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Macs continue to gain in home, business share
"Not using Windows anymore'
Stewart Alsop, former editor-in-chief of technology publication InfoWorld, a technology publication, said he used Macs exclusively for 12 years, from 1984 to 1996. When he switched careers and became a venture capitalist, he used Windows for the next 10 years.
“Then I had a very bad experience with Windows, where I lost a critical document,” he said. “It just disappeared and I don’t know what happened to it. And I thought to myself, a Mac has never stolen any of my documents, and a Windows machine did. Literally, the next day I abandoned Windows. It may have been my fault, but I don’t care. I’m not using Windows anymore.”
Cherry, who uses both PCs and Macs, said. “A lot of people who aren’t using Macs haven’t tried them in a long time. They think people who use Macs are weird, and that the software they want to use won’t be available on the Mac. I have only one application that I can’t run that I need to run that takes me back to Windows. It’s Visio, the diagramming tool that’s part of Office. Microsoft didn’t include that in their Office version for the Mac.”
A designing difference
Design plays a key role in everything Apple does, and it’s becoming more important to consumers, said Smulders of Gartner.
“As the PC market has become mature, people have been looking beyond just simply the performance of the product; they’re also looking for industrial design, or appealing designs —and clearly, Apple has led the market in that thinking,” he said.
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Apple Prices start at $1,200 for Apple's all-in-one iMac computers, which come with either a 20- or 24-inch screen. |
PC manufacturers certainly aren’t standing still. A number of them, including HP, Dell, Acer, Sony and Lenovo, have been coming out with more personalized and colorful laptops and desktops than ever before.
Apple’s all-in-one desktop iMac has proven to be an inspiration for similar PCs by Sony and HP.
The MacBook Air, released earlier this year, billed by Apple as “the world’s thinnest notebook,” at less than one-inch thick, isn’t for everyone.
But its design has captured the fancy of many road warriors who have found great pleasure in slipping the laptop inside a manila envelope, just as Apple’s ads have shown.
The three-pound laptop with a 13.3-inch screen retails for $1,799 with an 80-gigabyte hard drive, and $2,598 for a model that has a flash memory-based, 64-gigabyte solid-state drive. The computer also has a trackpad that uses the same multi-touch technology as Apple’s iPhone.
This past spring, the company also updated its MacBook Pro line of laptops with the same trackpad.
A desk at corporate?
While Apple is very much pursuing the corporate market with the iPhone, having added Microsoft Exchange Active Sync with the iPhone’s 2.0 software upgrade in July, it’s not necessarily looking to go there with its computers, Smulders said.
For one thing, it may be a daunting task, with the enterprise market overwhelmingly Windows-based.
“There’s a lot of resistance within the IT departments for that because it brings greater complexity and cost for those IT departments because they have to manage those extra products,” said Smulders. “Secondly, Apple is generally not in a position to support large accounts. It doesn’t have the infrastructure.”
Still, earlier this summer, the Yankee Group surveyed 700 global IT administrators and C-level executives, and found that 80 percent of the companies have installed Macs on their networks.
“Apple’s strong marks in security, features, performance, usability and reliability are indicative of the qualities customers’ value when purchasing hardware and operating system software,” wrote Laura DiDio, Yankee Group research fellow, in the report.
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