Steve Jobs says analysts should stop worrying about market share and focus on profits. And moving the company beyond Macs could boost both. Yet Apple’s market share has slipped inexorably. It dropped from 9.4% in 1993 to just 3% in 1997, the year Jobs was rehired to run the company. According to Gartner’s preliminary market-share data, Apple held just 1.8% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2003. And some think Apple’s share will fall further, if it can’t keep pace with surging overall PC demand. In the meantime, the Street yawned when Jobs & Co. recently reported strong results, citing slack sales of the new G5 and ignoring plenty of good news.
A Better Measure of Apple’s Success?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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the beaten expectations were factored in with speculation in the week or so running up to the profit anouncment and then people took their profits.
the world wide market share numbers are accurate, but all it says is that Apple has not moved into Asia and Africa like PCs did.
that is where all the new PC sales have come from. Americans still buy the most crap, and that is why Apple still makes so much money.
The African market is still growing very slowly (The entire continent has less Internet connections than the state of New York). However, yeap, they are dropping it in the Asian market – but their market share for the American market isn’t too rosy either.
What is its current market share?
Apple needs to drop their extremely high prices. Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple, and always will, but their prices are just way to frigging much for most people.
Apple has great technology, and beautiful, aesteticly pleasing hardware and OS, but the prices are just not kosher.
I believe that if Apple were to drop their prices by like 30% they would attract more business. If they could attract more business, in four or five years they might be able to drop their prices another 10% and they’d really be able to compete with the PC market.
nevermind I skimmed over the 1.8% statistic, I was always under the impression that they were closer to 8%.
How far will Jobs let market share slip before they either offer apple with a PC processor or realease OSX for the PC?
> I was always under the impression that they were closer to 8%.
No. All big statistical firms were placing MacOS & X between 3% and 2% the last 2 years. And now (end of 2003), IDC says that Apple has fallen further down, to 1.8%.
and it wasn’t to MacOS but from. I’ve been running linux for a while now and have found that it completely meets my needs (surpasses them at time too).
I’d love to purchase a new G5 but considering all the other important things I must throw money at this year, a new Apple won’t be one.
This Linux PC cobbled together right after losing my job 2 years ago, cost me less than $1000 at the time. Since then, the skills learned with it have found me the job I had been dreaming about for years.
Apple really makes amazing hardware and software, but if they’re going to compete, prices must go down.
The reason Apple did not disclose the split of iPod sales between Mac and Windows is that soon there will be more iPods in use than OS X Macs in use, making the issue startingly clear:
Apple is doomed as a computer maker.
This is the reason that Apple has suddenly gotten all hot and bothered regarding music.
The Apple backchannel strategy is to accumulate software which would sell well on Windows (or perhaps OS X86), giving Apple some options as their hardware business starts failing faster and faster.
In the meantime, though, Apple is making pretty little iApps but has no one to sell them to.
As many of suggested, Apple needs major price cuts to stay around. The top of the line G5 could easily have $1000 shaved off of its pricetag. I could imagine Apple would sell many more dual 2Ghz G5’s at $1999.
There’s no way a little plastic mushroom computer with zero expandability or upgradeabilty should cost more than $999. Apple also needs a headless machine that costs less than the iMac.
Simply put, Apple must move past their cultish and emotionally needy corporate culture and create a vision which includes all computer users, not just Mac-ro-cultie$.
How far will Jobs let market share slip before they either offer apple with a PC processor or realease OSX for the PC?
They’d be eaten alive in the PC market. It really bothers me how people keep asking for Apple to convert to x86, they don’t understand what that’d really mean (or atleast, most likely). I dont think we’ll ever seen OSX run on a walmart pc, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I’m planning on switching to Mac within a few months. The iBook is just too damn tempting (and VERY well priced, especially with an educational discount
Apple, Intel both posted earnings the same day. Intel posted record numbers, but from the earnings date, it’s down about 10% (about the same as Apple). In other words, you can’t gauge success based on one day’s result from the market. At the very least, compare months, quarters, if not years.
Anyone who is seriously looking for an alternative platform should give a look to OSX. Take a trip to any local store carrying mac’s(an apple store if you’re very lucky) and give it try. You might be quite surprised by the results. It combines the ease of use of any modern OS, and the powerful features of unix/linux. It’s great when things “just work” when I want them to, and then again I can get down and “hack it” when I need to. You can even go so far as hack the kernel, recompile it, and use it. Apple releases the source of many of it’s OSX apps and internals.
>> It really bothers me how people keep asking for Apple to convert to x86, they don’t understand what that’d really mean (or atleast, most likely). I dont think we’ll ever seen OSX run on a walmart pc, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I completely agree with you on the hardware question, but it may not be such a bad idea after all. If the increase in sales at ITMS is an indication, there are many people on the PC side who are recognize Apple as a brand they can rely on for quality stuff like Quicktime, iTunes and iPods, who would be more than willing to buy the OS on a hardware platform they already own.
As for me, I’ve been suffering from OSX withdrawal since I changed jobs : its XP + Linux now where I work, and since there is no way my employer would buy me a new Mac, a dual-booting system like I have now with linux seems like the only viable option, in which case its not that far-fetched either.
i find it surprising to believe emachines sells more computers than apple. emachines has moved in top five, surpassing both apple and gateway.
i believe this decline could have been prevented if steve jobs had not kill the clones.
i think there is a market for POWERPC power computing style mac’s running os x, but using industry standard form factor like atx, components, like atx case, keyboard, mouse, etc.
that is exactly what power computing did. lowers cost.
personally i think apple should port os x to amd64, and allow cloners to sell such machines, like emachines.
Apple is GROWING, not shrinking. Their profits are at record highs and there are more Macs out there then, possibly, ever before. Why is the marketshare percentage so low then?
First, even though the Apple install base is growing, the PC install base is growing significantly faster, especially world-wide. This causes the percentage to shink even as total numbers rise.
Second, Macs are more reliable and remain productive for MUCH longer then PCs in general. Marketshare is sales, not install base, and so its not a good way to compare Apples install base with that of PCs.
Also of note: Apples market share is all theirs, while the PC market share is actually the combined marketshare of HUNDREDS of PC makers, most of which survive on razon thin margins, if they survive at all.
Apple is doing so well, Id say Dell is more likly to fail, by far.
Apple is not doomed. even if their market share slipped to 0.01% (for the sake of argument). Apple has always prided itself on quality and that comes at a price. Why does it need to sell to people on tighter budgets just to be considered succesful? The overall number of mac users is increasing (if slowly).
If apple did slip to 0.01%, provided they keep making products that play nicely with the other 99.99. and provided they keep adding value in exchange for a higher price tag, they will always be my (and millions of others) first choice.
Can you say irrelevance?
I mean _really_ unless they engage the cloners or come up with something *SO* compelling that the world beats a path to their door, then they will become nothing more than a stlyist studio much like Guigario is to automobiles.
People must also realise that it is 1.8% of a growing global computer market. This has been stated many times. It also doesn’t really represent the truth about percentage of computer users because a lot of the basis of this statistic is sale of new computers. So it would be more fair to say that apple is selling 1.8% of the computers that are sold every year. Or that Apple is 1.8% of the computers that are out there which is down because of the increasing number of computers being used.
“i believe this decline could have been prevented if steve jobs had not kill the clones.”
