Apple Now Selling Better Than One Laptop In Six 767
Lucas123 writes "Apple's share of the laptop market has grown over the past few years and the company is now beating Gateway in sales, according research firm NPD Group Inc. in Port Washington, NY. 'Their sales are continuing to grow faster than the rest of the marketplace,' the firm stated. In June Apple was responsible for 17.6% of laptops sold (at retail) in the US and is now in third place behind HP and Toshiba."
College kids (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess Apple's strategy of marketing to younger people is finally paying off. Also, does this prove the iPod's halo effect is Real?
More to Come (Score:5, Interesting)
Gateway is the company to beat (like a dead horse) (Score:5, Interesting)
Then this article triumphs being tied with Gateway as an achievement.
Re:College kids (Score:5, Interesting)
As soon as my company moves from the red to the black, I'm investing in MacBooks for my entire staff. I'm no zealot, I'm a business man. I want my people to be productive and I want my people to enjoy their work. After spending a few weeks getting used to the interface, I honestly believe that my people will enjoy using their computers. The really amusing thing is that I really like MS Office on the Mac a hundred times better than on Windows. Entourage is actually pretty cool (when compared to Outlook or dEvolution) and after learning it I love it.
When choosing whether to move the company from XP to Vista or just to a Mac, if I can pull it off financially, Mac it will be and Vista will never make it in the door.
But What of the Long Term? (Score:2, Interesting)
I expect that lot of these new Apple buyers are people who, like me, just grew weary of Microsoft,their attitude, and the endless virus and other problems.
The problem for Apple is that they, and the fanboys, are selling the product as perfection, as complete out of the box, as seamless and needing no attention beyond plugging in the power supply once a day.
The reality of course is much different. Macs have some pretty serious deficiencies, even in the much vaunted user interface. Macs crash just like a Windows computer. Macs experience hardware issues. Macs, if you use them heavily, need regular maintenance to keep them running smoothly.
After two years with a Mac I tell people that really it's no more or less easy to use than a Windows machine, and has just as many irritations and problems. They're just different irritations and problems.
Because Apple sells their computers as the most perfect thing in the world, all of those day to day issues seem that much more disappointing.
My guess is that a lot of these "switchers" will hang onto their MacBooks for one cycle, then revert back to Windows in order to avoid compatibility issues, cost issues, and in some situations the lack of specific software that isn't available on the Mac.
At the end of the day there just isn't that much about the Mac that makes it a slam dunk for every user.
Re:College kids (Score:5, Interesting)
This is as close to my case as could be expected.
I wanted a T61p. With Linux. Or FreeDOS. Or empty. Whatever; I just didn't want to pay for Windows. I'm not using it, I'm not paying for it. Period.
In the time it took me to collect the money, it was out of stock - mostly everywhere (in Croatia). Except for a more expensive version with Vista, and I'm not that stupid.
Then someone told me I could buy a MacBook Pro for that kind of money anyway. Oh, really?
Turned out, oh, yes, really. Comparable hardware, comparable price, available, polished, and with an OS I actually would and do use.
I'm only having some trouble installing Linux on it, but I'll get there, too.
And if I only found a way to stop my gf from trying to steal it... (I think it's because of the remote.)
Re:College kids (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked around in a large lecture hall class of 100+ at University of Florida and 4/5 of the laptops were macs of some sort, and most of those were the new macbooks. They are at the price point parents can afford to get their kids (I mean seriously.... a crap dell of for a few hundred more something that won't burn down the dorm room), small enough to put in a backpack (there is a lot of wasted screen real-estate compared to the powerbook, but alas they still get the job done), and are powerful enough to do almost anything a college class could require (except maybe some 3d graphics work - FCP works fine).
When I got my powerbook a few years back it was almost a grand more than many other laptops (sony vaios and some upper end thinkpads aside), but the difference is I am still using it, and despite having it get pulled off a desk by my dog twice and being dropped, bumped, and lugged around to 3 jobs, clients houses, and college classes it is still working great. The screen was starting to degrade so I replaced it for $210, but that was ENTIRELY my fault. If it were most other machines it would be in the garbage.
