The Mac’s presence in the retail world remains limited, a shame given the rare opportunity for Apple to gain market share that opened up when Vista arrived.[...] Thanks to verge for providing this nice story on Digg.
What other users say about this:
IchiroBoston: I’m fine with Apple having 5% market share
Just like I am happy with a BMW rather than a Toyota…
tacojohn: It’s funny seeing an article like this when I see hundreds of people walk out of the Apple Store with Mac in hand every week. Just in the last week 2 of my friends have jumped ship to Mac. When I was in high school I only knew one person who used a mac, now days, you can’t walk into a coffee shop without seeing them.
If Apple is going anywhere it’s up up up.
brister: How is Vista a world of hurt? Every new OS introduced has a few compatibility issues and bugs when first released but it is no where near a world of hurt and a new user switching to mac would face even more compatibility issues with his hardware so that argument falls apart. I rather see the 2 years before vista came out as having been a great window of opportunity for the mac to gain ground and they did.
petejonesrn: I really couldn’t care less how Apple approaches it’s marketability, and certainly couldn’t care less about what some dime-a-dozen journalist thinks. I have four Apple Stores within a half hour of me and I will continue to be part of the 3% worldwide market share. It’s simply a superior platform. And most of you will never understand what’s in the kool-aid until you actually try it, because as rude as it sounds: you just don’t fucking get it. And that’s the absolute truth, as the rest of the 3% will certainly attest.
moisie: Apple aren’t Microsoft, they make their money from hardware not software. If they both had equal market share and their OS’s cost the same who would be the bigger company – Apple because they have the hardware sales. Apple are competing primarly with the likes of Dell, HP and every other PC manufacturer. Dell aren’t in shops and it didn’t stop them from getting big. Apple’s strategy has actually helped them. Before the Apple stores they were just another company lost in the mix and weren’t being sold effectively to the public. Now stores want to stock their stuff and have dedicated areas, their shops always have huge lines upon being opened and have massive sales.
enzomedici: Apple doesn’t want to be like Microsoft and is perfectly fine being the high end computer maker. Microsoft will never be cool and neither will Dell, HP, Google or any other computer company. Apple has branded itself as THE upscale computer and electronics manufacturer. Why would they want to downgrade that image? If Apple took over 95% of the computer market, everything would suffer including their image.
You can be Toyota, BMW or Bentley or Walmart, Target or Nordstrom or Microsoft, Sony, Apple. The author of the article is retarded like the rest of the New York Times.
WaterJake: My PC eats Macs for breakfast for a lot cheaper and is upgradeable. Macs are useless for everything short of playing your music and organizing your photos, there just isn’t any development for Mac versions of programs, and those that do exist don’t get any of the development effort to make sure that they work well.
tyrione: This guy is on crack. You can find OS X and Apple Hardware at CompUSA, Best Buy, select Circuit Cities, over 170 Apple stores and more. I can not only order it from the Apple Store in various countries, but I can also go to our favorite NewEgg.com and get the hardware.
Glad I run Debian Linux and OS X.
What does he expect?
Rooster.boy: I really wanted to believe that Vista wasn’t as bad as some of the rumors that have been going around. After installing it on my quad core rig with 4GB of RAM, I can sadly tell you that I’ve never been so disappointed with a piece of software. It wasn’t just awful, but it doesn’t do enough over XP to warrant all the hassles. Bioshock even crashed on it for gods sake. It was a piece of software specifically developed for Vista, and it still didn’t run worth a s$%t. More power to Apple.
aratika: Consider this:
MSFT Market cap – $272 billion
AAPL Market cap – $120 billion
So after all the bloviating by the author – MSFT is less than 2.5 the market cap of Apple?! Microsoft was too busy watching Netscape to pay attention to Google and too busy back patting over their OS market share to pay attention to the iPod. The desktop market merely a 30 year old industry. In terms of share price – the last 10 have been ruled by Apple:
Increase in Microsoft share price over last 10 years: 69%
Increase in Apple share price over same time: 2417%
Apple does not lead in OS market – but in has in terms of overall strategy. You only need look at the ROI on the Zune to see how much MSFT has lost its way. Bill Gates is merely the George Pullman of the Information Age. Technology changes the market that created technology…watch what happens in another 30 years after Google buys Apple.
kermit4karate: The article is Monday morning quarterbacking. I seriously doubt Apple, had it done the things the author suggest, would have, even under perfect conditions, sold many more Macs than they’re selling now. They’re up against Microsoft and its massive retail and distributor network. All things considered, I think Apple and the Mac are doing fine. Mac sales growth rates have been double digits for a while. Apple is poised to grow market share; Microsoft is not. That’s not opinion. That’s a fact. Microsoft is the company with everything to lose here. If/when they drop 5% market share it’d be a gargantuan loss. I say ‘when’ because we all know it’s going to happen sooner or later, especially with Linux and OS X out there.
I don’t hate Windows no matter what and don’t love Apple no matter what. Both have their uses, and now that I can run Windows on Mac hardware using Parallels I get the best of both worlds. I can still use Windows to access my company network, control our webcams and help Windows users troubleshoot issues, but I get to run it on a well-engineered Macbook and was able to decomission my old unreliable desktop PC.
twatwaffle: Why does the author of this NYT article address the feasibility of Macintosh as a Windows alternative to the public readership of the US, but then quantify the dominance of Macintosh systems with the international market share metric?
Macintosh has the 3rd largest market share in the US behind Dell and HP/Compaq, yet ahead of Gateway.
This is the type of abhorrent journalism and blatant ignorance that provides fuel to the already ignorant flame wars waged across the internet.
To preempt any journalistic article one would write, it would be best to understand just what you are writing about and said relevance to your point. If you are going to address the readership of the US, use US relevant metrics.
tao52nyc: I wish tech writers who should know better would get off the “3% market share” bullshit. Yes, Apple’s global sales account for 3% of all computers sold in the solar system. Fine. There are huge numbers of computers, however, sold in areas where Apple simply doesn’t play, like dumb terminals and pre-packaged point-of-sale systems used in retail stores – 10s of millions of those sold annually – not a Mac in the bunch. If you actually look at the markets where Mac plays it’s a different story, like, for example, 18% of the total laptop market this year. Lets look at consumer vs business desktops, or even just domestic share at over 6%. Before you look down your nose at the 3% chestnut, take a real look at the actual markets where Mac is a player.
IonSilverbolt: Apple=Microsoft2. Why would anyone want to replace a crappy OS(Windows) with another crappy proprietary OS(OSX)? You can’t even use your own software with the new Ipods. Only itunes. Is this really a company you want on top? If anything, Apple would be worse on top than Microsoft.
I hope Apple and MS keep pushing their restrictive shit on users. Eventually people will get tired of it and more companies and users will support Linux.
xike: He suggests the solution is to whore Macs to every reseller possible… I think Apple has a hard enough time with the few resellers they have. There’s so much ignorance and propaganda by the salespeople that hurts Apple much more than it helps.
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