Ah you know that nearly bankrupted Apple – thats why in the late 90’s every analist was predicting the end of apple untill Steve Jobs came back and he killed the cloning – if they were to do it they should have done it early on and not when they started doing it.
“personally i think apple should port os x to amd64, and allow cloners to sell such machines, like emachines.”
I don’t know why people don’t get this yet, Apple considers itself to mainly be a hardware company that also makes some really great software. If anything hardware people should move to the PowerPC archetecture and not just put an intel chip on a motherboard and slap it inside a plain grey box and think they’ve done something great. The PowerPC chip archetecture is a more advanced chip than anything intel makes. When I switched to Mac OS X from Windows I was hoping IBM would give the PowerPC chip what it deserves.
I agree that Apples prices need to drop a bit, but many people forget that the PowerMac G5 is designed for Profesionals and people who need serious power in a machine. I think the headless iMac idea would be a good thing though.
“emachines outsells apple”
Ford outsells Ferrari & BMW does that mean much no. Though I would love for Apple to expand it’s marketshare, it needs to start moving in a direction to make nice Macs that still look good, are very functional and yet have a lower price.
Apple had ~10% in 93, 3% in 97, and has 1.8% market share today. What does that mean? That means that Apple is selling fewer macs than all other computers are selling worldwide on average. This is true and is undeniable. However, that does not mean that they are selling fewer Macs than they were last year and does not mean that they are making less money than they were last year. In fact it doesn’t even mean that they are selling fewer macs than their was last year. What it shows is that all other computes are still selling to a greater and greater number of people than they were last year.
But is this statistic meaningful? What kind of “computers” are we talking about here? Are we talking about servers, desktops, laptops, embedded computers or clusters? We are talking about all of these numbers combined. Does that make sense? Why would apple, a consumer and Pro desktop and laptop maker be lumped in with every consumer and business desktop and laptop, server, and embedded computer maker? Wouldn’t it make more sense to compare Apple to other consumer destop and laptop makers like Dell, HP, Gateway and Emachines? Why would you lump them in with IBM, Sun, and Wind River? Would you lump saab in with every maker of cars, trucks, vans, SUVs, golf carts, tracter trailers, and earth movers and then laugh at their pitiful worldwide market share?
I have heard a statistic that pentium processors are used in something like 1% of all electronic devices worldwide. Why is that statistic not brought up so often like Apple’s market share is? Linux’s market share is suppose to be < 1% right now and that statistic is almost never quoted. So why is their this obsession with Apple’s market share? I think it is because Apple is the only computer maker besides Microsoft that makes an interesting product. From the comments in this thead it seems that a lot of people would be using a Mac right now if not for <insert reason here>.
So forget the market share numbers, forget the “expert” opinions and the misleading statistics– just use what you like and don’t worry about it so much. If you want a Mac, get a Mac, if you want a PC, get a PC. Both are great choices and both have their strengths and weaknesses.
Skipp
They are not going to last long as a hardware vendor for a expensive niche market. Yet they have shown the world that when it comes to software they know how to design good apps and a great OS that people like to use. Apple should start getting it’s major pieces ready to ditch it’s hardware or at least open it up to the Dell’s of the world and then using it’s already entrenched OS in the PPC realm they can become the next MS or give MS a run for it’s money on the PC side. In fact I think that it would be better that they should not ditch the PPC platform but instead open it up to the Dell’s and Gateways of the world. They can then focus on creating a kick arse Office and maintian their great OS.
“This is true and is undeniable. However, that does not mean that they are selling fewer Macs than they were last year and does not mean that they are making less money than they were last year. In fact it doesn’t even mean that they are selling fewer macs than their was last year. ”
No it mean that they are making less money then they made 10-15 years ago. It’s a slow decline but no less a decline in profits over a long time.
The PowerPC chip archetecture is a more advanced chip than anything intel makes. When I switched to Mac OS X from Windows I was hoping IBM would give the PowerPC chip what it deserves.
And why exactly is it better? Cause it’s RISC? Actually, chips like G5 do the same old trick of decoding commands into simplified internal representation that x86 CPUs did.
“re:So forget the market share numbers, forget the “expert” opinions and the misleading statistics– just use what you like and don’t worry about it so much. If you want a Mac, get a Mac, if you want a PC, get a PC. Both are great choices and both have their strengths and weaknesses.”
as an ex-be enthusiast, i would like to do what you suggest but look what has happened to be os
“Second, Macs are more reliable and remain productive for MUCH longer then PCs in general. Marketshare is sales, not install base, and so its not a good way to compare Apples install base with that of PCs.”
This is a bunch of bull and you know it ! I got an old 450mhz and 1ghz running as good as they were when I first got them. Both can run Linux or W2k with no problems. I have seen more then my share of dead IMacs and EMacs laying around in the labs at work to tell you that Apple’s so called reliablity is not what everyone makes it out to be.
Anonymous (IP: —.client.comcast.net)
“This is a bunch of bull and you know it ! I got an old 450mhz and 1ghz running as good as they were when I first got them. Both can run Linux or W2k with no problems. I have seen more then my share of dead IMacs and EMacs laying around in the labs at work to tell you that Apple’s so called reliablity is not what everyone makes it out to be.”
Everyone has different stories, but I do believe Macs (as well as Sun machines and others) are, in general, more reliable. How many nearly twenty year old PCs do you know are still running reliably with all original hardware? I have an old SE/30 that runs fine, and my g/f has a beige G3 that she hasn’t yet replaced because she simply doesn’t need to, it runs and runs. PCs are not inherently unstable, many are quite stable – but in general they can be quite shoddy. A low end PC is often horrible, and I doubt anyone will argue otherwise.
Kobold (IP: —.vc.shawcable.net)
“And why exactly is it better? Cause it’s RISC? Actually, chips like G5 do the same old trick of decoding commands into simplified internal representation that x86 CPUs did.”
Um, no they don’t. Decode into what? Its already RISC.
Goblyn (IP: —.port.east.verizon.net)
“Apple needs to drop their extremely high prices. Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple, and always will, but their prices are just way to frigging much for most people.”
Their prices are not “extremely” high, the G5s are cheaper then comparable dual Xeon or Opteron machines. I do think they need a cheaper low end model, but the eMac now sells for $799 and thats quite a start. Their primary target continues to be loyal, graphic shops are not going to convert to PC en masse any time soon. Not to mention that in many niches their growing, such as scientific and engineering.
Das Omen (IP: —.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net)
“The reason Apple did not disclose the split of iPod sales between Mac and Windows is that soon there will be more iPods in use than OS X Macs in use, making the issue startingly clear:
Apple is doomed as a computer maker.”
Their hardly doomed. Their profitable while Dell stumbled into the red, and their doomed? They continue to sell millions of Macs and more and more people are converting over. No, not at a high enough rate to grow their over all market share – but their hardly doomed. There are tens of millions of Macs in use worldwide, and I have strong doubts there are nearly that many iPods around. Sure, I think its possible in the future – but not the near future.
Nobody cares about gucci’s market share.
What apple needs to do is continue aligning itself with linux. Let linux deal with the low end and apple can occupy the designer segment of the desktop unix market.
If you look at the combined unix desktop market share over the last few years it has been growing. The asian market seems to be all over linux lately.
Apple has been positioning itself for a while to benifit from linux’s sucess, but I do think they need to step it up a bit. To me the biggest thing that needs to be done is for apple to create an osx native port of gtk (+ the different gtk language bindings), and ship it with osx. If done right gtk apps will be just like any other native app. It would be just another native toolkit like Carbon and Cocoa.
