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Microsoft Says More People Are Switching From Macs To Surface Than Ever Before (theverge.com)
Microsoft has been targeting Mac users with its Surface commercials recently, and it appears they might be paying off. From a report on The Verge: The software giant claims that November was the "best month ever for consumer Surface sales," following a number of Black Friday deals on the Surface Pro 4. Microsoft still isn't providing sales numbers, but the company claims "more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before." Microsoft cites "the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro" and its trade-in program for MacBooks for tempting people to switch to Surface. Again, Microsoft refuses to provide numbers but vaguely claims "our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever."
So more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. It reminds me of an episode of the US version of The Office. This may not be word for word what happened, but it's close enough to make my point.
Pam: I doubled my sales from the previous month.
Andy (sarcastically) : Yeah, to 2 from 1.
Pam: Yep.
Well, considering that the Surface is the first line of computers that Microsoft has ever produced, there are plenty of opportunities for record setting when measured against themselves.
From everything I have seen, the Surface is a pretty neat device and I think it is getting better with every rev. Also the Surface Studio is looking like a real winner. Still... Any time I hear a company tout their own sales numbers, I roll my eyes.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Ask Bill Belichick just how great Surface tablets are.
Except that affluent idiots (unless you really did mean effluent) arn't the only target market. A huge portion of the market goes to sysadmins, developers, etc, who use the machines for real work.
Those people consider the latest MBP to be a ridiculous pile of horse shit. I mean, Apple's lineup has been becoming more and more of a joke as the years go on, but they seem to be now at the 'lets just take as much piss as we can". I use a mac, and know a number of others who use Macs, because they provide the best of both worlds between windows and linux for the work that we do. The slight price premium was worth it for the dramatically lower number of headaches and bullshit one had to deal with.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. It's bad enough that the feature/price ratio has gotten significantly worse than it used to be. But now the products are just a fucking joke. Before they oh so generously cut the price on their dongles, you could easily spend $400-$500 in dongles just to reach parity with what you could do before. And of course, you are now required to carry around a dead octopus worth of cables to cover all the possible situations you may need.
This was fine when it was just the Air. That's what the Air was designed for. But pulling this idiocy on a laptop that is specifically meant for professionals? Someone needs to dig up Steve Job's coffin and repeatedly hit Tim Cook with it.