Coupe was the best selling car...

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2008, the Little Tykes Cozy Coupe was the best selling car in the US. However I don't think Toyota was overly concerned about the competition. Apple devices include things like the iPod. Microsoft's big money maker has always been business licensing. When Apple makes double digit market share in the enterprise arena, this will be news.

http://jalopnik.com/5282451/little-tikes-cozy-coupe-the-best-selling-car-in-america

Re:Interesting observation because MS != Apple

[couchslug]

Microsoft offers what it thinks you should have.

Apple offers what attracts people.

Define "computing"

[istartedi]

Passively reading news, or tweeting out the occasional 140-character update on your boring life is not "computing" to me. Watching videos isn't computing. Playing games isn't computing, even if it is computationally intensive for the device.

Call me when people start running spreadsheets on these things, or are using them as their primary development platform.

I think it would be more fair to say that these devices have surpassed the PC as interactive entertainment devices, as opposed to "computing" devices.

Re:Interesting observation because MS != Apple

[DrEldarion]

You do realize that Jobs was the one who said "people don't know what they want"? Apple is the #1 perpetrator of dictating to users what they "should" want.

It's called "moving the goalposts"

[gman003]

Microsoft "devices" (which apparently means "Windows devices" - mainly laptops, desktops and servers, with a few smartphones and tablets) are being outsold by Apple devices (mainly smartphones, tablets, and laptops, with a handful of desktops and even fewer servers).

In other news, Ford is outselling Airbus in terms of vehicles sold, and India makes more films than America.

Not only is there the whole computer-vs-mobile thing (with mobile being a growing market and actual computers having plateaued), but Microsoft itself is pretty new as a hardware manufacturer. They make Surface RT, Surface Pro, two generations of Xbox, the Zune, and a long series of mice and keyboards. Whereas Apple has been making hardware since day 1. So a more fair comparison would be "hardware sold" and "software sold" (not counting OS copies bundled with the hardware). Bet you it ends up with each winning one.

PS: Doesn't the Xbox count as a "Microsoft device"? TFA doesn't say, but they don't seem to include it. Seems unfair to have "OS X + iOS" versus "Windows" when Microsoft has their own locked-down, walled-garden media-consuming device.

Apple is the way computing should be.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny. A lot of windows users don't realize the torture that os puts them through. A lot of IT admins won't admit this but when you blanket a office with apple solutions, there pretty much out of a job because everything just works.
Apple makes the most cohesive and user friendly computing environments, and I'll gladly pay premium to not use windows 8.

Re:Interesting observation because MS != Apple

[SeaFox]

I don't want Blu-ray playback, if it means the OS has to conform with the required DRM hooks.

If you're on a Mac the OS already does. It's more about licensing with MPEGLA and protecting the iTunes ecosystem.

Re:Interesting observation because MS != Apple

[SeaFox]

That's not what "people" want. That's only what "SeaFox" wants.

You really think people don't appreciate being able to increase the storage on their cell phone or tablet without having to buy a whole new device? And I'm sure there's no gamers out there with Macs who would like to be able to use a high-end graphics card without having to plunk down for the top-end pro tower from Apple.

Go to any Mac forum and read from the creative professionals upset the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in any major way in three years. Or the folks with 24-27" iMacs annoyed they have that IPS screen and can't watch HD video on it unless they either rebuy their movies on iTunes or jump through hoops encoding/space-shifting their own content because they can't just pop the disc in the drive and play it like on a PC.

If you're gonna be a troll, you could at least not make yourself look like a moron in the process.

Define "No True Scotsman"

[Kjella]

If we take "passively reading news" to include other sources like forums, home pages, blogs etc. then most web browsing is excluded in general. If "tweeting out the occasional 140-character update" isn't computing then everything from IRC to e-mail to posting on Slashdot isn't either. Take away "watching videos" then I'm guessing that excludes listening til music, watching pictures or any other form of similar activity too, we've already excluded social activities and commenting as blabbering so all of Facebook and YouTube has nothing to do with computing. When you exclude things that are computationally hard for the computer but not for me, then I think you've excluded 95%+ of all I've ever used my computer for personally. Even compiling from source probably shouldn't count as "computation" then, if all you do is make && make install.

Let me try phrasing it it another way, what were the reasons I wanted to upgrade to a better PC in the past? Playing MP3s and MIDI was big in the 90s, better graphics modes in the 90s and HD video in the 2000s, games the 80s until present. In fact, I don't think I've ever wanted a new computer to make my spreadsheets go faster or to get my compilation times down. So since you've excluded all the reason I'd like to have or upgrade a computer, I guess it hasn't lost as a computing device only as a PC. Because I guess almost all the things I've used it for over the last decades haven't been computing, silly me. Oh and the really heavy computation you now do on a server or in the cloud, welcome to the new mainframes - on my desk at work is nothing but a thin client.