Mac Marketshare at Universities Booming?

[CourtneyA1]

USC's EMBA program 1/3 of instructors use a Mac to present.
My class of 45 now has 9 Macs up from 7 6 months ago, and 5 a year ago.

Its great to iChat during class too!

 

[GoodWatch]

Do you give a choice to your end users?

No, and everyone in his right mind wouldn't do either. Standardisation is one of the most important pilars of a smooth running IT environment. And not to mention cost saving. But this whole discussion isn't about this of course. Using Windows for whatever valid reason is always the wrong choice.... I appologize for being dragged into this AND making replies. I will refrain from this and only concentrate on my iMac and all it brings. Eh?

 

[GoodWatch]

Now that is an excellent (and heretofore unmentioned) hurdle to switching. I am not an expert in iSeries, but as I understand it OSX and iSeries are a no go.

So that would fall under "proprietary, incompatible software" problem that I mentioned at the end of my post.

All I was saying is that the reasons you *did* mention were presented as if there was no alternate solution for OSX clients. . . which was not accurate. Terminal services, netboot/netinstall, locking down desktops, etc. etc.

There are very valid and real reasons that make transitions to OSX (or any platform) a significant hurdle. It's important to focus on those instead of ones that aren't really an issue.

And never assume anything That is a bad habbit of well, Windows users, isn't it?

 

[cohibadad]

So what? Only reason you guys are getting all horny about this is because iPod sales have increased awareness of a computer company called Apple. You think college kids REALLY went "Hmm, I went to Apple.com recently, and searched iMacs because my friend recommended it. They look pretty awesome.". College kids, in fact, everyone, probably went "My iPod is so cool, I might just get these things called iMacs!"

Now that the Zune got a WHOLE lot better, these statistics won't mean anything. iPod sales will go down, Zune sales will go up, and everything will be the way it was in the 90s.

lol. dumb

 

[Consultant]

I can honestly say I'm not surprised, it makes a ton of sense for college students to get OS X for reasons that we are all intricately aware of. However, I'm going to get a Wintel for one reason: tablet functionality. The IBM Thinkpad X60 tablet just makes so much more sense for taking notes that its even getting me not to get a Mac.

Of course, if Apple does make a proper Tablet PC by this summer, when I graduate, needless to say I will be the first person in the Apple retail store the next morning this is my point, really though: Apple needs to focus on the education market and make a Tablet PC so that there will be virtually 0 reason to not get a mac for college students; get Apple to focus on education.

Um, a good number of people can type faster than writing.

 

[Consultant]

*sighs* No it doesn't. As long as you have the correct drivers, updated firmware, etc its fine. My Thinkpad had all kinds of problems with hibernating (I loath suspend. Waste of power. ARE YOU LISTENING APPLE! IMPLEMENT HIBERNATION AS A USER ACCESSIBLE FEATURE!) Until I went with a centrino solution for WIFI. Since then its been flawless. Its all about the drivers. as long as you are geek enough you generally won't have any problems. And its even better in Vista. hibernating or Standby is faster then even OS X and this is on a MBP I'm measuring the performance.

Yes, sleep or hibernation are very buggy in windoze machines. Almost all windows user I know shuts down their computer, even for a 30 minute drive.

Apple current laptops does have hibernation mode. It is user accessible, but the terminal command doesn't seem to work on my Santa Rosa MBP.
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/mac911/2006/10/safesleep/index.php

 

[Consultant]

I really have to agree here. I closed my Dell laptop from work running Windows XP while on the bus today after starting some work. I fell asleep and didn't wake up for an hour. I was freaking out that my battery was dead and I wouldn't be able to save anything. I just open my laptop and it restores from hibernation and Access 2007 is there just like I left it. My battery only dropped from 87% to 81%. As much as I love OS X, this clunky old Dell knew what to do and all that I did was enable hibernation in the Power Management Control Panel.

Dear Apple,

Enable hibernation for us weary travelers that don't want a dead battery if we forget to shut off our closed laptops.