Um, no they don’t. Decode into what? Its already RISC.
Into smaller uops. Check this out: http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/g5.html
—-8<—-
The G5 does instruction cracking and microcoding. A number of PowerPC instructions are divided up into two or more internal instructions called microoperations (µops). Those that are broken into two are said to be cracked. Such instructions take up two spaces in the dispatch group. Those that are broken into three or more are said to be microcoded, and take up an entire dispatch group unto themselves. No AltiVec instructions are cracked or microcoded, though vector stores have a vector and LSU component that is visible in the simulator. These only take up one slot in the dispatch group, but take up two issue queue slots as per other stores — one in the LSU and one in the vector store unit.
—-8<—-
Sounds familiar to the crappy x86 CPUs that use inferior instruction set and decode everything into RISC inside? Well, now the RISC CPUs break their instructions into uops, which are even “more RISC”.
In light of Apple’s unfortunate diminishing market share, perhaps Apple should begin bundling and maintaining open source software on their well designed and integrated hardware. What stops Apple from integrating, polishing and selling Linux on the G5? Heck, IBM, HP, SUN, Novell and even Microsoft, to mention a few, are doing just that. Why not Apple?
While the idea sounds radical, a radical solution is what I think Apple needs to continue surviving in this hard times. Times are changing, but it seems Apple is adamant and stock on doing things their own way, the utopian elitist way, while sacrificing unreasonable tradeoffs. Afterall, software is fast becoming a comodity, nothing stops Apple from being a Linux vendor, especially to cut cost, diversify its customers and gain potentially new market share.
I’ll probably get flamed for this suggestion. Pfft!
If Apple were to release a super low price $400 Mac and increased market share to 10%, it wouldn’t do much to increase the availability of Mac software.
If the average buyer spends less than $600 on their PC, they’re probably not going to pay $400 for a software package to put on it. I know a huge number of people who have NEVER purchased any software other than a game or two.
Apple is doing something right, or they wouldn’t have survived all these years.
From the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”
Jobs to Gates: “We’re better than you.”
Gates to Jobs: “You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter.”
Come and join the lemmings! NEVER!!!!
Why on earth would ANYONE buy a Mac that came preloaded with Linux?? The whole point of buying a Mac is to have the user experience associated with a Mac (Mac OS). If I wanted a computer to run Linux on I would go out and buy a cheap(er) PC. OS X certainly has its quirks, but I believe that it is the best system available today, which is why I own a Mac.
that’s right. note the the time you save when you just use mac, a complete hardware and software solution. moreover, compare prices on new dual 64-bit intel and compatible boxes and on g5 boxes. and that’s right, your mac will serve you much longer.
Dual Itaniums? Itanic was never really born. Why don’t you compare to dual Opterons instead?
I still think the reason for success of x86 architecture and the OS that runs on top of it is because of the accessibility of development. I mean, I’ll develop for Windows because their tools are the easiest and I’ll reach the greatest user base. I’ll develop for Linux because I can get a lot of help through Open Source. Is there any reason for people to develop for Macs?
lol, doomed.
We humans really are special creatures. We declare fictional prophecies as factual for the sole reason- to make ourself believe such bullshit
If you want to live in a delusional state Das Omen, then please yourself. I can only hope others can laugh at such ignorance.
For those that can’t- let me help you.
We all owe our modern computing experience to the Apple Macintosh; this is a fact
Apple computer, the company has and is leading the industry with innovation; this is a fact
The Macintosh is still the primary computer in use within the creative markets. this is a fact
Apple computer is pioneering the digital music age. this is a fact
OS X is the most refined OS we have to date. this is a fact
Microsoft are still copying Apple design and innovation. this is a fact
I could go on and on. This is hardy a company near the point of doom.. LOL its just stupidity to declare such naive comments as factual.
And as far as overall market-share is concerned: Do any of you actually know the market-share of Mac / PC’s? or are u just reading internet articles and believing what you want to hear?
The sad fact is, marketing muscle runs deeper than man of you would know. this is also, a fact
At least in Germany, Mac sales are increasing much more than regular PC sales. Especially the new iBooks (I got one and love it) are selling like hot cakes.
To me this is a clear indication that Apple needs to offer more reasonably priced (like a headless Mac!!!) hardware.
I’d certainly like to see a fanless G4 Cube @ 1.25 GHz for 800 bucks.
The United States of America contains approximatly one percent (1%) of the worlds population. Wow, we must be pretty much irrelevent huh?
Perspective people. As others keep saying, 1.8% of the computer market is a HUGE number of people, and more then enough to be a real relevent alternative.
how’s this for an idea.
take linux for amd’s x86-64 cpu.
aquafiy its interface, port openstep for it, so that it can run cocoa native applications, port unique iapps
and sell this linux OS for cloners who sell amd64 processors.
it would only run linux and cocoa native apps so it would not directly compete with apple.
We all owe our modern computing experience to the Apple Macintosh; this is a fact
I don’t owe IDEs, gcc, perl, command line shell, X, VNC, web browsing, FTP server, HTTP server, wiki, email, instant messenging, IRC and p2p file sharing to Apple (as far as I know, feel free to correct me). Apple did lots of nice stuff, but they are nowhere near “all”.
Apple computer, the company has and is leading the industry with innovation; this is a fact
Nope, the folks who lead the industry are people who just happened to get a good idea. Companies buy them out.
Apple computer is pioneering the digital music age. this is a fact
Buying out music software and setting up a kinda good music store isn’t pioneering digital music age. Making a good fashionable device that also functions as MP3 player isn’t pioneering digital age. What else did they do to “pioneer” it?
It appears the website I found the population numbers on did not calculate the percentage properly, and the US actually has about 4% of the population. I should have checked their numbers. (it was probably a faulty script)
Still, ths US is far more influential then the population might imply.
“personally i think apple should port os x to amd64, and allow cloners to sell such machines, like emachines.”
Where do people get the idea Apple could make OSX run on anything but their own hardware…..???
Most of their success (if you really care to call it that) centers around making an OS run on very few pieces of hardware. Every other company/individual on the planet would love to create an OS that only needed to support a couple different motherboards, a few chipsets, and other limited edition hardware, it makes things really simple in comparison to Linux or Windows for that matter.
Ever wonder why a Mac is so stable? Simple… They control the entire process, hardware, drivers, you name it…. Any other OS on the globe could perform with similar results given that working environment.
Apple needs a decent low end IMO. Powermac and powerbook as high end, iMac and ibook as middle end, eMac and eBook as low end. With the G5 in the high and middle end, they have the room to make *decent* and cheap machines in the low end. They can use those new G3+Altivec processors from IBM, and finally ditch Motorola.
Kobold (IP: —.vc.shawcable.net) – Posted on 2004-01-26 10:10:02
I don’t owe IDEs, gcc, perl, command line shell, X, VNC, web browsing, FTP server, HTTP server, wiki, email, instant messenging, IRC and p2p file sharing to Apple (as far as I know, feel free to correct me). Apple did lots of nice stuff, but they are nowhere near “all”.
“all” meaning- All computer users. Please, refrain from taking things out of context- your embarrassing yourself
Nope, the folks who lead the industry are people who just happened to get a good idea. Companies buy them out.