Re:Brand Synergy (Score:5, Interesting)
When I started a new job in January, they issued me a MacBook Pro. The first time I brought it home and pulled it out of my bag, my four year old daughter - who is used to various desktops, LCD and CRT monitors, my and my wife's Thinkpads, and the Toshiba Tecra I had at my previous employer - immediately popped it with "Wow, that's a cool computer!" as soon as she saw it.
She'd never seen a Mac before, has no clear idea about brands and stuff, yet immediately recognized that it looked cooler than the other computers she's seen. Couple that level of cool with OS X and you have a winner, so Apple's surging laptop market share doesn't surprise me.
Re:College kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:College kids (Score:4, Interesting)
First iPods are rather cheap and can be considered an impulse buy for Middle Middle class-Wealthy people for Poor- Lower Middle Class an iPod Shuffle would be at christmas gift.
Being that they are in these price ranges a lot of people are using these and realize they like they way that Apple does things.
Being happy with apple products using iTunes and checking the Apple Web site every once in a while to see what is new or going to the Apple store or to the Apple section of the stores they will see other Apples Product
Seeing their products knowing you are happy with the brand you are more likely to get that brand.
Now that you see and know the specs for say an Apple Notebook you go out and compare prices of PCs vs Apples based on Apples Specs and you find they are competitive price (If you Compare Apples to PC Specs they are Apples are expensive) So you go with Apple.
Also Apple has good word of mouth advertising and a loyal fan base. Most people I known once they switch to Mac and allow themselves to get use to it are actually very happy with their Mac, and they repeat buy. Heck I am on my second Mac that is the first time I purchased the same brand after the old model went obsolete (and it is not about fear of switching OS's, I went From a TI-99 (1984-1988), DOS 2 Box (1988-1992), * Windows 3.1 (1992-1997), Linux (1997-2001), Solaris (2001-2002), Mac OS X (2002-2006), Mac OS X intel (2006 - Present) so I am use to swiching primary OS's)
* I switched to Linux back in 1994
Re:College kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not exactly. Sort of. For instance, I run Windows XP sandboxed on my dual core MacBook Pro laptop, and that's the only place I run Windows at all. Windows isn't allowed to get to the net where it can get hurt, I just use it to host a few desktop applications that don't have Mac equivalents. With Parallels [parallels.com] "coherence" mode, I'm in the OSX filesystem for the images and other files I use under Windows, but I have the Mac right there doing the right things for everything else.
I also run a linux install pretty much the same way (though no coherence, unfortunately.) The linux install is allowed on the net because it considerably more secure "out there" than Windows is. I can run all three OS's at once without any problem and get realistic performance from all of them.
Hence, no need for a Windows machine, and no need to be an "idiot", either. ;-)
As for Vista... No need to go there. We won't be writing any applications using Vista specific capabilities, either. As far as I'm concerned, Vista was dead at the starting line.
Re:College kids (Score:3, Interesting)
I've bought a couple of HPs (most recent one was the "Lance Armstrong special") and I've not had any issues with either of them.
That said, if I were in the market for a notebook today, it'd most likely be a Mac. HP still offers XP on its BTO notebooks, but there's less and less stuff for which I need Windows...both of my machines boot Linux (the older one only boots Linux; the newer one can boot Windows from a USB hard drive or inside VMware if I need it). For most of what I do, there's less difference between Linux and Mac OS X than between Linux and Windows. If HP were to stop selling XP and only offer Vista, that'd be yet another incentive to go with a MacBook the next time. (I already have a G4 Mac mini and a small collection of older Macs and Apple IIs, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with Apple hardware.)
Re:More to Come (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite funny, actually
And, though I only got the machine in June, already one person has bought a macbook pro because of seeing my macbook in action while at a party. And he seems to be happy with his decision.
It seems that once people get to see how OSX works, they have crossed the point of no return.
To mention, it also seems that the more the person knows about computers, the more likely he is to get a mac. I find that very interesting, too.
Re:Please educate & inform me... (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, a smart filmmaker will shoot high def, digitize to DV footage to be edited on the macbook, and then uprez and render the high def version on a quad-core Power mac at the post production house where the real heavy lifting needs to be done: color correction, final compositing, sound mixing.