Windoze have background processes running even when sleeping, which drains the battery.

Macs in contrast, maintains the battery level when the cover is closed, in either sleep mode or hybrid hibernation mode.

On the various different iBook G3, iBook G4, PowerBook G4, and MacBook Pro I've owned, I've never ran out of battery and thus never need hibernation, even if I run the battery down to 1 minute, and don't charge it for a day. (I have a 4 year old iBook that still gives me 4.5 hours of internet surfing time.)

Yes, Macs do have hibernation mode. Just because you "don't know" something doesn't mean it's not there. You are asking for a feature that's been included with every Mac for a couple of years.

Seems like you have not used a Mac laptop? Do I smell a troll?

 

[flopticalcube]

Windoze have background processes running even when sleeping, which drains the battery.

Macs in contrast, maintains the battery level when the cover is closed, in either sleep mode or hybrid hibernation mode.

On the various different iBook G3, iBook G4, PowerBook G4, and MacBook Pro I've owned, I've never ran out of battery and thus never need hibernation, even if I run the battery down to 1 minute, and don't charge it for a day. (I have a 4 year old iBook that still gives me 4.5 hours of internet surfing time.)

Yes, Macs do have hibernation mode. Just because you "don't know" something doesn't mean it's not there. You are asking for a feature that's been included with every Mac for a couple of years.

Seems like you have not used a Mac laptop? Do I smell a troll?

I don't understand this part of thread either. My MacBook loses 0.75% of power per hour when the lid is closed. It just sleeps quietly. I can send it to deep sleep through a widget but I don't think 0.75% per hour is really the end of the world.

PS. No way is Eldorian a troll. He's probably had more Mac laptops than I've had hot breakfasts and I love to eat!

 

[krunk]

So what? Only reason you guys are getting all horny about this is because iPod sales have increased awareness of a computer company called Apple. You think college kids REALLY went "Hmm, I went to Apple.com recently, and searched iMacs because my friend recommended it. They look pretty awesome.". College kids, in fact, everyone, probably went "My iPod is so cool, I might just get these things called iMacs!"

Now that the Zune got a WHOLE lot better, these statistics won't mean anything. iPod sales will go down, Zune sales will go up, and everything will be the way it was in the 90s.

Actually, every single switcher I know (whether they also owned an iPod before or not) made their decision based on personal recommendation or having seen someone using osx and said "wow, that looks really nice...huh? No viruses? Nice!". Some like the looks, others liked the OS their friends were using, some saw friends using the bundled iLife and such, and many a programming friend drooled over the unix backend. It had nothing to do with the iPod.

Seriously. I've NEVER heard anyone say "My iPod is sooo cool, I got to get a mac now!" But I have frequently heard "Why would I want a mac? My iPod works fine with windows."

 

[Eidorian]

Windoze have background processes running even when sleeping, which drains the battery.

I can say the same for OS X while it's asleep. kernel_task to windowserver (PID 1 to 68 for me) would like to have a talk with you. mds and automount are my friends too.

Sleep is a low power state regardless of the operating system. The only requirement is that it's support by the operating system's power management features. The sleep state is still using a minimal amount of energy.

Macs in contrast, maintains the battery level when the cover is closed, in either sleep mode or hybrid hibernation mode.

How so? I guess that flashing light doesn't consume power either.

On the various different iBook G3, iBook G4, PowerBook G4, and MacBook Pro I've owned, I've never ran out of battery and thus never need hibernation, even if I run the battery down to 1 minute, and don't charge it for a day. (I have a 4 year old iBook that still gives me 4.5 hours of internet surfing time.)

I've never run out of battery power either in my laptop usage. I still think that giving OS X users the option to hibernate in order to save even more battery life. I don't want to have to reboot my entire machine in the field when I could just hibernate it. The sleep state is still using power albeit a small amount.

Yes, Macs do have hibernation mode. Just because you "don't know" something doesn't mean it's not there. You are asking for a feature that's been included with every Mac for a couple of years.