And who did Apple ‘buy out’ to build the original Macintosh? ..lol
Buying out music software and setting up a kinda good music store isn’t pioneering digital music age. Making a good fashionable device that also functions as MP3 player isn’t pioneering digital age. What else did they do to “pioneer” it?
iTunes was built from the ground up. Sorry to inform you- it wasn’t bought from anyone. And secondly to answer your question:
v. pi·o·neered, pi·o·neer·ing, pi·o·neers
v. tr.
To open up (an area) or prepare (a way)
To settle (a region).
To initiate or participate in development
Im sure your clever enough to work it out
Look at the numbers from a different angle and you’ll see that 4% of the world’s population in a single state makes USA the third largest state by population. (China and India being significantly larger.)
Just because a number appears to be small, doesn’t mean it is small.
“all” meaning- All computer users. Please, refrain from taking things out of context- your embarrassing yourself
Sorry. The thing is – I owe a lot less to Apple then I owe to university teams and small innovating companies that got bought out. Apple probably is in the list, but it is quite far behind other folks.
And who did Apple ‘buy out’ to build the original Macintosh? ..lol
And just how old is original Mac? Their current “innovations” have a lot more buyouts.
iTunes was built from the ground up. Sorry to inform you- it wasn’t bought from anyone. And secondly to answer your question:
iTunes was built by folks who wrote Soundjam. So Apple bought out their ideas (rather then code directly).
its not the Street thats yawning, its all those people who’s seen it over and over again how critics keep prophesizing the death of Apple. How mundane … Every fortyear or so, sounding the deathknell of Apple comes into fashion again.
The funniest thing is, this time Apple is relatively stronger than its ever been! It never had an industrial strength OS which everone acclaims as technically superior to what its on the market, well now they do. They never had a processor powerful enough to shut the critics up, well now they do. Apples installed base is bigger than its ever been before. They’ve got other supporting products to make a whole comprehensive soltuion for consumers which never existed before. All around the industry, theres aclaim and begrudging respect for the products that are coming out of the company. Things are looking even brighter today then ever … yet the criticisms will keep coming as usual (yawn), heheh and in another quarter, year, decade … Apple will still be here making the products that people want to buy, like they always have been. Business as usual.
Kobold (IP: —.vc.shawcable.net)
And just how old is original Mac? Their current “innovations” have a lot more buyouts.
While you have a valid point- you also re affirm my original comment.
‘We all owe our modern computing experience to the Apple Macintosh; this is a fact”
if it wasn’t for the inception of the Macintosh computer- we would ‘all’ have been subjected to flounder around in the command line for a greater amount of time, which in turn wouldn’t have given rise to the many other technologies that were developed as a consequence. Its age is of no relevance to its importance.
I am surpassed to see so many people disregard what happened in 1984. People are quick to forget…
Devon (IP: —.client.comcast.net)
“The United States of America contains approximatly one percent (1%) of the worlds population. Wow, we must be pretty much irrelevent huh?”
Its actually higher then that, the US has nearly 300 million people at this point and the world population is around 5 billion – thats quite a significant chunk. We’re not the most populous nation on earth, but we’re top five.
if it wasn’t for the inception of the Macintosh computer- we would ‘all’ have been subjected to flounder around in the command line for a greater amount of time, which in turn wouldn’t have given rise to the many other technologies that were developed as a consequence. Its age is of no relevance to its importance.
I am not sure if that would be the case. Multiple groups of people came up with wheel independently. Someone would come up with GUI of some sort eventually. Apple just happened to be one of the first companies to get into it. Maybe our windows would not be overlapping, or our GUI primitives would be different, but someone would have invented it for sure.
For the people who say Apple is doomed: “To say that Apple is doomed, is like saying Darl McBride and SCO will win the lawsuit against IBM” Apple create the PC revolution, they have been around since the begining, they are still making a profit and I think they will for a very long time.
Unfortunately for your sad analogy, Bentleys don’t require a different type of gas (software) then other cars.
The reason why people do not buy Mac’s is mostly for one reason… PRICE.
I do not believe Apples are overpriced at all. You have to see that you could not purchase a computer 10 years ago under 4000 smackers. The only reason why Apple looks so expensive is because of crap companies such as PDQ who makes ultra cheap (CHEAP = CRAP) CDRWs, and Amptron who makes quite possibly the worst motherboard in the world, but is priced less expensive. It has consumers thinking they can buy a computer for as cheap as $200. As a matter of a fact, Frys every once in a while sells a computer for $99 that has Linux loaded. This is killing the whole market. Everyone is running on so tight of a budget, they will all fail in the future.
‘tosses his two cents
it doesnt help that Dell sells a crippled machine with a flatscreen monitor and free fellatio. This completly kills the market… and it’s all to sell one more computer than the next guy. That’s why I do not work on Windows Computers any longer, this market has gone to hell.
Re: Kobold
RISC processor is better than a CISC processor because the newer 90nm G5 cpus use around 24W to operate. The previous 130nm G5s released last June used 51W. The 3.2 Ghz P4’s from Intel currently suck more than 100W of power. That’s roughly 2-4 times more efficient at equal or faster speeds in performance.
i’d highly doubt your zealotry.
sure apple has some good ideas, but in fact they just copy stuff like everybody else. they also just cook with boiled water like everyone else. the only difference is their exclusivity – they are the last company producing software/hardware bundles of pc’s for a consumer market, one of their strategies is to charge high prices, thus limiting their market share and offering an exclusive product.
i dont know anyone who drives a ferrari but i bet he assures me he invested his money good, allthough the ferrari has just as many wheels as an audi/opel/whatever.
i am sure he would tell me ferrrari innovated the automobile industry. that they invented airbags, and that they brought catalysators to the broader market.
to come back to your zealous pro-apple post. one thing you wont be able to doubt about. apple would never have sold computers under a certain price tag. their product philosophy is idiotic. when a productline runs out they rather scrap the remaining models instead of selling them for cheaper. there are times you buy a mac, and a month later you would get a much improved version of the same hardware for the same price.
if all this is innovation then i dont know in what parallel mac universe you live in. there are actually people who have to calculate for every penny they spend. luckily wintel brought the internet to those people by walmart pc’s. and wintel also brought internet to the eastern countries, or third world countries. i guess you will see no apples standing there, though many of them actually run linux. that may be one of the reasons why apple lost marketshare, but you see, they are riding a dead horse with their target group.
it may be hip to use a mac, but for me it’s hipper to use linux on my 4 year old pc STILL capable of doing things where i would shell out loads of money if i would choose the mac as my os of choice.
– “OS X is the most refined OS we have to date. this is a fact”
You cannot call something like that a fact– It’s your opinion, and that’s something completely different. I’m using Windows and MDK, and they completely satisfy my needs. But are they the best operating systems in the world? No way. The same goes for Mac OS X. You might say it’s suits you just fine, but that doesn’t mean it is the best overall.
– “Microsoft are still copying Apple design and innovation. this is a fact”
Very arguable– I’ve never had that feeling, and I’ve used every version from Windows from 3.11 through to the Longhorn PDC Build… I think this whole “MS is copying Apple” thing is a common misconception– and even though it were true… Then so what? The same happens in every market, from the toothpaste market to the car market.
I believe the issue is price. They are pricing themselves
out of the home computer market, IMHO.
