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Apple Could Finally Sell More Devices Than Microsoft In 2017 (computerworld.com)
Gartner predicts Apple will ship more iOS and macOS devices in 2017 than Windows-powered devices "for the first time this century," and then increase their lead over the next two years. An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld:
Gartner predicted that iOS + macOS, unlike Windows, will recover in 2017. Apple's OSes will climb 8% to 268 million this year, add 3% in 2018 to reach 276 million, then increase another 3% in 2019, with that year's device shipment forecast at 285 million. Windows will dip this year, then stagnate for the following two years... The gap between Microsoft and Apple -- 12 million last year, with Microsoft atop -- will widen to 27 million by 2019, advantage Apple.
"The global devices market is stagnating," said Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal in a statement Wednesday. Mobile phone shipments are growing only in emerging markets in the Asia and Pacific markets, Atwal added, and noted that "The PC market is just reaching the bottom of its decline." The PC industry's troubles have affected Microsoft most of all; Windows is almost entirely dependent on PC shipments, which have been stuck in a protracted slump. Future shipments were further hit when Microsoft walked away from the smartphone business last year.
The article also points out that even in 2016, Windows devices came in second, and "accounted for approximately 11.2% of the total devices, which overwhelmingly ran Google's Android."
"The global devices market is stagnating," said Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal in a statement Wednesday. Mobile phone shipments are growing only in emerging markets in the Asia and Pacific markets, Atwal added, and noted that "The PC market is just reaching the bottom of its decline." The PC industry's troubles have affected Microsoft most of all; Windows is almost entirely dependent on PC shipments, which have been stuck in a protracted slump. Future shipments were further hit when Microsoft walked away from the smartphone business last year.
The article also points out that even in 2016, Windows devices came in second, and "accounted for approximately 11.2% of the total devices, which overwhelmingly ran Google's Android."
And every Android device sold gives Microsoft 5-15 dollars of pure profit because of licensing agreements.
To be fair, Microsoft has been making phone software far longer than Apple. Everyone forgets about it though, because it's been shit for 16+ years.
Apple has pretty much perfected the passive aggressive forced obsolescence thing.
They don't actively force you to upgrade anything. They just make sure you can't downgrade any of their handhelds (unless you take it into the service center, then you're getting upgraded to the latest iOS whether you want it or not- good chance if you've got an older device, this will intentionally cripple it by installing a slower OS).
All their software basically requires the latest greatest OS as soon as they're able to pull that off without pissing off the majority. Don't have the latest OS? Too bad for you, backwards compatibility hasn't been a thing since they dropped Rosetta support in 10.7. Then you run into stupid situations where your handheld doesn't want to sync with iTunes because iTunes is too old (even though all this shit should be standardized to the point that it doesn't matter), and you can't upgrade iTunes because that requires a new version of the OS, but the new version of the OS has fairly serious quirks on your current hardware... etc, etc, etc.
The hilarious thing is that most of the people I know who have money to spend... Basically just throw their hands up in the air, and run out and buy all new stuff. Which works for 2-3 years, until all the Apple software changes enough that things stop working again, and then they just do the exact same thing.
Meanwhile, Windows 10 will run on a... what, 10 year old computer? It's no wonder they're not selling more devices than Apple.