Safe Sleep is nice but why can't you make it user controllable?

Seems like you have not used a Mac laptop? Do I smell a troll?

+2 years and over 8,000 posts here on MacRumors. I'm #30 on post count if you want to check the members list. Not to mention at administer a department of Macs and Windows machines. I suggest that you don't question my credentials without looking into them.

Check me out on Apple's mailing lists as well.

PS. No way is Eldorian a troll. He's probably had more Mac laptops than I've had hot breakfasts and I love to eat!

Thank you

 

[Consultant]

I don't understand this part of thread either. My MacBook loses 0.75% of power per hour when the lid is closed. It just sleeps quietly. I can send it to deep sleep through a widget but I don't think 0.75% per hour is really the end of the world.

PS. No way is Eldorian a troll. He's probably had more Mac laptops than I've had hot breakfasts and I love to eat!

You see, Eldorian is asking for hibernation, a feature that's part of OS X for over 2 years. The hibernation feature can actually be implemented in many of the older Macs too. See my post #181

So if he's not a troll, then he is quite uninformed.

Also, in term of battery usage, it's Mac compared RELATIVELY to the other option, which is wintel only machines. Compared to the drain on wintel machines, the Mac's sleep/safe sleep/hibernation mode has relatively no drain on battery.

 

[Eidorian]

You see, Eldorian is asking for hibernation, a feature that's part of OS X for over 2 years. The hibernation feature can actually be implemented in many of the older Macs too. See my post #181

So if he's not a troll, then he is quite uninformed.

As I said, Safe Sleep is there to provide a backup in case you lose power while your Mac is asleep on battery power.

It's just not a easily user controllable. I can set my current Dell laptop to hibernate after a certain period of sleep inactivity. I found this quite useful when I nodded off with my closed laptop. I understand that sleep's battery usage on its own is minimal.

 

[Consultant]

oops

Meant to post this page instead:
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2006/10/sleepmode/index.php

What's so difficult about this?

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode [insert 0, 1, 3, 5, or 7 here]

 

[Eidorian]

Meant to post this page instead:
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2006/10/sleepmode/index.php

What's so difficult about this?

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode [insert 0, 1, 3, 5, or 7 here]

Once again, easily user controllable.

Try getting average Mac Joe to use Terminal.

Not that it's hard to make a GUI application or script for this. Why doesn't Apple do it then?

 

[Consultant]

I see you are insistent. If you want it, why don't you make an automator script, or make a widget? Probably take less time than reading what I said and replying to it. =p

Later on, I'll see how fast my Mac Genius friend can make an automator script, although for most users, the current sleep setting is the best choice.

 

[Eidorian]

I see you are insistent. If you want it, why don't you make an automator script, or make a widget? Probably take less time than reading what I said and replying to it. =p

Later on, I'll see how fast my Mac Genius friend can make an automator script, although for most users, the current sleep setting is the best choice.

I still don't want to pop my battery out after my machine enters Safe Sleep hibernation though.

Thank you for enlightening me a little more on Safe Sleep though. MacWorld's videos were informative.

 

[Virgil-TB2]

I don't believe you're right about this. I think Microsoft Office is, by far, their biggest cash cow. ...

Office and Windows are the two "lynch-pins" of the Microsoft money printing facility.

Office does make a bit more, but if you think of these two as being almost the only money generating products they offer and if you think of the revenue they generate as being roughly 50 percent each, you aren't far off the actual figures.

Every other thing they do pretty much hemorrhages money.

So my prediction was that in any MS future re-organisation (a reasonable expectation), they will likely follow standard business procedure and sell off everything that doesn't actually make them money, (goodbye X-Box, Zune, etc.) and retire the exec responsible for the disaster that caused the re-organisation. They might also want to correct their "image problem" by shuffling out the old guard exec and going with a new, "re-invented" MS team.

If I was Balmer, I would be checking for knives in my back every morning before work.