Sean
Back in 2000, apple just made desktops. Now apples makes iPod, xserve and they distribute music (itunes). They have pushed into new high-end segments as well.
do you see the trend here? Apple’s product line is getting bigger. More of their profits and revenues are coming from other places. They are de-emphasizing the role that desktops play in providing both profits and revenues.
if their foray into these other markets continues to succeed then they’ll be able to use desktops as a loss leader and drop the prices of desktops sharply while still maintaining profitability. I do believe that Steve “gets it” but he is is restricted by what he can do and how fast he can do it.
You have to see that you could not purchase a computer 10 years ago under 4000 smackers.
And that is why there were times when only a few people could afford a decent computer. It is a lot easier now, and that’s why we have market growth, better and faster hardware, apps that let us do what we could not, etc.
The only reason why Apple looks so expensive is because of crap companies such as PDQ who makes ultra cheap (CHEAP = CRAP) CDRWs, and Amptron who makes quite possibly the worst motherboard in the world, but is priced less expensive.
Never heard of that. None of my friends use that. There’s a lot more to cheap PC hardware then unreliable junk.
You can’t buy a decent machine for $100, but you can certainly get a useful CS student workstation for $500 (just the box, no keyboard/mouse/display – I have them already). What is Apple’s closest offer? eMac, the glorified “cheap duron box” with Apple pricing.
RISC processor is better than a CISC processor because the newer 90nm G5 cpus use around 24W to operate. The previous 130nm G5s released last June used 51W. The 3.2 Ghz P4’s from Intel currently suck more than 100W of power. That’s roughly 2-4 times more efficient at equal or faster speeds in performance.
I don’t follow the reasoning. You imply that one approach to processor architecture is better then the other, because there are two CPUs which implement them and one is better then the other? This argument makes no sense. You can certainly find a lot of hot RISCs and cool CISCs.
And once again, don’t compare G5 to P4. G5 has an almost perfect equivalent in PC world – the K8. Both are 64-bit running mostly 32-bit OSes. Both were developed or co-developed by IBM. Both came to market quite recently (unlike P4).
OS X is the most advanced desktop currently available. Combine expose with some of the featuers of the dock, and the iapps combined and you have an integrated seamless environment for your “average” user’s daily work. (i.e. Safari for web, Mail for email, Address Book for contacts, iChat for IM, iTunes for music, iPhoto for their digital camera, iDVD to turn that DV recorded film into a menued disk and ship it to their friends, iCal to schedule things). Most users don’t need beyond the functions i listed, heck a *very* few even need iDVD but i added it because it’s there.
now compare that daily work flow with microsoft’s apps and i think you’ll see they don’t compare in easy of use or features out of the box. as much as i like macs, i’ve been in the windows camp much longer (1994-2001) and used macs for about 8 months, the difference in quality of software included with the OS is like night and day.
You imply that one approach to processor architecture is better then the other, because there are two CPUs which implement them and one is better then the other? This argument makes no sense. You can certainly find a lot of hot RISCs and cool CISCs.
I’m implying that the G5 is a much more efficent CPU. Take this for what it means, i.e. lower power bills, longer future for improvement, easier to put into laptops, etc. What’s the K8?
RISC processor is better than a CISC processor because because the newer 90nm G5 cpus use around 24W to operate.
No, I don’t see from this how G5 being low-power would make RISC better then CISC. The specific instance… maybe. In general case – firm NO.
What’s the K8?
AMD’s 64-bit CPU, also known as Athlon64 (for mortals) and Opteron (for corporations).
The reason why people do not buy Mac’s is mostly for one reason… PRICE.
I never bothered with Mac except the first time I wanted to buy a PC. Nowadays, I don’t consider Macs as an alternative because I’m not sure if I’ll get all applications I’d need.
I know about Adobe, Macromedia, Quarck, and Microsoft’s Office but beyond that? I think my ignorance about existing commodity apps (Browser, EMail, Video, Chat, IM, FileSharing, etc.) is keeping me from even considering Macs.
Makes no sense to buy a mac and install Linux because Linux runs very well on my cheeper PC hardware. Additionally, there seems to be no active developer community comparable to Linux’.
Apple’s statagy is to make money, and they obviously are, being number 3 in laptop sales and number 10 in computer sales. They are in the market…
I wish the G5 desktop started at $1000.00 with a dvd burner or without one. If high priced Sony can do it, so can Apple.
I guess all of can complain how Apple should do this or that. It seems they are happy with the current direction.
zik (IP: 211.27.66.—)
I am surpassed to see so many people disregard what happened in 1984. People are quick to forget…
Indeed, because Apple was just the company first to market with the GUI concept, not the inventor of it. That credit needs to go to Xerox Parc. So who innovated here?
Sidenote: A CLI in the right hands can be a devastatingly powerful tool. Don’t think lowly of it, just because one likes to click.
Keyboards weren’t even a standard item until apple came along.
even when apple didn’t develop technologies they brought them to adoption e.g. USB & 3.5″ floppy
I know about Adobe, Macromedia, Quarck, and Microsoft’s Office but beyond that? I think my ignorance about existing commodity apps (Browser, EMail, Video, Chat, IM, FileSharing, etc.) is keeping me from even considering Macs. >>>
What came on my 10.3 install disk. (And if you buy a new mac, the bundle is better)
Browsers Safari and IE. Avalible for download: Opera, Mozilla, OmniWeb, iCab.
EMail Mail — which I find fast, flexible, and powerful. Avalible: Entourage (MS’s version of Outlook for OS X), Eudora, Mailstart, and several others.
[b}Video iMovie 3. Avalible: Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro, and Shake, Adobe Premiere (although Adobe discontinued Premiere for the mac about 2 years ago you can still find copies on eBay)
Chat/IM iChat AV. Avalible: ICQ, AIM, others
Filesharing Samba, easiest damn networking on the planet. Avalible: Microsoft Dave.
All of the commodity apps you want are bundled with the software and alternatives to the included bundle are widely avalible at tucows or versiontracker.
No, I don’t see from this how G5 being low-power would make RISC better then CISC. The specific instance… maybe. In general case – firm NO.
tell that to the companies who need 100s of server machines to handle large workloads. that’s cutting their power bill in half or fourth. i did check, the g5 is still more efficient than opterons and athlon 64s. and i hate to burst your bubble, but intel has WAY more market share than athlon. companies rarely buy athlon, because it’s not intel. athlon is more or less a niche cpu as much as apple is a niche computer manufacturer.
It makes me laugh whenever I see Mac-heads extolling the virtues of Mac OS X. The thing is basically a patchwork frankenstein OS running a crippleware mono-theme GUI.
Using latest Panther, I teamed up with a Best Buy employee to laugh the Apple representative out of the store, demonstrating time after time how Mac was not intuitive, didn’t work well, or didn’t provide the user with choice. The consensus amongst the Best Buy employees was that Macs are made for people of below average intelligence.
From talking to the Best Buy employee, he wasn’t even sure why they carried Mac computers — no one buys them. The employees mainly use them as their web surfing and email machines as they are unused most of the time.
Mac OS X does not work at all well on two monitors. Sure, you can move stuff over to the other monitor, but the “dock” is flawed when it comes to using it on two monitors, the “menu bar” only appears on one monitor, not both, the Mac doesn’t understand portrait mode (now isn’t that ironic… where is Radius when you need them?), etc.
