“Apple’s CEO says it’s tough times for corporate and education sales–but consumers are still buying. His biggest challenge? Convince the majority of Apple users to switch to OS X. […] At the start of the year, Apple had only 1 million of its 25 million Mac owners actively using OS X. That number is now in the range of 1.5 million to 2 million, although about 3 million Macs have been sold with the new OS on the hard drive. However, Jobs remains confident the company can end the year with 5 million OS X users.” Read the report at News.com. Update: TheRegister features an article where they chat with Apple’s Tevanian on Windows CIFS, networked Quartz.
Steve Jobs: OS X Marks the Spot
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
my heart flutters when I hear about it 🙂
a MILLION people bought Macs running OS X and ripped it out? That hardly bodes well.
Where’d you get that from? 2 million existing users upgrading, 3 million new machines sold with osx
just give away the OS, its not like they are making money from upgrades (And if they are, it cant be much), and its not like they can run it on anything but an Mac anyhow.
I have used, supported and programmed for Mac’s for the last 15 years, but I finally bought my own “personal” Mac this year ( the iMac G4, fully loaded ).
This is my first experience with OSX and I have to say that it a world of difference from the non-preemptive, non-threaded, very unstable ( in comparison to OSX ) MacOS 9 and below.
Anyone that does NOT use OSX ( especially when it comes preinstalled and the default OS ), is just being sentimental.
The same comparison can be made between Windows ME and Win2K/XP. The workstation features alone are worth the price of admission, for those who share a computer with other family members.
At the start of the year, Apple had only 1 million of its 25 million Mac owners actively using OS X. That number is now in the range of 1.5 million to 2 million, although about 3 million Macs have been sold with the new OS on the hard drive.
3 million OS X Macs were sold, but there are only 2 million people using OS X, even if you’re generous with the numbers.
That means a million people that bought OS X macs ripped OS X off. More actually, since some people have installed it on machines that didn’t originally have it.
The fact that 1/3 to 1/2 of the people buying a machine with OS X are removing it reflects poorly upon it.
Hey – Love OS X to Death, but being an Audio Pro
means occasionally having to boot into OS 9 to use
ALL MY HARDWARE THAT IS STILL UNSUPPORTED BY OS X.
(And I’ve been disgustingly patient for a year+ now)
Example:
In OS 9 -> Hey, look – My MOTU 2408 MKii works !
In OS X -> Hey, look – My MOTU IS A $1000 dollar rack space warmer !!
Wassup with that ?!
Thanks MOTU !!! You wasted NO TIME getting XP drivers out,
How about a little something for your OS X users, ya lazy
non-commital biznitches ?!
Grrrrrrrr
p.s. don’t EVEN get me started on Pro Tools.
Until recently, OS X was installed along with OS 9 … so it doesn’t mean that people were REMOVING OS X – it just means they may have it and aren’t using it.
Not that ‘having it and not using it’ is a great thing … but they may not be doing it for reasons such as needing a legacy app that won’t run under X. Those reasons should slowly disappear as app developers release OS X native applications.
“3 million OS X Macs were sold, but there are only 2 million people using OS X, even if you’re generous with the numbers.
That means a million people that bought OS X macs ripped OS X off. More actually, since some people have installed it on machines that didn’t originally have it.
The fact that 1/3 to 1/2 of the people buying a machine with OS X are removing it reflects poorly upon it.”
rebuttal:
1) Photoshop just got ported to Carbon (making it run natively in OS X). Many people are still waiting for laggard companies to finish up with various key productivity apps.
2) Scanning still sucks in OS X– thus some people still use 9 for hardware reasons.
3) Most people probably didn’t DELETE OS X– they just are booting into 9 instead.
4)IMHO– as a long time (since ’89) Mac user– there are a fair number of little UI things and bugs that irk me about OS X (I use 10.1). But overall, I LOVE it. No looking back for me. Though I rarely crashed my OS 9 very much, OS X handles threads WAY better. I can’t see why people would be holding back from using it. I like the look, also; and the non-modality. If I get a dialog box in Windows 2000 or OS 9, for example, I HAVE to interact and hit “OK” or whatever (say I am accepting a cookie on the web or something). In OS X, I can ignore it, tend to other user processes and get back to it when I want. A small thing, but cool.
I use to hate Macs. I was young and stubborn, guilty as charged. If it weren’t for OSX, I would still be hating Macs.
Quote from imaginereno:
Anyone that does NOT use OSX ( especially when it comes preinstalled and the default OS ), is just being sentimental.
“is just being sentimental” that last line sums up what I think is the reason why the Mac platform fell behind Wintel. It surprises me that a platform such as the Mac, which aims at creative people, and encourages people to “think different,” and is known as an innovator of cool designs and ideas, but for all those reasons Apple still burrows itself in a niche and doesn’t expand to target other areas of the technology industry. Why did it take Apple so long to get a rack mount server out, when x86 based servers have been in use for years? Why can’t AppleWorks have as much power and support backing and do what Office does for Windows? (make it popular in the office).
imaginereno is saying that people who are still attached to older MacOSes are being sentimental. The same could be said about Apple. They’re still doing all their hardware in-house rather than allow “clones” to be made. I think Apple is being over sentimental with their hardware designs. There would be much more growth in the Mac platform if more companies were involved in the research and development. On the other hand, many people would argue that the fact that Apple has complete control over the design of their systems is what makes them so great. I can appreciate that fact too, because there are far less viri written that target the Mac.
