Apple tops 9% marketshare

Well, Apple finally has a good operating system by putting Unix under the hood. Microsoft stubbed a toe with the introduction of Vista. On top of all that, the Apple advertising campaign has been great. I'm happy to see someone give Microsoft some competition.

Tom

 

It's no secret that Apple is gaining market share because of quality products, innovations people want, coupled with good customer service. It's amazing applying simple sound business practice remains the formula for success. Instead of outsourcing its technical service to India to save a couple bucks Apple employs enthusiastic sales and technical service people who believe in the product. For a hundred bucks a customer can get one on one lessons for one hour per week for one of these very knowledgeable technical people.
I use Microsoft at work use Apple at home. Apple is gaining market share through personal use and schools. Microsoft owns the business environments. The irony is that Microsoft's new Vista operating system is a nightmare for business use. Most businesses still rely on XP operating system which will eventually be obsolete. I still order new computers from Dell with the XP system. I understand most companies still rely on XP for their new computers.

 

After they count in the Christmas shopping I did online the other day, the share will likely climb to 10%.

 

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple gains a little more ground this holiday season.

I'm considering a Mac for my next laptop. I'd have to dual-boot Windows because I write Windows software for a living, but I think Apple has a strong future!

Macs are especially popular with the younger generation and I wonder what influence they will have when they graduate and enter the business world.

 

Like I've said before (and the next time I have to use it, I'll say it again): the only person in the world who actually likes Vista is Steve Jobs.

 

For me vista is the last straw. Most of my old programs will not work on it. Apple, here I come!

 

Have you considered Ubuntu? It is faster and more reliable than even mac os, and it is free.

Tom

 

I consider "plays well with others" as part of the reliability factor, as well as the bundled software. Apple has a bad track record for networking reliability. We have historically had a harder time keeping Apple servers running and available on networks, and the client software shows a nasty tendency to hang up. Now that Apple is using Unix under the hood, this should improve as long as they don't "improve" it. Apple also tends to limit user's options. As good as it is, I suspect Mac OS would be even better if you removed the Mac sugar coating from the top.

Tom

 

I had issues with the ATI mobile graphics on my HP laptop when I ran Ubuntu on it last year. Now I work on a Macbook with Leopard and sofar it has worked flawlessly. No matter if I use bluetooth over crackberry phone, wireless (WPA, WPA2) or wired networking to connect to the internet. Also the suspend/wakeup when I close/open the lid is flawless and fast.

The only issue I'm trying to figure out is why the time machine does not want to use my NAS NFS share at home as a backup device. *grumble* I can see it and select it as a backup device, but it's not working.
Maybe I should try to export an AFP share and see if it works then.

But my home servers do have a mix of Fedora (Entertainment Center), Slackware (Asterisk PBX), FreeBSD (webserver), Ubuntu (Mailserver), and OpenBSD (Firewalls). Oh, and Winblows to play games. So like with every other occupation, the right tool for the job.

Thomas

 

I think I have my Mother converted to Mac. She absolutely *hates* Vista. Now my Dad's PC won't print. My Dad isn't too thrilled either.

My Mother wanted a coconut cake recipe she'd seen in a magazine she'd given away. So I found it online. But couldn't print it. So I e-mailed it to myself and I'll be printing it at my house and then giving it to her.

I think I'll buy them a wireless router for Christmas so I can use my laptop at their house. If I ever get my old laptop repaired, I'll give it to my Mother to use. She'll be hooked.

(As far as I can see, there is NO reason they have to use a PC. My Dad uses no proprietary software that demands PC. Most of the stuff they do is on the web. And they have AOL plus broadband from Time Warner. I've tried to explain the overkill but they like AOL. But....you can do AOL on a Mac too. At least they let me install Firefox on their PC for when I use their computer. I *hate* I.E.)

 

How well did Mac OS work on the HP laptop? The reason your Macbook works better is that the hardware is compatible with the software. ATI has a long history of trouble for Linux video drivers (or lack thereof). Granted, Ubuntu can limp along with bad hardware and crappy drivers, but you won't be happy with its performance. Mac, on the other hand, only works with its own hardware.

My 86 year old mother runs Ubunto on her desktop machine. She didn't do the installation herself, but then she wouldn't be able to unpack a computer and plug in the cables, even with color coding.

Once set up, her Ubuntu machine has been perfect for her. Open Office and Firefox do pretty much everything she needs.

Tom

 

Rumor has it that the next release of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) will be for the Intel Macs only - because they are going to remove the Power PC code and streamline the software. They supposedly won't be adding many (any?) new features except for speeding up the software and using less of the HD space for the OS. I think this (if true) will be the knife in the back of Vista - Vista added complexity and ran slower than XP, every version of OS X (except possibly Leopard) ran faster on the same hardware.

I'm currently taking a course to learn SolidWorks solid modeling software, so I can hopefully get another job someday. SolidWorks runs on XP and Vista and we are using the latest version (2009) in the class, but the computers are running XP, not Vista. I think that says something about Vista.

 

Small miracles there...

Saying "every version of OSX runs faster" is basically saying "at least the newest versions don't suck as badly as the first versions". Did you ever use Cheetah or Puma? If they couldn't have gotten subsequent versions to run faster, they probably would have just given up on OSX.

 

Now the big issue is proprietary software - not just for Apple but for the whole Linux world as well. All of the major bases are covered, so I don't suffer there, but there are a few of those job related, must have programs that force me to keep a copy of XP on my machine. Programs that are so deeply rooted in MS technology that they won't run on WINE.

With Apples's market share rising, this will help temp software vendors to support additional platforms. It's a fairly small step from OS X to Linux, so I'm hoping for some cross pollination.

Tom

 

one of my friends just converted to a MacBook Pro and she absolutely hates it and constantly whines that she could have saved over $700 by just buying a comparable Sony Vaio notebook running Windows Vista.

 

That's why there are two major camps, just like having republicans and democrats. Neither works for everyone all of the time.

Tom

 

I used all of them starting from the original release in 2001. I didn't start using it at work until 10.2 though.

I also used the "Classic" Mac OS starting from System 7 up through 9.2. My observation: it worked a lot better if you refrained from launching any Microsoft applications. I used a Mac at work running MiniCad (later changed to VectorWorks) and my system was pretty stable. Most of the crashes in those days were caused by Internet Explorer. But I do prefer OS X, especially with an Intel Mac - I can run Windows and Linux in VMWare if I need to.