We couldn’t stop laughing when we moved GarageBand over to the big second monitor and it left its menu over on the first monitor. Of course without the menu, you can’t do shit in the app. Apple must get a kickback from the medical industry for that “half-and-half” UI.
And if you want to see another half-baked Apple creature feature in action, try Expose on a dual monitor system where the second monitor has many more pixels than the the first monitor. Choke!
Or Apple’s so-called smart mouse tracking that you cannot turn off or change the parameters on. That one really got some good laughs too.
Or the little pause before every window move. Click on a window to move it and there is a little pause before you can move it. Who knows why… but it was good for some laughs to. Evidently that G5 beyond-the-G4-supercomputer brain takes a lot of naps in there or something.
And let’s not mention how CHEAP Apple is with their hardware. Where’s the onboard RAID chip on the new G5? Do I have to buy a hardware card just to use RAID 1 on my two internal drives? Come on, Apple. Just about every PC motherboard that is made includes onboard RAID.
All in all, it is no wonder Apple is losing marketshare. Windows 2000 works better than Apple’s Mac OS 2003. Not to mention Windows 2000 is blindingly fast compared to Mac OS X, supports thousands more applications, thousands more hardware choices, etc. Who does Apple think they are fooling?
I still say that when Job’s killed the “clones” that REALLY hurt Apple’s potential in expanding it’s slice of the pie.
The clones, Like Power PC and such GAVE you options.
Apple fanatics always love to point out Bill Gates as a power crazed, wants it all for himself operation. Well what is Job’s doing with Apple? No competition with hardware, high prices!
They release new hardware and how often are there serious issues with it? NO where to turn to. Apple’s way or no way. Sounds to familiar.
Sorry, no one will ever convince me that Apple would dry up and die if they continued allowing “clone licenses”.
Variety is good. IT breeds a better quality product and generates more interest! VARIETY!
THAT is exactly what made me switch to Mac’s.
The problem is not that Apple prices too high. The problem is that they do not offer mainstream products. They have a pricing structure for the Powermac that would make it insane for you not to get a dual processor 1.8ghz or 2.0ghz. Thats like making it insane not to buy a dual opteron. Hardly anyone needs a dual opteron really and would prefer to simply not buy one. Thats the case with the G5 Powermac. The Imac and Emac while appropriately priced, don’t offer anything for people who don’t want a monitor. Which again is the same story.
LOL – Just kidding,
but seriously I EXPECT a loss in marketshare now, why?
Well it’s quite simple, you see the market is like a car accident that cases traffic. Traffic tends to move backwards from the point that it is caused. When jobs left apple they had an OK marketshare and once the boofoons took over and caused the accident, even though the accident has been cleared up and the highway looks better now (analogy to simple defined lines of computers, better OS than before, more innovative products, iPods coming out etc), the effect will be felt into the future because people who were in that traffic jam when jobs left decided to take the side streets (using PCs or other platforms with windows, linux, BeOS, etc) to get to their destination. Now that the interstate is open again the change from using the backstreets to using the highway again will be gradual.
Man.. this must be the analogy of the millenium
tell that to the companies who need 100s of server machines to handle large workloads. that’s cutting their power bill in half or fourth. i did check, the g5 is still more efficient than opterons and athlon 64s. and i hate to burst your bubble, but intel has WAY more market share than athlon. companies rarely buy athlon, because it’s not intel. athlon is more or less a niche cpu as much as apple is a niche computer manufacturer.
Your statememnt meant that RISC in general is better then CISC in general. This is wrong. Please excuse me if I misunderstood oyu or you made a honest error.
Now the efficiency… true, Apple has a small edge in heat output, but, from what I know, offers lower perfomance. Just check the real SPEC scores for G5 and, let’s say, Opteron 148 (aka FX-51). Opteron has more then enough perfomance to compensate the difference in power consumption (which becomes unnoticable behind those 15K RPM SCSI drives). And, while Intel does have a lot more market share, a lot of companies were quite enthusiastic with regards to Opterons – IBM sells them, Sun will sell them. HP is considering them (but they seem to have more then enough 64 bit architectures already ;-P), and Dell… well, Dell is Dell. And since Opterons compete with Xeons on the price and Itaniums on perfomance and 64-bitness, Intel simply does not have a counteroffer (no, they can’t make a “small Itanium” and maintain any reasonable level of perfomance). Meanwhile, all that Apple has to offer is easy to use GUIs for their servers.
That’s the Mac-head we all know and love. They can hyperfocus on the tiny unimportant things… to the extent where they don’t know what the fsck is going on in the big picture.
They wake up in the morning and ask “Why does everything I own have DRM on it?”
only problem is price performance ratio.
G5 gives you a better bang per buck than an Opteron machine….also point out that Spec is a highly predictable benchmark that does not produce benches that can even get you close to reality in how a CPU will perform with people actualy using it.
now, lest assume, for aguments sake that the opteron does perform marginaly better than the G5 as SPEC says….if the $1500 diffrence worth that? I say no.
Apple has never submitted any REAL SPEC results:
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.html
There is not one data point from Apple. Not one. Now that’s confidence in your “beyond the supercomputer” processor, eh?
All we have is the rubbish that they made up when the G5 was first introduced. After it was proven that the tests were bogus, Apple withdrew them and now uses another completely bogus set of benchmarks that are also full of lies.
There’s some sort of BS also going on with Apple’s claimed heat dissipation on the G5. If the numbers they quoted were true, they wouldn’t need all the special cooling stuff they did for the G5. The heatsinks are giant, bigger than anything in Xeon/Opteron land, there is a special plastic duct, special fans, etc. Obviously something is amiss for Apple to need that much hardware to cool what is supposed to be a very cool running processor…
To add to this point… note that those hot P4’s (desktop chips) have even been put into laptops for a long time now. If the G5 is so darn cool and efficient, why is it not available in a laptop?
Over time, a person learns that he has to look at everything Apple claims about their OS and/or hardware as a lie until proven otherwise. Apple has made many lies about their G5. I would not be surprised to learn if the G5 power/heat figures are lies as well.
Well, since your entire post dealt with the jolly good time you and your best buy buddies were having laughing at the Macs there because they were so inferior to the $500 eMachines or whatever cheap-o PC best buy sells, I didn’t really feel that it warranted a serious reply.
Since all of the music I listen to is contained on CDs I own, I don’t seem to have a problem with DRM being on everything.
“If the numbers they quoted were true, they wouldn’t need all the special cooling stuff they did for the G5. The heatsinks are giant, bigger than anything in Xeon/Opteron land”
They did that for maximum heat dissipation at lowest fan noise. Besides, you make it blatantly obvious that you have never looked inside a Dell Precision or other similar dual processor workstations which incidentaly are much louder.
I laugh at you and your so-called Best Buy friends. Since when did any Best Buy employee make it to the top tier when it came to Computer Experts. Please!! 7-15 bucks an hours wow they must really now their stuff!
SPEC is close to reality. Unless it is altered by Steve Jobs distortion field. And pricing… just how did you manage to archieve a $1500 price difference? It will be interesting to know how you calculated that difference.
The consensus amongst the Best Buy employees was that Macs are made for people of below average intelligence.
I guess this makes you smarter than the people on the Apple Pro page, huh?
http://www.apple.com/pro
BTW, how’s this for portrait mode: http://www.insidemacgames.com/include/image_view.php?ID=4798
I can go on and on, but it seems that the problem was with the user (oh geez, it was YOU). Patchwork frankenstein OS? Stop embarrassing yourself with stupid comments.
