Just this comment here shows your complete lack of knowledge about the POWER architecture and what it is used for. You think those kid toys that are the consoles are the only thing using it ? No, they're simply used to offer volume and lower R&D margins on shipped processors.
Hmm the consoles are kids toys? Well, I hate to break it to you but the average "kid" playing an Xbox360 or PS3 is the 18-35 year old male. Even better is the fact that the average age is getting older because they're not stopping their gaming as they get older.
Don't forget the fact that theres more console gamers out there than there are Mac users total
In fact, the average age is now 35
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/07/17/survey:-average-u.s.-gamer-age-35;-40%-are-women
The POWER architecture is used today in most big computation solutions, in scientific arenas. It is perfect for that task, moreso than ia-32 and x86-64. If you really think Athlon's are the pinacle of processor design and power, you're again just spouting anecdotes and opinion as fact, which is why you are labelled a troll around these parts.
Go to ibm.com and read up on POWER.
Yeah I'm going to go to IBM and read all of their sales pitch material regarding a product they sell to convince myself its a good product. Next, would you like me to go to Intel.com and read about how great their GPUs are?
If The PowerPC architecture is so much better than Intel architecture, why did Apple completely abandon it? Why did the old MacBook Pros and iMacs run circles around the PowerPC G5 based Macs available at the time? Why have most Linux distros that supported PowerPC architecture abandoning their projects if they haven't already? I've been googling for a few minutes here trying to find interesting ways PowerPC is still being used. The only thing I can find is that the next generation "POWER7" MIGHT be considered to be used in a single super computer. AMD and other processors are being considered for the same project.
Apple is merely ahead of where the rest of the PC market is going: in December 2008, it was reported that Windows has now also crossed the "50% laptops" threshold.
By a mere 100,000 units. Thanks in large part to netbooks.
As I've said before, Apple's notebook sales are only so high because they have an awful desktop lineup.
"Invasion", sure. Why it's a veritable stampede!
I count two dual-platform users who defend Windows to (X) degree... mosx and yours truly. That's, what, a ratio of 100:1? 200:1?
We can't really help that this is a sensitive stuff to the Mac faithful, that these MS ads represent to them what the Muhammad drawings represented to Muslims.
hahaha Exactly!
And how many HP, Dell and Sony all-in-ones have you seen in the wild?
The difference is that other vendors add an all-in-one to the lineup for the minority of customers who might like them - not because of an almost religious zeal that an all-in-one is the right form factor for a desktop.
Sony's an odd case, but they're mainly a consumer gadget manufacturer, not a computer maker. (Hmmm. See the parallel?)
Exactly. I've only seen one HP All-in-one in the wild, and that was at Fry's last weekend. They had one model set up and nobody was using it. Everyone else was interested in the notebooks and standard tower desktops, even the models costing more than the all-in-one. The Apple section was largely empty, minus the people looking at iPods.
So what you're saying is, your mission is to stop people from buying Macs and steer them towards Windows. This is fascinating, for the same reason that the MS commercials are.
No, I want people to make informed decisions.
5 years ago any employee of Microsoft would have laughed at the thought of Apple being a threat, or even a competitor. Apple was nothing more than a tiny 2% market share player that wouldn't even license its OS to any other manufacturer. No threat at all.
I can't really see what's changed. Sure, Apple's market share has increased slightly, but not a lot. Why is MS suddenly making commercials like this, backed by legions of people like you? I would have thought Linux is more of a threat. It would only take a great marketeer like Jobs to come along with a polished distro. The world is ready to give up Microsoft.
As Aidenshaw pointed out with a link, Apple is still at single digit marketshare in the US and worldwide. Apple's marketshare would have to increase by about 5x at the same time Microsoft's would have to drop by nearly half for Apple to be a real threat to Microsoft in the US. Worldwide, Apple's marketshare would have to increase by about 25x while having Microsoft drop by half.
But that won't happen because Apple is flat out ignoring emerging markets because the citizens of those countries can't afford to buy vanity computers.
Maybe its just that they're running scared and are trying to fight fires from all angles, because Vista is such a disaster.
Really? Thats why over 300 million Vista licenses have been sold so far?
How many copies of Leopard have been sold?
That one has been covered 10 times over on this discussion so I'm not going to dwell on it. Take out the word "don't" and you've pretty much answered your own question.
Not really, because you don't get what you pay for with a Mac. Apple advertises the Mac as a well built all-in-one solution that is faster than the rest and can do everything you'd ever want it to. And thats simply not true. First of all, they're not faster than much cheaper PCs. They can't do everything those cheaper PCs can, and in many ways, they're not built as well as those cheaper PCs either.
My brand new MacBook Pro 17" running Leopard is putting a big smile on my face. (That smug Mac person's smile you really hate).
