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Apple's Share of PC Users Drops To A Five-Year Low (infoworld.com)
Windows 10 is installed on 24.5% of devices -- but that's only half the story. "Apple's Mac share of personal computers worldwide fell to a five-year low in December," reports Computerworld, adding that Linux and Windows "both benefited, with increases of around a half percentage point during 2016."
An anonymous reader quotes their report:
According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Apple's desktop and notebook operating system -- formerly OS X, now macOS -- powered just 6.1% of all personal computers last month, down from 7% a year ago and a peak of 9.6% as recently as April 2016... The Mac's 6.1% user share in December was the lowest mark recorded by Net Applications since August 2011, more than five years ago... In October, the company reported sales of 4.9 million Macs for the September quarter, a 14% year-over-year decline and the fourth straight quarterly downturn. Apple's sales slide during the past 12 months has been steeper than for the personal computer industry as a whole, according to industry researchers from IDC and Gartner, a 180-degree shift from the prior 30 or so quarters, when the Mac's growth rate repeatedly beat the business average.
Apple's success through 2016 was "fueled by Microsoft's stumbles with Windows 8 and a race-to-the-bottom mentality among rival OEMs," according to the article, which also notes that the user share for Linux exceeded 2% in June, and reached 2.3% by November.
Apple's success through 2016 was "fueled by Microsoft's stumbles with Windows 8 and a race-to-the-bottom mentality among rival OEMs," according to the article, which also notes that the user share for Linux exceeded 2% in June, and reached 2.3% by November.
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My first computer was an Apple IIGS. I've owned more Macs then I can remember. I was responsible for Macs being adopted by my workplace. And yet, I very much doubt my next computer will be a Mac. Poor hardware choices are really the last straw. Chances are good my next rig will be a Dell XPS running Ubuntu.
I find it surprising that according to this statistic one third of Mac users stopped using Macs during the last 8 months. Or did the market grow a lot (don't think so)? I can see that some Mac users would switch to Windows (or occasionally to Linux), but one third in 8 months? Seems actually unlikely.
Apple is also losing the battle in education. There are almost 100,000 schools in the US and until about 5 years ago, many ran Apple computers in their classrooms.
Chromebooks have eaten Apple's lunch almost entirely in that space.
Cutting Tim Cook's pay is not enough - Microsoft put a tech guy in charge of the company - it's time for Apple to do the same.
PC laptop screens went through some dark, dark times. The cheap crap still has lousy screens; but there was some time where it was hard to find anything decent, at any price(especially after the harrowing of the 4:3 panels and the massacre of what few 19:10s existed). At least now you can get decent panels again, if you stay out of the bargain basement.
Apple was a "just works" solution for people who didn't want to be bothered with their computer to do what they actually wanted to do. And Apple delivered that beautifully. Not to me, I never got my mind wrapped around the "Apple way" of thinking, but I could easily see it with the various people I used to admin PCs for. They quickly fell in love with the intuitive interface (beats me how this is intuitive, but they thought so) and how "naturally" everything felt (personally, I felt it was all wrong). But it wasn't for me, it was for them, and for them, it worked perfectly. There also was never an issue with odd drivers or having to upgrade them, Apple did that for you. There was also never an issue with having to buy some additional reader for whatever esoteric memory medium your digital cam used, your Apple could read it. Out of the box. Without you having to install anything. Even the most cryptic format nobody heard about, your Apple would read it and seamlessly let you work with it, it organizes your files for you, it was the perfect computer for people who just wanted to do stuff without having to learn how to do it.
Quite frankly, Apple's engineers apparently spent a lot of time employing people like my dad telling them what they want to do and they designed the software to "think" for the user. That was the key asset for Apple. And they threw that away.
No, not with the software. That probably still works the way it did. But with the hardware. Again, one of the key selling points for Apple was that their machines could read anything you could possibly throw at them. And that is simply no longer the case. They can't even read USB out of the box anymore. Instead you are supposed to buy a lot of additional crap, various cables for various reasons that confuse and overwhelm people. Which one do I need? And I don't want to buy the wrong one, they're all quite expensive.