If Apple would offer a $600-$1000 PC that isn’t a joke (Emacs, Imacs) I would be a lot more likely to buy one. Apple could improve their affairs with geeks a lot if we didn’t have to buy there beautiful, quality, but very expensive displays. And there is no way I would ever have an eMac on my desk (I don’t want my tv and dvd in the same box, I certainly don’t want my computer that way either).
If I were to buy a new laptop it would probably be an iBook, simply because they are so damn nice and offer a long battery life.
Apple needs to offer a G4 1+GHz with 128MB min RAM and like a Radeon 8500 graphics card for about $800. No display sold with it! No odd cases, standards conformance for the case.
Other than that, port OS X to x86; I’d advice people to use it. It’s simply better than Windows, and a lot of people feel better about buying a big commercial OS than using Linux.
I don’t really think Apple’s prices are so high, they just don’t offer anything in the low end (except those crappy eMacs).
Now that’s confidence in your “beyond the supercomputer” processor, eh?
I have confidence alright. Look at the latest [url=http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/]Top500[/url] list. Check out no. 3, no. 4, and no. 6. The cluster composed of 2,200 2GHz G5/IBM PPC970 chips turned in better performance that the ones composed of 2,500 3.06GHz Xeons and 2,816 2GHz Opterons.
There’s some sort of BS also going on with Apple’s claimed heat dissipation on the G5. If the numbers they quoted were true, they wouldn’t need all the special cooling stuff they did for the G5. The heatsinks are giant, bigger than anything in Xeon/Opteron land, there is a special plastic duct, special fans, etc. Obviously something is amiss for Apple to need that much hardware to cool what is supposed to be a very cool running processor…
You obviously haven’t heard of the new [url=http://www.apple.com/xserve/]Xserve G5[/url] Dual-2GHz G5s in a 1U server. And it won’t be too long before we see PowerBooks equipped with the G5 processor now that them chips are being made using 90nm process.
‘Nuff said. Nice to know there are still plenty of “knowledgeable” computer users like you. See you around chump.
OK I just dont get it(seriously). How does a:
Apple eMac M9252LL/A
1.0GHz PowerPC G4
128MB of SDRAM
40GB
ATI Radeon 7500
Monitor Included
$1,099.99(CDN)
outperform a
Cicero SH2640E
2.6GHz P4
512MB DDR
120 GB
ATI Radeon 9000
Monitor NOT included
$899.99(CDN)
Prices quoted from Futureshop
@Jason
Keyboards weren’t even a standard item until apple came along.
What on earth are you smoking?!?
First off, home computers didn’t really exist before Apple — the Apple I, like the first computers, were sold as self-assembled kits, and keyboards were included.
Second, if you mean the Mac: lots of computers were sold at the time the Mac was released, and keyboards were included. As far as home computers go, you couldn’t even buy a home computer without a keyboard: TRS-80, Commodure 64, VIC-20…
You could buy game machines without a keyboard (Atari devices) but computers?
@James Dorn
I do not believe Apples are overpriced at all. You have to see that you could not purchase a computer 10 years ago under 4000 smackers.
What are you smoking?!?
I bought several computers 10-15 years ago. Two of them cost under 1000 smackers (TRS-80 Color Computer 3, Amiga 500). One of them cost under 2500 smackers (386SX machine). The best of the bunch was the Amiga, which lasted me nearly ten years (until December 1998). I used to surf the web on that thing.
The only computers that cost more than 4000 smackers 10-15 years ago, were targeted for the same market that costs 4000 smackers today: high-end users. You would have to go back to pre-home computer days to find a computer market where no machine cost less than 4000 smackers.
Mac OS X does not work at all well on two monitors.
Tell that to the professors at my university who switched to Mac, and use two monitors. They seem pretty happy to me.
Or the little pause before every window move. Click on a window to move it and there is a little pause before you can move it.
I don’t have this problem.
…what I am reading here. Look, I recently bought a brand new PowerBook G4, the one with the 15″ screen. Believe me when I say that it is the best machine I’ve ever had in my hands… Sleek, beautiful, fantastically well-built and silent. Expensive? Perhaps. But then the IBM T40 that I have at work (one of the newest ones from IBM, sporting a Pentium-M 1.6Ghz, 512mb of ram and an ATI Radeon can’t-rememer-the-model) is also a wonderful machine that compares to my PB regarding features but it is only 200€ cheaper than my PowerBook… How’s that for those who cry that Apple stuff if pricey? And that includes a smaller hard disk and no dvd-burner… Quality has a price and if you cannot afford a Mac, then don’t whine about it here. I cannot afford a Ferrari and I am not trolling in every car forums asking Ferrari to lower the price of their cars.
I really wish Apple _never_ ports OS X to x86. It would be their demise. Apple and OS X should stay as a high quality environment for those who really want to work and make the best of their time, not reinstalling graphic drivers, downloading security patches, messing around with irqs and/or compiling kernels. And all this comes from somebody who has spent the last 10 years using exclusively Linux at home.
The Apple cluster is a joke. Apple provided it for “promotional” price, the assembly was done by students for pop & pizza, the machines used have non-registered RAM and desktop cases. Try dividing it’s LINPACK result by 2 to account for having to repeat the computations twice to avoid memory errors (as the errors, while not important in a benchmark, would matter a lot in scientific computation).
I could give a crap about what the dual G5s do against Opterons in Spec benchmarks. Seriously, wtf is Spec really. Lets take a look at real world use here and see who is faster. Most of what I read shows the Dual G5 to be faster in most (not all)real world tests vs. Dual Opteron. The G5, however, usually trounces the Dual Opeteron and Xeon systems by incredible margins in Digital Video encoding as well as audio encoding. In some cases by as much as 40+% on DV. Considering that DV and audio is the market Apple pretty much owns, this is a good thing.
SPEC is NOT close to reality….when in reality are the only inputs always in the right order to be processed, always predictable (which highly inflates Intels speed by the way since their long pipe makes a failed prediction VERY costly), and no latency from periferals?
SPEC is a good bench mark for Fanticy land where everything is perfect.
As Apple’s marketshare CONTINUES to slip, there will be less incentiive for IBM to continue the amount of R&D that they put into their PPCs. The PC manufactors however will be able to maintain their devolpment and continue to advance. The mac users will surely sucumb to their desire for performace and afforablilty and thusly abandon Apple.
what does the Price performance of an Emac to a P4 system have to do with a G5 Xserve and an Opteron server??
Wow, i think this is the most blind mac troll i’ve ever seen. This should be fun.
It makes me laugh whenever I see Mac-heads extolling the virtues of Mac OS X. The thing is basically a patchwork frankenstein OS running a crippleware mono-theme GUI.
OS X uses FreeBSD UNIX as it’s OS core. Which has a much better track record of stability, and security compares to the Windows NT Kernel. It’s also supported on dozens more platforms, and has been around since the AT&T days. The kernel is also open. Want to go download it? just check out the source at apple.com. If you’re bitching about the theme, then you obviously have never looked. <a href=”http://www.unsanity.com“>unsanity.com has a lot of great themes for os x. you act as if having a unified theme in the first place is a bad thing. just take a look at microsoft office: from 97, to 2000, to xp, to office 2003 you’ll see that the interface has changed FROM EVERY revision. office 2003 looks so out of place in win xp that it’s down right ugly. not to mention the fact that the windows xp transition left a lot of apps in the cold. sometimes using windows i see apps that look like winxp apps, sometimes they look like win 2k or 98 apps. occasionaly i see a crappy themed skin that makes it look somewhere inbetween. at least macs have a consistent look and feel with aqua or metal apps.
