Slashdot Mirror
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..."
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?
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
Microsoft offers what it thinks you should have.
Apple offers what attracts people.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Not so fast! If we are going to start comparing counts of "Devices", the clear winner is neither, but Linux.
Windows still rules the Desktop, and Apple the MP3-players, but all those millions of routers, TVs, Blu-ray players, TiVos, GPS units, Android devices and even kitchen appliances....
Linux *Devices* clearly outsell any other comparable platform, by a huge margin.
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
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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*.
But that's not what the masses want, you're a nerd (admit it you're on slashdot) and what you want is a microscopic market niche. Steve was right.
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.
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.