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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..."
Long live the King. Again
Microsoft devices cost less than Apple devices, but they get less of units sold than apple which has specialized in their customer base. Not everyone wants apple, but it seems nobody wants windows now.
I wonder how android sales go along this?
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.
Did they include Xbox and windows CE devices?
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
. . . 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.
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
I read the press release and the report...
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2408515
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=clientFriendlyUrl&id=2396815
In units shipped, Microsoft maintains its lead.
The prediction doesn't reflect the reports own claim that ultrabook sales will make up for some of the losses.
The headline doesn't take into account licenses sold to corporations and private customers to upgrade existing hardware or to install software on custom-built machines.
There is also no mention of Windows RT or Windows Server in the prediction.
But what do I know.
The Apple fanboys will cry if you burst their unreality bubble.
GARTNER? C'mon, these predictions get richer ever year. I'm not a fanboy of either, I have an iPad and Win8 PC. I dislike both companies, if anything. How many of the analyst prediction articles on Slashdot have came true? I'd bet my mortgage the percentage is small.
This is the same company that said in 2012 that over 350,000,000 PCs were shipped last year now claim only 150,000,000 this year?
If you think Gates and Allen have turned their backs on their company, you should see the cold shoulder Jobs is giving his. (and cold hands, feet, and everything else, for that matter)
Devices with Linux on them outsells them both combined. Many devices people are using are embedded Linux and they don't even know it. Set top boxes, routers, phones, televisions, GPS devices, and so on. Beautiful transparency where the OS is behind the scenes providing seamless functionality and flexibility. A true success but silent.
I'd bet my mortgage the percentage is small.
I doubt anybody would take that bet... I mean, who wants to win somebody's debt?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Obviously consumers are mostly staying away from Windows 8, which is slowing new PC sales... and in all honesty, there isn't an urge to upgrade PCs every year or two any more. We've reached a point of maturity in desktops and laptops, in terms of memory and drive space... the sweet spot seems to be around 8GB of RAM and 1TB of drive space. 90% of consumers do little more than surf, get e-mail and play games. Gaming hardware really hasn't vastly improved the user experience in a few years, even low end cards deliver nice graphics and performance on 1080p monitors.
Combined with customers' concerns over the "Modern UI" in Windows 8, and there just isn't a lot of compelling reasons for consumers to purchase new equipment.
Likewise... IT departments have likely slowed hardware refreshes in light of Windows 8. Many took a year or two to adopt Windows 7, which was a no-brainer upgrade after struggling with Vista (which many IT departments skipped). Again... nothing compelling to move into Windows 8 and integrate it into their common office environments, and hardware requirements of current software hasn't demanded more ram than most companies already have deployed.
When can we start suing them for being a monopoly?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Don't forget the Zunes. Whatever their final total was, add +8 to it, so it reflects the Zunes.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
How was Windows outselling Apple before Windows existed?
Depends how you look at it. When I bought my house it was a new housing estate in the UK, Scotland to be precise. The house was valued at £225,000 when I bought it 4 years ago. There is 15% of the mortgage left to pay. Do you want my deeds for 15% of the house value? My real point was, Garnet talk shit.
Microsoft never offered anything that was all that good (ok, maybe applesoft was ok, but integer basic was much cleaner code... we gave up a lot of elegance and speed just to be able to use floating point numbers, even if your program didn't implement them) - their success had to do with luck and a contract with IBM, in which Microsoft maintained ownership of the cp/m clone that they bought (we all know it as MS-DOS) and essentially rented to IBM. Now that they (MS) lack any kind of monopoly in the mobile space (and thus any kind of leverage on vendors), their products are doing about as well as one would expect in a more or less competitive market. If they would have had to compete in a competitive market selling MS-DOS and Windows, I would expect about the same so-so sales that they get now in the mobile space. Just compare Windows 3 to the old Mac OS. OK, they both seem horrible by today's standards, but Windows was a lot more horrible. I would say even horrible by yesterday's standards. It only did well because you could run it on your DOS PC.
Windows was introduced in 1985, so not sure what you are trying to say, last I checked 1985 was in the 80's
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
> How was Windows outselling Apple before Windows existed?
MS-DOS
That's right. Microsoft nearly ground Apple into the dirt with MS-DOS.
That's "manual memory management" versus the GUI driven Mac with an early form of LAN networking, virtual memory, and something akin to USB.
The tech gap between Microsoft and Apple now is nothing like it used to be.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No one is buying windows 8 machines that owns any previous windows computer
Except to replace a PC that currently runs an operating system that will stop receiving security patches a year from now.
...M$ is losing on those gambles it keeps making pissing off their long-time customers. I'm glad I upgraded my PCs before Win8 came out, because the next machine I buy will probably run Mac OS.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
It just turns out that personal computers aren't what you thought they were.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
and Windows 8, no doubt.