I may be an anonymous coward, but I know a good bargain for hard-earned money when I see it.
Re:College kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:At retail... (Score:5, Interesting)
So crash free, virus free, and great performance, it's a dream come true for me. External displays work as expected. Everything just works, in general. (A few gotchas, but *very* few as compared to XP.)
The funny thing is, I don't consider myself a Fanboy. But when I talk about the Mac, I get excited about how well it works, and people accuse me of it! Well dammit, I *am* excited about how well it works for me! And want to share it with others. At the end of the day, I don't care if people convert, as long as it's there for me.
In Boston more like 50-70% (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe it's just the huge number of 'creatives' in the city, but it seems that around NYC and Boston, that Apple's pretty well taken over. Hell, my office has 70% of the people carrying iPhones (and that was true the first week they were out). I have yet to actually see anyone with a Zune. Period.
What's odd is that I lived in North Carolina for about 8 months, and most of the computers there were Windows-based PCs. My 4 macs were seen as oddities down there. Here it's par for the course.
Re:College kids (Score:4, Interesting)
Overall, the quality on these laptops is outstanding and they are very durable and very stable. I'm not comparing them to any other current companies offerings because I can not (other then the HP/Compaq models we had years ago maybe).
So overall, we have not seen any reduction in quality over the past few years, no increase in maintenance costs, and they are very reliable units.
YMMV.
A Little Perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't mean that in a fevered, evangelical way because, really, I don't care what the rest of the world uses but for me, personally, switching has made a big difference to my productivity and enjoyment of computers - I'd kind of forgotten the excitement I used to feel back in the day.
Over the past couple of years, Apple seem to be have been slowly but steadily getting it right in a sustained manner that I suspect will come more clearly to fruition when Leopard is released in October. I was kind of slow to notice this build-up, kind of resistant to the idea of buying into the cult of Apple and probably should have made the switch sooner, could have used this productivity boost a year ago, but, whatever, I'm glad that I eventually cottoned on.
Again, I don't much care what the rest of the world does as long as my experience and working environment keep improving. Some enjoy treating this as a spectator sport, like a never-ending baseball match between Apple and Microsoft, enjoying each play that seems to bring victory that little bit nearer. Bollox.
Sure, Apple probably will see quite a jump by the holiday season but Microsoft have simply dominated the market for too long to be pushed aside - the vast majority of people don't know and don't care to know much about computers and will happily "upgrade" to Vista when their existing machines die. What we will see, however, is a fairly fast and comprehensive migration towards Mac by programmers and other people who need to be creative and productive with computers. That probably represents just 15% of the market but it's an important 15% and giving those people better tools to do what they do is going to be beneficial for everyone.
In the meantime, I certainly recommend giving the whole Mac proposition a closer look, you might find yourself as surprised as I have been.
Re:Brand Synergy (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:College kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Quality and Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
I just bought my first Mac. A Santa Rosa macbook pro. And I use it almost exclusively now.
Here's what I don't like.
Ok, so why do I LIKE it (a lot)?
There's nothing not to like about this hardware.
Pair that up with the fact that their design team is solid and is producing exceptional quality designs such as the iPod line and the iPhone. (I don't own one and won't based on cost and that I have a good PDA phone but my colleague has one and I've tried it out and it's a good design.)
Apple made three pivotal moves:
Re:College kids (Score:5, Interesting)
As for writing code for Vista. Well I'd say give it time; people didn't write for XP the moment it came out either, it took a while for apps to stop supporting Win98, but as people update their computers and get Vista by default there'll be a transition, whether it's worthwhile or not.
Re:More to Come (Score:3, Interesting)
A co-worker and I recently both purchased laptops of almost identical performance. His is a Dell XPS of some sort, mine's a Macbook Pro. His was about $500 more, but it's a 17", and the price difference would be neligable had I bought a 17". They're almost identically specced, although mine's a slightly less powerful DX10 video card, his has slightly more balls but is DX9. Mine's also about half as heavy (and would still be signifigantly lighter if it were a 17"), much thinner, and looks good, where the Dell is a horrible mishmash of lights and coloured plastic bits. It's like a riced out Honda Prelude with neons next to a BMW 318. Similar performance, one just looks tacky.