Apple replaced total compatibility with absolute incompatibility. They saw that they can cram it down their users' throats in the phone market and tried the same stunt with their computers. And now they get to learn the MS lesson: Just 'cause you can piss on your customers in a market you dominate doesn't mean that it will work everywhere.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am a creative professional in the online, SaaS, new media publishing era. I should easily be in the traditional Mac OS demographic.
I am using a 17" 2010 MBP. It has been maxed to 16GB RAM and dual internal large SSDs. I regularly use all of the ports that it offers. Even though the screen resolution is lower, I use the larger screen because I often have side-by-side windows open running SublimeText and/or some IDE, and doing that on 15" or less introduces eyestrain, even with the higher resolutions (which are mostly supported only in a way that adds visual actuance/sharpness, not in a way that increases available workspace). Density is cute for photos, but for reading and working in text, density < surface area.
I was an iPhone early adopter. I had been using smartphones for years (Palm at the time that iPhone was released), and iOS was a revelation early on. Absolute game-changer once apps happened.
Talk to me in 2009/2010 and I am a hardcore Apple supporter. I am running my old Linux applications in X, have a shell window open all the time, have access to pro-grade multimedia and development tools, and every part of the product line enhances the productivity of every other part seamlessly. They get it and they are enabling me to do my work like nobody else.
I recommend Apple's ecosystem to friend/family/co-workers without hesitation.
Now? The Mac is 7 years old. There is no device currently in Apple's lineup that would better serve my needs. I can't buy something from Apple, at any price, that I'd want to replace it with.
Many of the Applications that I previously used on it—Aperture, Final Cut, even iWork—have either been retired by Apple or hobbled by Apple, leading me to purchase third party alternatives, e.g. from Adobe, that are also supported on other platforms. The transitions were a pain in the ass, but now I've made them, so I'm no longer facing the resistance to switching that comes from losing all your applications and workflows.
And while iOS was once inimitable, nothing like it, enables many more things than any competitor, now I use Samsung Galaxy Tab S machines and a Panasonic CM1 Android phone. They give me shell access, expandable storage to move files around, and hardware that is better for mobile (better camera, better portability/weight, etc.) than iOS does.
In short, I'm an savvy computing professional, not someone easily swayed by marketing speak, and Apple isn't selling a single thing that I want. I've gone from an Apple house (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Time Machine for router/backup) to a mixed house (Mac, Android phone, Android tablet, Roku, third-party NAS).
The only Apple item left is the Mac, and in a year or two it'll probably go and be replaced with a Dell/Samsung/Asus high-end machine running Linux.
There is no reason Apple had to lose me, they just didn't continue to make products that would enable me to get my work done more efficiently than the alternatives, which is what Apple used to do with shocking skill. But now?
Like I said, there's not a single thing in Apple's product line that I want to buy or that seems like a good investment from the productivity perspective. That's a complete and shocking inversion from the late '00s.
I now recommend Windows 10 or Linux and Android to everyone, and Chromebooks for those that just browse and type papers.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Consumers aren't buying PCs anymore in volume.
Hence, Apple should aim the MacPro at the literal "PROFESSIONAL" market only.
The cost of a MacPro is less than the total cost of the software on the system. I pay more for CAD licenses in the lifetime of my MacPro than the cost of the MacPro.
Get it? Cook? Just my opinion.
Aperture is a good case study. I had half a million photos in it. It is no longer being maintained.
It's an ecosystem in disrepair.
Application A requires a newer version of Mac OS to support the latest hardware, features, integrations with third parties, and sync with its mobile apps. Meanwhile, if you upgrade Mac OS, Application B, no longer supported, will at some point stop functioning. And Application C requires new revision Apple hardware that hobbles your workflow in Applications A and B with mundane physical problems like lack of ports.
This sort of thing is happening all over the place in Apple land. Yes, you can spend hours of your workday and dollars that you don't want to spend finding lots of workarounds.
OR you can just see the writing on the wall, switch to Lightroom (for example) and plan a path to a platform where the conflicts don't exist.
The "it just works" philosophy was the exact OPPOSITE of version-and-abandonware hell. Version-and-abandonware hell was the reason that I left Linux for Mac OS in the late '00s. Sadly, I bought in just a couple of years before Apple would take the same route.