Clearly it is time to close apple down and give the money back to the stockholders. I mean it has a price to earnings ratio of 9.6 in an industry where 30 is the norm ( Facebook has a P/E ratio of 1,854.43, and arguably a book value of zero.) Seriously it's on the way out.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The whole thing is stupid period since those devices are all very different markets and kinds of devices. However it is even sillier to compare all of Apple's stuff to just Windows desktops and laptops. If we are going to grab random devices that happen to run stuff, well then there are actually a number of things that run CE, or the embedded versions of Windows.
It actually is not all that impressive to say all of Apple's devices, desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, and so on managed to outsell Windows desktops and laptops (since let's be real, that's where the numbers are the MS tablets and phones aren't selling hardly at all). All that really says is that the market for electronic gadgets is big, and that MS still has a huge share of computers.
This is not news.
Computers are getting to be a mature market. The growth is leveling off, we will get to a point where it'll largely be replacements getting sold, not new ones. However that doesn't mean it still isn't a huge market, or that it isn't profitable.
So ya, Apple is beating MS left right and center in tablets and phones... However it would seem MS is still the be-all, end-all of desktop and laptops which, despite what teenagers may think, are still where shit gets done in the real world and thus still quite in demand.
Also in terms of talking phones, a fun one would be to have a look at Android. I am betting that one is the real winner in that arena.
Keep in mind the Gartner comparison is in number of units sold. Considering Apple is much more vertically integrated than MS they keep a much larger chunk of the unit selling price and therefore earn substantially more revenue from per device sold. Apple should really start rolling their own server and office productivity software to compete against the remaining MS cash cows.
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.
Android has probably not outsold Apples devices, when you consider Android's non existent tablet sales and lack of laptops/desktop installations.
Yeah apple's PEG ratio is 5 times SMALLER than google's. Price/ Earnings/ Growth. So smaller means better. five fold better. Stunning.
I tried to find data on historical accuracy of predictions by Gartner, but surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any.
Here is one example (which is actually not that bad): http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/013108-gartner-it-predictions.html?page=1
Really? So this new figure is counting every device that runs any flavor of Windows? That obviously includes Xbox, Windows Phone, tablets, desktops, laptops and Netduino. But it also includes home appliances, cash registers, industrial machinery and millions of other devices that runs Windows Embedded, CE, Compact or one of its many other SKUs. No, I don't think Apple will be overtaking Microsoft any time soon.
"desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones powered by Microsoft's various Windows operating systems"
"tablet" and "smartphone" shouldn't be plural.
Do you have ESP?
Oh, if we want to count machines running desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones,and servers then Linux wins over both Apple and Microsoft.
First take 70% of all smartphones on the world market, which are running Android Linux. Then add the 50% of all tablets which run Android Linux. Then add the many millions of Linux desktops, and millions of servers running Linux.
The Gartner report never projects the sales of iOS and OSX devices exceeding those of Windows devices. Those projections cover the years 2012 through 2017, so I'm not sure where that sensational conclusion came from. It's also worth noting that the projected sales of Windows devices is continuing to increase, albeit not at the same rate as iOS/OSX, each year.
Not that I would place much value in these projections. The volume of sales of mobile phones suggests that people will be replacing them every 2.4 years, and that's assuming that everyone over the age of 15 owns one. (If you assume that fewer people own mobile phones, the replacement rate must increase to less reasonable levels.)
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.
I believe that MBASIC shipped with a majority of CP/M machines. It shipped (generally version 2) on nearly every eight bit machine of significance except the original Apple ][, the TI 99, and the Atari 400/800 (and some other non-disk based machines).
Once the Apple ][+ came out (the only difference was that it had the Autostart ROM (with no disassembler) and Applesoft (e.g., MBASIC 2) instead of Apple Integer BASIC), it outsold the original by several to one (and then put the //e into the mix . . .).
The result is that most Apples shipped with MBASIC--which functioned as the operating system for most intents & purposes.
So prior to Mac, nearly all of Apple's machines ran MS . . . (and most of the early macs ended up with MS Basic for Mac).
So there is *something* reasonable to the notion that MS was outselling Apple before Windows & Mac.
hawk
1) Typing on a real keyboard/mouse with a 24" or bigger display. Yes you can do this with some tablets, but most of them don't.
2) Run virtual machines to have multiple OS's simultaneously.
3) Play high-spec video games.
4) 3D CAD work
5) Software development (not just compilation, but writing code, debugging, etc.
6) Support dozens of open windows simultaneously, with many of them visible at the same time.
7) Full flash/shockwave/silverlight/java implementation in a browser.
8) Non-linear video editing, transcoding, etc.
9) AV recording via digital inputs.
10) Edit large (greater than 2GB) files of whatever kind.
11) Any sort of physics simulation or other number-crunching task.
12) Run specialty software like matlab/maple or R for statistics.
13) Run random x86-centric stuff for work or school.
Yes, some of these are higher-end things to do, but they're all things you can't do on your iPad.