Good for you. You spent $2,799 on a computer thats less powerful than one that would have cost you about $1400. You just paid a $1300 Apple Tax for a less powerful and less capable system.
And I'll take the 24" screen I'm using right now over any Apple display, notebook or otherwise
My 2.5 year old MBP is on eBay at the moment, and its doing very nicely thank you, despite the recession. Lots of watchers, bids already. My friend sold his MB last week and was stunned by the price he got. His iMac is currently listed and is looking like it will exceed his expectations.
And how many of those are buying their first Mac? I guarantee you that every bidder is someone who has already bought into the Apple hype and not an average person
You may not like it, but there are lots of people out there who aspire to own a Mac, and there always will be.
Like I was. Then I got it, saw how things really were, and wish I could get rid of the thing.
I want Apple to remain a profitable and financially healthy company, but I don't want them to increase their market share, because in order to do that they'd have to go for the high volume, low cost end of the market and build boring business boxes. And then they'd stop being the Apple I know and love.
Yeah, let's all hope Apple continues on the same path with no change. Let's all hope they keep screwing all customers in favor of maintaining that 3% worldwide marketshare, rather than doing the intelligent thing and appealing to everyone.
Mosx obviously loves hand built, spare parts bin PCs on the cheap. He doesn't care about spending an afternoon trying to track down the exact part that just failed in order to RMA it to one of 10 different manufacturers that participated in his box. It is folly to think someone would rather just have to deal with 1 manufacturer who will do it all for free under warranty because he sold the entire thing to you. Time is of no value to this man and thus shouldn't be of value to anyone else
Ah, another failed argument.
Spare parts bin PC parts? I don't think so. When I build my PCs, with the exception of optical drives, all of the parts I use have better standard warranties than Apple's extended warranty. I can build a PC with the fastest, highest quality components, and best warranties out of the box and still come in at half (or even less) the cost of an equal Apple product.
Another amazingly bad part of your argument is the time argument. Heres a perfect example:
A friend of mine bought her MacBook before her and I met and became friends. She bought the black MacBook with AppleCare. A year and a half into owning it, the HDD started to fail. So she took it for service. She was without her MacBook for an entire week just for a HDD swap. On top of that, she ended up spending another $150 for an external drive (Apple would only use one of the drives they sold) and the service for data recovery. A full WEEK. If she had come to me (this happened after we met), her data could have been recovered for free AND she could have had an upgraded HDD for half the cost and it would have all taken no more than a couple of hours for data recovery and software installation and about 5 minutes to physically swap the drives.
And look at what happened to my first Mac. In it the optical drive went bad. It took a full THREE WEEKS of failed repairs on Apple's part to finally get things right. If it wasn't for the fact that you had to perform major system surgery on the plastic MacBook, which would have voided the whole system warranty, and buy a ridiculously expensive drive (about $200 at that time), I could have done it myself in just a matter of minutes.
With the iMac, Mac mini, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, you have to deal with Apple's support. Which means you're out of the game for at least a week, if not longer depending on how sub-par their service center feels like performing. With the Mac Pro, if one of the non-user replaceable parts fails, you still have to deal with Apple's support.
With a custom built PC, if something fails you're only out for as long as it takes you to get that new part. Let's say a motherboard dies. I can get in the car and drive to Fry's and get a motherboard for only a few dollars more than it would cost at newegg and be back up and running all in a couple of hours time. The drive to Fry's would take longer than anything else. If the motherboard in an iMac dies, you're out of the game for a week.
The good thing about buying quality PC components is that they're not likely to fail until you're ready to upgrade anyway. And when they do fail you have the choice of RMA'ing it under warranty or just taking the opportunity to upgrade.
With an Apple product, with very few exceptions, you have to deal with Apple directly no matter what. If the display in my iMac dies out of warranty I'm basically SOL, unless I want to use the all-in-one system with an external display. But have fun getting that to work since OS X extends the desktop by default. If the motherboard in my iMac dies out of warranty, I can't just go swap it with any board that will fit the case specifications. Nope, have to go through Apple or buy an extremely overpriced replacement part from a 3rd party.
So in reality, your argument completely fails. Because by going with a PC you both save time AND money.
Windows 95 will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows 95 OSRB will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows 98 will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows 98 SE will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows ME will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows NT 4.0 will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows 2000 will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows XP will fix everything. Just hold on...
Windows Vista will fix everything and look pretty while doing it this time, honest. Just hold on...
It's the same BS story everytime there's a BETA release. All the MS fanbots are all over the thing, scream at how it's : stable, fast, slim, awesome looking. Then it ships... I've been stuck listening to them for the last 15 years. Heck, I was one of them, having participated in the Windows 98 Beta and finding it awesome. Funny how that turned out.