The viability question is bound up with influencers. I am one. I probably brought 50 people at four businesses over to Apple/Mac/iOS between 2008 and 2012 on the strength of my recommendations and after-hours assistance. Now? Now I recommend Windows 10 Surface and Android to most non-professional users that ask me.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
> it depends on how you count. I'd count what people use.
Isn't that exactly what they were counting and found declined?
Seriously, it would make just about everybody happy. The designs must use aluminium cases, and they must be approved by Apple before manufacture. The Apple logo will be on the cover, and the manufacturer's logo will be over the keyboard.
PCs are no longer Apple's core competence, and they should make moves to divest the function.
Problem solved.
They never were a computer company (atleast not since their "rebirth").
They're a fashion company and they failed to make enough changes to remain fashionable.
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I think when Steve Jobs was still alive, he enforced a philosophy at Apple that the Mac was the "cornerstone" of the company, no matter what else it developed. It was all about that "halo effect", where the Mac was the control center for everything else, and everything had a symbiotic relationship with everything else Apple sold. (EG. You could be a Windows user and buy an iPod as your music player, and use it just fine. BUT, you'd eventually say, "Hey... Apple's iTunes software that manages this thing really runs better on the Mac than it does in Windows. Maybe I'll just go with a Mac in the future and use it with this?" Or you might be a Windows or even Linux user who bought an Apple Airport Extreme as your wi-fi router because it got high reviews. You *could* manage it with the Windows version of the management software, but you'd find it's easier to just set one up from an iPhone, where support is built right in.)
Back then, it was commonplace for Jobs to remind people that low overall percentages of Mac sales compared to Windows didn't concern him. It was about selling gourmet food vs. McDonalds. If you have a premium product, you concentrate on catering to those who appreciate that ... not worrying about maximizing sales numbers.
Today, it's very different. Apple under Tim Cook seems to believe iOS devices are the "future" as the traditional computer dies out, and MANY of the complaints Mac users have are direct results of this change in course. There are problems right now with PDFKit in OS X, where Apple suddenly rewrote the thing from the ground up in OS X Sierra without so much as informing developers. The reason? They wanted one with feature parity with the iOS version. This made Apple's own Preview software unsafe to use to edit PDF documents, because it causes embedded OCR layers to be stripped from them when you save them. Other applications like Mariner Paperless, which use Preview to display scanned documents in their database, crash as soon as you try to view a file in your collection. It's basically a trainwreck right now. I hear Apple is scrambling to fix a lot of this in the latest OS X beta, but this fiasco already caused many realtors to switch back to Windows because they rely so heavily on PDF as part of their daily workflow,
If rumors I've heard can be believed, Apple doesn't even have much of a Mac OS X development team left anymore. The updates to it are supposedly being done by a team that's expected to spend part of their time doing iOS related work.
I've been a big Mac proponent since the 2001 time-frame, but I'm finally reaching the point where my next computer won't be a Mac, unless there's a major change of course in the near future. As others have said, Apple has nothing for sale that I'd really want to buy. The new Macbook Pro 15" looks desirable at first glance. The touch-bar is a nice addition and it looks attractive in space gray color and all that. But in reality, it's the most expensive laptop Apple has ever sold (in a high spec configuration at least), while demanding more compromises to use it than have ever been expected of "Pro" users before. The lack of all ports except USB-C would be more acceptable if the USB-C standard was more prevalent. But putting it there today is doing it just to prove you're "cutting edge", while hampering real-world usage. And at that price? Why isn't a set of the dongle adapters included with it?? The Mag-Safe charging was a mistake to eliminate too. That's been a signature feature that made Mac laptops a step ahead of everyone else. Couldn't they at least do a USB-C variant of Mag-Safe?
I'm worried that in personal computing today, and I'm including professional PCs in this, everything seems to be a shadow of its former self.
Windows has been getting worse since 7. Windows 10 offers only modest benefits for most users over what we had back in 2010, and at a heavy price.
Apple seems to have gone full-fashion-gadget, with ever less flexibility and longevity across just about its entire product range.
Linux has the kinds of problems you mentioned, and much of the Linux world is still as focused as ever on the OS itself and not on what you can (or can't) do with it.