Re:College kids (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow! can I borrow your time machine to get a T62 as well? Us mere mortals only live at the current time, when the T61 has just barely come out this summer.
Back on topic -- one thing that I don't regret in getting a T61 over a MBP is
Re:At retail... (Score:3, Interesting)
Photoshop. Fortran. Run simulations while on the road without having to perform yoga contortions to get the machine to act like a proper UNIX box.
Just get work done quietly and unobtrusively, without the computer/OS having to announce its presence every minute, lest I forget the blessings that Redmond hath bestowed upon me.
My dream laptop would be an IBM X31 running OS-X, but since those were never made, MacTops it is.
Re:College kids (Score:3, Interesting)
I admit that it is an acquired taste, rather than a cult. It takes practice and some getting used to (perhaps even building a small callous on your index finger), but the efficiency of the TrackPoint is just orders of magnitude better than a touchpad. You can get the cursor to anywhere on the screen in a fraction of a second, and you don't have to move your hands from the "asdfjkl;" position on the keyboard. You owned a T23 for 2 years and used it non-stop, and you haven't become a convert to the TrackPoint? How could you have not appreciated it? Everyone I've ever met that "doesn't like" it simply has never tried using it much and can't be bothered learning how.
The fact that you don't have to deal with the frustrating "accidentally brush the touchpad" phenomenon (when all of a sudden you're typing text wherever the cursor happened to be sitting) is just a bonus. I had a ThinkPad as part of going to school last year, it had a touchpad as well as the Trackpoint. Thank heavens the touchpad could be disabled via a config menu. Annoyed the heck out of any classmate or teacher of mine that wanted to use my machine, though!
(BTW, I worked at IBM in the mid-90's when ThinkPads were just starting to be rolled out to employees. Someone in my department came up the name "clitty stick" for the TrackPoint. Much more amusing than "nipple"
Re:College kids (Score:3, Interesting)
However as horrible as it is, I'm still looking into buying a MacBook Pro, simply because it seems like a well made piece of hardware that will run what I want on it, in addition to letting me run OS X which I'm willing to give a fair try even if iTunes is horrible. Worst case I can just install linux or XP.
For the record, my favorite media player so far is foobar2000 on windows, but even that lacks in its database searching interface.
Re:College NON-kids, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is this the case? It's not about iPods and it's not about Vista. It's about UNIX, X, and Boot Camp/Parallels/VMWare. The professor who used to have a Sparc, a PC and a PPC Mac in his office now just does his number-crunching and scientific visualization on an 8-core Mac Pro with dual 30" displays, and takes a MacBook Pro places with him. (I'm low on the totem pole, so I have a plain black MacBook.)
What's really amazed me lately is that this isn't just a US thing. I work near a major Japanese facility, so there are always Japanese scientists around. For years, they've always had these cute little Panasonic/Toshiba/Sony/Sanrio/whoever laptops that we never see at stores in the US (except at Shirokiya in Honolulu, I guess). Earlier this month, I actually worked with three of them one night, and they brought 2 laptops with them - both Macs. I never thought I'd ever see any "American" brand become that popular with the Japanese scientists.
Re:College kids (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess Apple's strategy of marketing to younger people is finally paying off. Also, does this prove the iPod's halo effect is Real?
It is not only that. If you go to academic conferences in sciences, you see now sometimes that nearly a half of the laptops open at a given time are Apples.
Some of the reasons for their widespread adoption in academia are that they are no longer significantly more expensive than non-apple laptops, they are the closest thing to a Turing machine you can get (you can basically run ANYTHING on them, natively or via emulation/virtualization), they also are robust and - why not - nice looking.
People going to conferences around the world (this year I have been to Polynesia, Western Canada, then I will go to Chile... all flights from central Europe, not counting flights within the E.U.) also favor light laptops. In their size categories, Apple laptops tend to be among the lightest ones that also provide an optical drive.