And what was there to fix with those OSes? Windows 95 brought pre-emptive multi-tasking to consumer OSes nearly 6 years before Mac OS had it. Windows NT had multi-processor support before Mac OS did, but not like that would have mattered anyway considering Mac OS up until OS X had co-operative multi-tasking.
As someone who has been using Windows since 3.0, I've never had any of the problems that Apple and the fanboys claim Windows has had. Sure it hasn't been 100% problem free. But the problems I did have were in the 90s and caused by me being overly cheap at that time and buying low quality hardware. Since I started buying good hardware, which I came to find out had minimal cost difference, I've had very few issues with Windows. Any issue with Windows these days would boil down to poorly written 3rd party software screwing things up. Or certain pieces of software, I'm looking at you iTunes+Quicktime, trying to take over the entire system and the user not wanting that to happen but the software being designed to do so no matter what.
I mean, in reality, all of these so-called problems that Windows has and needs fixing... it all only exists in the minds of Apple's marketing department and the minds of Apple fanboys who have no real Windows experience.
that is NOT the person that the macbook, the mini or the imac was made for. You are who the Mac Pro is for, and maybe the MacBookPro (which has a few more upgrades than the Macbook if you order online)
Actually, no. The Mac Pro and MacBook Pro are not for me. I'm too intelligent to buy them. I'm most certainly not going to spend several thousand dollars on a Mac Pro when I can get 90% of the processing power for about $700. And I'm certainly not going to buy a MacBook Pro at any price when I can get more power, more options, and more capabilities for around $1300 in a PC.
The other 3 are for the regular user. The folks that don't need superfast, hyper charged graphics etc. Why has Apple downgraded the graphics in the mini and the imac you asked. because they weren't being used. I will bet my rent money for the month (and I live in LA so that's not chup change) that 95% of 20" and lower end 24" imacs have been going to folks that wanted to email, web surf, maybe use the webcam to talk to family, organize photos and sync my ipod.
No sensible person is going to spend $1500 on an iMac when a PC that does everything the same, with the same size yet higher quality screen, can be had for less than half that amount.
If someone wants to just browse the web, sync their iPods, and play with digital pictures, a $500 PC from Walmart with a $250 24" 16x9 screen will do that just fine. I mention 16x9 because Apple's screens are all 16x10 and are bad for movies. People love their movies. The best part about that is the cheap PC will have a DVD writer, it will have a similar amount of RAM and storage space, and a relatively decent processor for the money.
so Apple pulls back the parts cause the more expensive ones are needed. in some cases, ups the harddrive size or some other tradeoff. in others just adds the savings into the profit till (what you didn't know that Apple is trying to make lots of money. like every other business)
Do you realize how cheap HDDs are? Or how cheap high quality displays are these days? By going with the 9400M in the entry 24" iMac, I would bet Apple is making more of a profit off that system than they did the previous generation unit just because HDDs are dirt cheap and the 9400M takes care of the entire system chipset plus GPU for only a few dollars on top of what the Intel chipset itself would have cost.
t's only when folks like Pystar build a whole company out of it that it's an issue.
And thats only because Pystar shows Apple's ridiculous pricing schemes
So given this detail, why should they market everything to the power users. why should they strive to make that small group happy and maintain a tiny cut of the market when they can look to the other 98% of the folks out there. the ones that will buy into the fact that there's more to the cost than just the computers innards and buy a laptop for $1300 + tax to do basic tasks and let the kiddies play a few games.
It's not about power users at all. It's about giving people CHOICE. THe CHOICE to buy what THEY want and use it how THEY want. Not at all about catering to the "power users".
The whole argument here and with these Microsoft ads is that you simply have NO choice with Apple. You either have to buy what they tell you you need or want or nothing at all. Thats the problem.
Oh, and like I said before, the average gamer is 35 years old
Far from being a "kiddie".
last report I saw was that the world market share was just under 10% and had gone down perhaps 1/2 of a percent.
why don't you illuminate us with a full time line of the numbers (with sources would be very nice).
Again, I'd like to thank Aidenshaw for the numbers posted already.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/02/mac-market-share.ars
I also want to say one last thing..
People tend to claim that Apple uses high end hardware thats better than PCs. Well, thats kind of funny to me. In my MacBook I have a Hitachi HDD, LG DVD writer, LG screen, Intel processor, and nvidia chipset. in my HP I have a Fujitsu HDD, LG DVD writer, LG screen, Intel processor, Intel chipset, and nvidia GPU. In the Dell Studio XPS 13 you'll find one of the same screens by the same manufacturers used as Apple, same DVD writers (Panasonic and LG), same HDDs, same nvidia chipset, same Intel processor.. need I go on?
Macs are the exact same hardware put in a prettier yet more poorly built enclosure.