I'm starting to think the era around 2010 was the golden age of personal computing, and since then the greed of hardware companies, software companies and (especially) online services is just making almost everything worse for users.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Guess I'll be the lone voice of sanity here. The Touch Bar is really, really useful - to the extent I am homing Apple makes an external keyboard that includes it so I can use one when docked...
As for staying at the high end, that is how Apple survives. Scrounging for tidbits even the rats wouldn't eat is a losing proposition but that is 90% of the PC market. Apple may lose marketshare because there are a flood of supper-crappy cheap laptops, but what does that percentage really matter in the long run? Not much, as tablets and phones continue to eat into the sheer number of computers purchased.
The only high-end area Apple is not really targeting is games, and who could say it would be a good idea fro them to do so? Let other companies make $8k laptops with three screens, Apple will continue to sit at the high end for professional hardware...
Long-Long term, I think you'll see Apple's work on chip design really pay off as Intel continues its slow decline. If you want to understand why there is no new Mac Pro, I don't think you have to look any further than Intel...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Omitting the fucking ESC key for one. Requiring expensive adaptors to connect pretty much anything is another. Or how about the fact that after 4 years it's barely faster in many benchmarks, or that they utterly rape you if you want to opt to increase the non-upgradable-flash-SSD-storage. Or that their touted battery life increases have not only not been borne out in practice, but people are having issues with the battery lasting 1/2 as long as before. Or that after all of that lack of innovation, they haven't even made it cheaper.
I have a 2012 MBP, and there wasn't any serious competition to it back then (even as a Windows laptop using Parallels). But after 4 years this is all they could do, and not even drop the price? It's a joke!
iPhone, check.
MBP, check.
iPad, check.
iPod Touch, check.
Time Capsule, check.
The Time Capsule's functionality hasn't really been added to. Yes, Apple does update the firmware every so often, but fundamentally, the device hasn't seen any fundamental improvements. Even an el cheapo 1 drive NAS like a Synology DS115 gets significant new stuff every so often. The "old" Apple would have had a Time Capsule automatically copy data to a cloud provider (be it iCloud or another), and if a Mac needed a restore, it would first try to hit the TC, then would redirect to where the cloud data is stored. Apple could make some money in selling multi-drive Time Capsules with built in RAID and the ability to back themselves up to the cloud (client-side encrypted, with a Secure Enclave built into the NAS) for peace of mind. People would pay a premium for a dual-drive TC with RAID 1, a good filesystem, encryption, backups to iCloud, and the ability to install a new Mac from the LAN. However, Apple seems uninterested in this market segment.
The MBP? A Dell XPS 13 is a better MBP than a 2016 13" MBP on the hardware front. The software front, it is obvious that macOS has the hind teat when it comes to improvements. Windows is winding up ahead of macOS just because Apple hasn't done anything to keep it going. While Apple might offer one or two new doodads, Microsoft adds functionality almost anywhere. The WSL is a nice thing, for example. Plus, Microsoft keeps upping its game on security. The Edge browser is supposedly going to be placed in its own Hyper-V VM, completely separating it from the OS. On the virtualization front, W10 comes with Hyper-V, while Apple has absolutely nada for this. The most significant thing in macOS is APFS... but that is mainly so iOS has better encryption, as opposed to be something designed for Macs only.
I would hate to have a desktop Mac. The Mac Mini hasn't been touched in years, and the last refresh was a four core to two core downgrade. The Mac Pro, Apple's flagship machine? Will it be five years before it sees a refresh? For a flagship machine, Apple should rebrand the canister Mac Pro as a high end desktop box, and make a true E-7 Xeon Mac Pro in the traditional tower case with closed loop water cooling.
The iPod Touch gets some items, every so often. Because of that, it does work well as an emergency authentication device, because apps work on it, although the platform is definitely not as popular as it used to be. However, with some work, it isn't dead yet. Apple could pitch it as a method of recovering access to websites and such should one lose their phone, especially with 2FA protected by a Secure Enclave chip.
The iPhone and the iPad are the only two items that are "blessed" by Apple, and it is pretty obvious that they have this status. They are the only devices that get significant new functionality every year, and have a constant refresh cycle.