The consensus amongst the Best Buy employees was that Macs are made for people of below average intelligence.
Best buy employes work at best buy for a reason, because they aren’t professionals and they probably just graduated high school (if that). So i take whatever they think with a grain of salt, but anyways, on to the other argument of this sentence. I live in computer science hosue at RIT. We have as i write this nearly 10 mac users now on a floor of about 50 people. Why such a high ratio on a floor of mainly programmers? Because we’re UNIX geeks. We love linux, freebsd, and all of it’s variants. It just so happens that apple came along and produced one of the best UNIX desktop operating systems ever. I guess we’re all stupid for liking the best combination of UNIX and ease of use right? We’re the people who are going to be making software in the future, and goes a lot furthur than people like you who just consume.
Mac OS X does not work at all well on two monitors. Sure, you can move stuff over to the other monitor, but the “dock” is flawed when it comes to using it on two monitors, the “menu bar” only appears on one monitor, not both, the Mac doesn’t understand portrait mode (now isn’t that ironic… where is Radius when you need them?), etc.
i use my powerbook with a 19″ monitor all the time. never had any complaints, and i guarantee most others haven’t either. changing the menu bar and dock in mac os x from one monitor to another is as easy as opening the system prefs and going to displays. the sad thing about your menu bar argument is how wrong you are about it. read my nice <a href=”http://otierney.net/comment.php?newsId=30“>article on if if you actually have the attention span to care. in a nutshell, the mac menu bar is vastly superior to the windows one. even with dual monitors
Or Apple’s so-called smart mouse tracking that you cannot turn off or change the parameters on. That one really got some good laughs too.
i’ve used os x for 8 months and i have no clue what you’re talking about. standard things like tracking speed can be changed in mouse preferences if that’s what you mean.
Or the little pause before every window move. Click on a window to move it and there is a little pause before you can move it. Who knows why… but it was good for some laughs to. Evidently that G5 beyond-the-G4-supercomputer brain takes a lot of naps in there or something.
this is pure crap. i have 0 delays “moving windows around” on a 12″ 867 g4 powerbook.
And let’s not mention how CHEAP Apple is with their hardware. Where’s the onboard RAID chip on the new G5? Do I have to buy a hardware card just to use RAID 1 on my two internal drives? Come on, Apple. Just about every PC motherboard that is made includes onboard RAID.
where’s the onboard RAID chip on a standard home Dell or hp? apple’s no different. that’s not entirely true though, the new powermacs do ship with SATA standard now. i don’t see dell or hp doing that, but maybe they’ll catch up with apple in the next year. if you’re doing RAID 0 or RAID 1, there’s not much advantage to doing that through software. which os x does just fine, under disk utility. converting two disks to RAID is a few mouse clicks.
All in all, it is no wonder Apple is losing marketshare. Windows 2000 works better than Apple’s Mac OS 2003. Not to mention Windows 2000 is blindingly fast compared to Mac OS X, supports thousands more applications, thousands more hardware choices, etc. Who does Apple think they are fooling?
apple’s not losing market share, the x86 market is increasing faster. there’s a difference. one implies that apple is LOSING people, which they aren’t, the other implies that apple’s not growing as fast, which is the actual case. get your figures right. windows 2000 is so much slower than mac os x it’s not funny. try taking winamp and dragging it around the screen as fast as you can over other windows. you’ll see choppy redraw errors everywhere. do that on a mac as old as a 500mhz g4 with os x, and you’ll notice zero redraw errors. why? it’s called quartz extreme. read up on it, before trolling things you don’t even know about. what good are all those window applications if they all do the same thing or suck? there’s plenty of software for the mac. check versiontracker.com.
“what does the Price performance of an Emac to a P4 system have to do with a G5 Xserve and an Opteron server??”
It dosent. That price comparision is for desktops.
Does anyone have any anwsers?
“re:So forget the market share numbers, forget the “expert” opinions and the misleading statistics– just use what you like and don’t worry about it so much. If you want a Mac, get a Mac, if you want a PC, get a PC. Both are great choices and both have their strengths and weaknesses.”
as an ex-be enthusiast, i would like to do what you suggest but look what has happened to be os
And what? Did you die? As I can see, you didn’t. If you still can’t live without BeOS, you can use its various incarnations, most probably Zeta. But if you’ve accepted that BeOS is dead, you’ve probably found some other OS to work and live with (and find something good in it too). The same goes for Macs (OS X), or any other OS. Use it if you like and if it satisfies your needs as long as you can. If it lasts very long, better for you, if not, oh well, you’ll find something other. Maybe you won’t like it that much, but as time passes you will (or be forced to). But there’s no need to get overexcited over it.
When saying this, I think exclusively on some PC users (fortunately not all of them). If you don’t like Apple and don’t use it, why are you so interested in its future? And why are you posting so many comments regarding Apple news? I’m a Mac user, and I’ve never ever read any news regarding WindowsOS on OSNews, not to mention posting there (and start flame war). Why? Because I don’t care about WindowsOS, and i don’t like it, but I won’t spend my time bashing it. Sometimes I just wish Apple to disappear just for you to shut your mouth. Live Apple die in peace, it’s been doing it for the last twenty years.
And some words on Steve Jobs. You may like him, you may dislike him, you may hate him, but you can’t deny he’s very successful man (same goes for Bill Gates). Remember Apple, NeXT, Pixar. Some may say NeXT is dead and they’re right but that dead was very well cashed ($430 millions, if I remember correctly), and those don’t know that NeXT was pretty successful company. Maybe Apple will die soon, but be sure that won’t be Steve’s last word.
To make a conclusion: almost all previous posts, not only in this topic but all around OSNews are completely useless and many of them very strongly biased toward personal opinion, but backed up with lot of nonsense and sometimes with plain stupidity. It’s almost always about fighting: Macs vs. Windows vs. Linux, Java vs. .NET/C#/C++, Open source vs. commercial and so on with very little on none real facts. Reading all those posts for the last two years, the only useful fact I’ve heard of is aspect-oriented programming, which I haven’t been aware of before. That’s why I posted on OSNews only twice (including this one), but I still keep on reading posts, hoping to finally hear something useful. I don’t think it’s site editors’ fault, on the contrary if find this site very useful, bringing me lots of Tech news in one place (although the editors tend to be biased sometimes too).
Apple is a healthy company – maybe not a growth company but they have cash in the bank and they aren’t going away. That said I have a few questions:
Apple’s market share was at an all time low just prior to the return of Jobs. But what was the overall market share of Apple plus the cloners? If the cloners were eating Apple’s lunch then maybe Apple should have taken the opportunity to get out of the hardware market.
My point is this why tie your profits to hardware (cost lots to produce, ship, warehouse, etc) when you could make money on software? Look at Itunes and the Ipod, I read somewhere that itunes is a loss leader to sell Ipods. To me I think apple has thier business model upside down. Their model works to a certain extent, it obviously had earned them a very loyal customer base that can certainly sustain them – but they will never dominate the market.
you twit…..IBM makes the PPC970 for themselfs as well. Apple gets to ride along on the great IBM development for free.