There are similarly equipped PC laptops around the same size and weight, but often they tend to cost more -to offer the same functionality and look ugly. This is also a bonus, esp. if you have to fly through legalised torture institutions like british airports. Apart from Apple laptops you still see nice Sony Vaio subnotebooks, and a few other random laptops, evenly shared by the other manifacturers. Most participants from the Far East have tiny laptops. Sometimes I think Apple is not producing a subnotebook right now because they would simply unable to cope up with the demand.
Add to this that a lot of people in the academia have been scorched by Dell dumping on them second choice laptops with faulty screens (maybe in the U.S. it is different, but most Dell laptops bought by my university came with white blotches on the LCD screen, and the repair program almost "required" you to stay without a computer for one month, of course to discourage you), and now you see it coming.
Our administration in theory forces us to buy laptops that they have chosen and for which they agreed on a special price (in practice, we get older models for a price that is better than their original list price, but that could be bought now for much less...). But they will allow you to buy anything if you need to run a specific operating system. There are professors here that bought Macbooks because they "need" to run OS X, then the first thing they do is to install Vista on them (some kept an OS X partition just for fun and ended up switching, but this is rare among german professors. OTOH the students, including mine, are starting to play with OS X a lot).
rmav
Re:Don't forget. (Score:3, Interesting)
Also you should realize after a new version of the OS is released of OS X they still support the old ones and you still get upgrades and update to the OS. Every dot release is actually a major upgrade Like from Windows 3.1 - 95, 95 - 98, 98 - ME (That may not be a good example), ME - XP, XP - Vista (perhaps an other bad example) From 95-XP there were new version of Windows every couple of years, much like OS X. OS X Gets minor Update like 10.4.1, 10.4.2, 10.4.3... These are equivalent to service pack releases, where sometimes you may get some minor features, and increased stability in the OS. The 10 Dot releases offer a lot of new features and the OS looks and Feels different.
Apple has a faster software development cycle then Microsoft, it is not a bad thing, it means you have the option to use the most current technologies and fully utilize modern hardware.
Mac Hardware is not overpriced it is competitively priced., the problem is that Apple offers little in options they have sub class groups
Dells Website...
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T7700 (2.40GHz) 4M L2 Cache, 800MHz Dual Core
NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M, 512MB Turbo Cache memory (256 dedicated)
15.4 inch Wide Screen WXGA Anti-Glare LCD Panel
4.0GB, DDR2-667MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMMS
* 160GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 7200RPM
8X DVD+/-RW w/Roxio Creator(TM)/Cyberlink PDVD(TM)
Dell Wireless® 360 Bluetooth Module for Windows XP
Intel® 4965 802.11a/g/n Dual-Band Mini Card
Standard Touchpad
$3,427
Apples WebSite...
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x2GB
160GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
MacBook Pro 15-inch Widescreen Display
* Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
Accessory Kit
*iSight Built in Camera,
$3,199.00
*Better then the competitors.
Granted that the Dell has a couple of features that are slightly higher performance then the Mac such as a faster drive and perhaps a better video card. But I would expect those difference in spec would be about would account to about $150 difference in the price. But the apple has a built in video camera light sensor and glowing keyboard, motion detection, and the magnetic power adapter (don't mock it until you tried it) which would account for about $150 different in the prices as well. Then dell depending where you go on your website and coupons and such... You may be able to get an other $100 or $150 off but still after all this extra hassle you are not really paying much more for the Mac compared to Dell similarly spec are actually about the same price.
Re:Dell laptop? hah (Score:2, Interesting)
Now... everything you said and showed was fine, the machine worked without a hitch... the question is what did you wear?
It shouldn't matter what things look like but it does. You can have a functional laptop that an industrial designer hit viciously with the ugly stick, or you can have a functional laptop that looks good too. You can wear the suit you bought at Target or the one you bought at Armani. You can buy a solid, reliable Toyota or you can buy a solid, reliable Mercedes.
The choice is yours, and people will judge you accordingly. Branding is not something marketers alone do, you do it also, consciously or not all your actions and choices indicate who you are. Again, it's not ideal but it is human.
As for the screwdriver thing... I know a few tradesmen and they definitely have opinions on which brands make a good screwdriver and which ones are shit. They may not laugh at you, but they'll see which one you have and it becomes a part of the opinion they form of you.