There is a value in settling down with hardware and software that just works. You get more work done. I just think that if we’re too quick to be satisfied, the demand for innovation goes down, and the effort to innovate will follow.
I’m done rambling.
At least HALF of those 25million mac users are using G3’s or less. Until OS X can run as quick as 9, their not gonna get a lot of upgrades.
Apple sold millions of g3 iMacs with 16MB or less Rage128’s. Now with the next X update a lot of the GUIness is being offloaded from the CPU to the CPU – IF you have a HTL 32Mb video.
Its great that OS X will take advantage of the newer hardware; I wouldn’t hope otherwise. But running OS X on an iMac G3 is like running WinXP on a Pentium II. Sure, you can do it but WIN98 for a PII is a better choice for many, just like OS 9 will be for many G3 iMac users.
But running OS X on an iMac G3 is like running WinXP on a Pentium II.OS X on a G3 600 isn’t too bad. Sure, not very fast – but the iMacs weren’t meant to be speed deamons (i hope). You can always upgrade your older iMacs to a 500 or 600 mhz.
http://sonnettech.com/product/harmoni_g3.html
That number is now in the range of 1.5 million to 2 million, although about 3 million Macs have been sold with the new OS on the hard drive.
That’s sad!
they did not do rack mounts with os 9 becasue that would be a joke. OS X needed to get to a point that it would do somthing usfull on the server.
apple does all the hardware becasue that is part of there design…you could not have a mac platform that interoperates so well if you did not have total control over the entire system.do you think there would be half as much inovation on the mac platform if it turned into commodity hardware like the x86 platform? helll no.
I don’t have a link to back this, but I do recall reading somewhere that the U.S. military use to use OS 8 (or something like that) for their web servers because there was no way of remotely connecting to the system (excuse me, remotely administer the system). Sys Admins would freak out if they couldn’t remotely connect to a server with administrator privledges, but think about it. Disabling remote admin means you’re eliminating a ton of security holes and potential for hacking.
My point is, even with older OSes the Mac platform could still be a decent server. And to clarify, I was not implying that the Mac platform should be more like x86. I like things the way they are, but I just want to see more.
>>OS X on a G3 600 isn’t too bad. Sure, not very fast – but the iMacs weren’t meant to be speed deamons (i hope). You can always upgrade your older iMacs to a 500 or 600 mhz.<<
For some people though, using a *slightly* dated OS that runs a bit faster is worth it. . .
Its not worth it to me . . . I am posting this via an iMac DV 400mhz 384MB RAM running OS X. Sure OS 9 is a little faster, but X has the Dev Tools CD, a command line, better multitasking, stability etc. etc. OS X is the only reason I bought a Mac (this one is my first). I’m just saying, among iMac G3 owners, I’m probably a minority.
It does kinda suck that the Rev A-D iMacs can get speed bumped, but nothing for the DV/SEs (yet?).
I’m a longtime PC user that just took my first Mac plunge (Final Cut Pro 3 and DVD burning). When I first got my Mac, there was one program that still had to run natively in OS 9. I upgraded it as fast as I could.
I had to use OS 8 and 9 a lot in grad school and to be honest, I never really thought a lot (bad or good) about the pre- OS X interfaces. Windows did it one way, pre-OS X Mac’s did it another. I never experienced that WOW factor. I did experience tons of show stopping crashes however, and for that reason alone, I was determined to spend as much of my Mac time in OS X.
I’m fortunate enough to have a Mac that can handle OS X pretty easily, but I’m still disappointed in the occasional slowdowns. The dock is pretty cool, but I guess I like the start menu better in some ways. Overall though, whatever beefs I might have with OS X (almost none to be honest, really a beautiful experience), I will accept them with open arms because of OS X’s stability (same goes with the NT core on Windows, I jumped all over win 2000 and xp).
Once the Jaguar update comes out this summer, OS X will finally start achieving everything it’s capable of.
“Anyone that does NOT use OSX ( especially when it comes preinstalled and the default OS ), is just being sentimental.”
Oh.. you only forgot about the 99% of the Mac users whose main purpose of usage is Photoshop. Well, my GF works in an agency with about 150-200 Macs. She’s got her G4 brand new recently with OS X preinstalled and they kicked it off straight away…why? Because PS is a pain on OS X. This may change now where PS 7 is released, then again, if they don’t buy the upgrade, she’ll stick with OS 9…
W98, W2K, XP all run equally fast, provided all systems have like 256 MB RAM. You can find it for yourself or follow several benchmarks online…
Uh, why is everything bold I guessed some one forgot to close the bold tag.
I’m a Windows (currently XP) user and I have one comment…
Mac OSX is SEXY. Just look at all the OSX clones for StyleXP and you’ll see how much people want their windows boxes to look like OSX
Oh.. you only forgot about the 99% of the Mac users whose main purpose of usage is Photoshop.
I think you will soon be surprised. I really feel that in the near future, UNIX geeks will uproot the traditional Mac users as the new target audience. It seems to me that it is just a matter of time before out image of typical Mac user goes from the “graphics professional” to more Main stream users and UNIX geeks.