 

[Consultant]

IMO, it'll take a while for Macs to get a considerable larger total market share. Right now, I believe Macs have 5-6% market share, while Windows has something like 90%. A lot of people will will get PCs because "Well, most of the world is a WIndows world so I might as well fit in." With Leopard & Boot Camp, it should help bring some more people over.

As for security, having such a small market share is a good thing in some respects b/c it lets us Mac users have security by obscurity. So basically, why would you want to hack a computer platform w/ only 5-6% market share when there's a platform w/ 90%? If/when Macs get more market share, don't be surprised to see more malware, people trying to hack, et al, Macs.

It would probably be worse then Microsoft if Apple got 92% Market share.

Do you personally know any hackers? Not script kiddies, but real hackers making viruses to infect Windows machines for profit?

See, a lot of hackers are using macs because it's the most capable OS / hardware combination out there (Macs can multi boot Mac OS x, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux at ease).

Combine lack of interest (because they don't want to destabilize Mac OS X, their tool of choice), Macs being harder to hack than Windows, and other reasons, theoretical exploits on the Mac are never taken advantage of by any hacker. So no matter what the possibilities are, despite of your wet dream being that all macs are hacked, zero real life exploits on Mac is still zero exploits.

Definitely more secure and usable than your frankenstein windows machine which you have to put days to trouble shoot, find drivers, install drivers, install virus protection (which slows down your CPU), perform frequent defrag, reformat after a few months.

 

[sjwk]

Just for the record, the numbers here for our students (UK higher education) are showing just over 10.5% running some version of OSX which, while still low, is a touch up from last year. 21% on Vista and 65% still on XP (either of which *could* of course be running on Apple hardware)

With teaching staff, the Apple numbers are currently lower, but growing more rapidly and some have recently switched back to Apple having moved to Windows before OSX came out.

 

[krunk]

As for security, having such a small market share is a good thing in some respects b/c it lets us Mac users have security by obscurity.

The numbers we're seeing on campuses makes me think otherwise. From previous links we see that campus usage is up to 50% and above in many cases.

So why would this be significant? Campuses are a prime target for bot nets. They normally have the best infrastructure around, relatively open networks, and a pool of users that are on the whole inexperienced and naive (18-25 year olds).

In ad dition they're a virtual cornucopia of personal information via on campus hospitals and student databases. I work in IT at my uni and it is frequently targeted by real hackers. Not script kiddies and email viruses (which of course are as prolific here as anywhere since they're all just shotgun approaches). Windows is always their preferred point of entry.

Why? There's one simple reason: Windows comes with oodles of services enabled while osx has none. For example, when you see a remote exploit in ssh pop up and go "ah ha! It's obscurity! OSX has vulnerabilities too." The fact that this service isn't even running on 90% of osx installs means the actual vulnerable pool of systems is far smaller then the total of all osx installs. Contrasted with windows, where a service vulnerability normally effects 100% of XP installs.

If the roles were reversed in this policy (osx with always on services and windows with always off), then the number of vulnerable osx clients per exploit could actually surpass the number of vulnerable windows pc's per exploit even with osx only having ~10% of the market. Now that's something to chew on.

We could go on with other glaring gaffs in MS's security choices, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel. This is why folks say "Obscurity sure helps, but OSX is more secure by design as well."

 

[seenew]

I go to the Savannah College of Art and Design, so you'd expect higher Mac numbers here, and they are. I'd say at least 7/10 people I know here use Macs. Mostly MacBook Pros.

 

[chrismarks]

I am in engineering and use my mac. I have never used a pc. I got a brand new macbook to repalce my old powerbook G4 and it works wonders at school. I see Macbooks everywhere these days on Campus. On my floor at least half the people have macs. My only problem is that I use SolidEgde (Autocad like program) and I need paralells to use it.

 

[weberik]

More law students are using Macs, too. I've been running Mac Law Students for the past couple of years, and have seen plenty of evidence of marketshare growth. The move to Intel in particular has had a huge effect.