Linked by Jack Perry on Thu 3rd Jun 2004 17:55 UTC
It's all Waterloo-Maple's fault, really: if they had maintained a version of their computer algebra system for the Amiga, I wouldn't have found it necessary to switch to Mac. Or maybe it's Commodore's fault for mismanaging themselves into oblivion; I don't know. Either way, I became painfully aware three years ago that my little Amiga would no longer satisfy my computing needs. I needed a new home computer.
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It's true. I'm seeing tons of Macs at every conference I've been to in the last year or so. At the last workshop (on *compilers*, no less) it looked like iBooks and PowerBooks had at least 20% market share. Every few days I notice somebody coming out of the bookstore with a new iBook or PB box.
I just bought a PowerBook about 9 months ago--the first person in my lab to do so. It hasn't been a totally smooth transition (from Linux) and I'm not in love with Apple as a company (I think they would be just as bad or worse than MS if their roles were reversed) but it's definitely the most exciting machine I've ever owned, both in terms of hardware and software. It's like the Porsche of laptop computers.
A labmate recently said that he was considering an Apple for his next laptop. This is pretty incredible, since the guy's primary line of research involves heavily hacking the Linux kernel and Linux is not terribly well supported on modern Apple laptops. The thing is, he's been really impressed by how well my machine works and he would be willing to do his research in an *emulated* Linux system if it meant he could "live" in OS X.
I like this trend, but I don't know if it can save Apple. The educational market is big, but the general consumer market is where you need to win if you want to make the big money. Hopefully Apple's progress in the educational market will act as a "hearts and minds" lever to get a bigger market share in the general market.