Microsoft must look with cold calculating green eyes at Apple's success in selling overpriced consumer devices, apps, and content.
The traditional personal computer allows customers to install third party software creating no additional revenue for Microsoft. With a fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximise revenue, Microsoft strategists seem to be hell bent on the goal of selling millions of client devices that customers can only use to buy apps and content through Microsoft's online facilities.
To achieve this vision, a world of walled garden consumer devices, it looks like they are willing to follow Apple and abandon the general purpose computer.
Somehow you've missed the point, maybe you didn't know about this textbook example of bad software design. The designers of the device put in time based digital rights management so it needed to keep track of time. Whoever did it fucked up so badly that the device will not play music at all on the last day of a leap year, even the stuff without DRM. That's what I mean by lack of attention to detail. If the people producing the software for a product can't even implement a calendar correctly and then others can't find that fault in testing it makes you wonder what else they fucked up. Such a mistake would not even be considered acceptable in a high school project let alone a product.
I'm astonished that there's somebody here that doesn't already know that story.
Microsoft was founded in 1975
More precisely he was referring to adoption rate, not market share... In which case he is correct. A more relevant statistic in reply to your comment on market share is that the WebKit rendering engine by most measurements has a higher market share than IE's trident. This is mostly down to mobile safari, but also chrome and the default android browser. What will be interesting is how that all changes post the chrome WebKit fork (blink) and the adoption of mobile chrome as the default android browser. Personally I feel that chrome will only increase (proportionally) in its market share given its position on the web (google) its speed and generally good security. For all its flaws they are made temporary by the concepts driving it, automatic updates regardless of platform is a must for any modern browser, for both the good of the developer and the user.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Most XP users if they have not left for now have no plans to do so in 2014 either. They have AV software so why worry?
I imagine that once Windows XP no longer receives updates, Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows XP will no longer receive updates. Besides, an exploit of XP's TCP/IP stack could cause a worm to burrow deep into the system where AV doesn't normally hook. Microsoft would usually fix these deep exploits as they are discovered, but not starting April 2014, and computer criminals know this. They're probably saving their best 0-days for the day after XP EOL, when they know they're going to have an easy time port-scanning the net for targets. They'd need to bring the machine to a computer repair shop to get it wiped and reinstalled, and no reputable shop will reinstall an EOL OS with 0-days in the wild.
It's possible Windows 3.0--which Wikipedia claims was the first pre-installed Windows--outsold Macintoshes running System 6 in 1990, but historical data is needed to validate the claim that assuming Gartner's sale estimates Apple devices would be outselling Windows devices "for the first time ever."
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
First, for every iOS device there are 3 android ones. Second, smartphones and tablets are not PCs or laptops.
OS only sales! This has always been M$'s stronghold. Enterprise sales and system builder/upgrade sales still make a large base. M$ is still totally dominant on the desktop.
I suspect that Tr3vin is right, despite wording it poorly - at some point during the Windows 1.x or Windows 2.x product cycles, Microsoft was probably still selling fewer copies of Windows per accounting period (year or quarter) than Apple was selling computers (including the Mac, but mostly the Apple II series). Of course, by Windows 3.x, that was probably no longer the case.
Anyone have actual stats?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The keyword is "devices". Apple is well known as a device manufacturer. They are also well known for grossly overpricing their uber hyped devices. Since the super hypster (Jobs) is dead, look for this to play a rapidly declining role in Apple's future. It's why I've dumped all my Apple stock. On the other hand, take a long look at Microsoft. They have only recently been dipping their toes into device production, since, they are mainly a software company. Oh yeah, I can hear you saying that all those Apple devices are running Apple software and that's true, but, consider this: Apple software all comes from the walled garden. There are very few indipendent companies producing iOs, etc. software. Then, look at Microsoft. Look at the enormous amount of software being written by third parties for the Windows OS. It makes Apple software look like "Sams Club Cola" compared to Coca-Cola. There is no comparison. This is a Windows world because of the simple fact that Microsoft allows so many indipendant companies to write Windows compatible software. I really don't think Microsoft has too much to worry about when it comes to Apple, since, like I said: "The Hypster-In-Chief" is dead!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
Well as an Apple Fan who's always updated in Apple Inc., there had been lots of rumours that's been going around that Apple will launch this software, that software, and some other bloody crap like that, well eventually, none of those things came true. Trust me Apple will never change it's software.
outsell Microsoft in every market. This is not true. apple may sell more ipads and iphones than Microsoft sell tablets and phones but they don't even come close to the amount of computers Microsoft sell. apple doesn't even sell 1/3rd the amount of mobile devices as Microsoft sells PC's and laptops. Even apple and Android together doesn't come to half that amount. This is why when people say Windows 8 is a failure it makes me laugh. It may not be doing as well as Windows XP or 7 but even a failure for Windows 8 machines is more than the sales high of apple (macos and ios) and Android devices.