On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Mike Smith wrote:
> > "macs tend to stay in service longer" is largely a function of "people who
> > buy macs are casual users who want email and have the thing smile at you
> > when you turn it on". At least in the home market. These people are not
> > likely to upgrade aggressively. The game market is pretty much owned by
> > the PC world, and it is games that drive new computer technology for the
> > most part (at the desktop level anyway).
>
> Yeah, it's hard to need replaced often when there isn't any new technology
> introduced that would require it.....
>
> > Which is all really too bad, since Apple has designed and engineered and
> > produced a superior product in almost every conceivable way, they just
> > don't have the marketing sense to get people to buy them. Pretty much too
> > late for that now, they were a competing and non-compatible technology to
> > "wintel", and now that "wintel" has captured the primary home market
> > (mostly based on games), developers are hesitant to put in time/resources
> > to port apps to a completely separate architecture...
>
> Marketing sense? Harrumph... That's ALL Apple does.
they preach to their own choir, though. Apple made their Big Mistake back
in the early 80s. The *only* way they can recapture a significant amount
of the PC market is to roll out a reasonably fast machine for under $1500
that can run programs designed for Windows - specifically, games. And it
must run it at least as fast as a comparably priced PC box. That's the
only thing that will get home users buying macs in large numbers again.
Until then, the Mac will be a computer for:
1. People heavily into graphic design, video editing, etc.
2. People who have very casual computer use requirements and do not play
games
3. People who want it as a novelty, ie, people who want to port code to
it because they 'can', or people (like me) who think it's cool to see a
UNIX shell on a mac (OS X), or people who want to run Linux on it (good
way to revive an old PPC601/PPC603/PPC604 box actually).
4. People who don't know better and think that it *can* run Windows and
want it because the case/monitor styling looks cool (my ex-wife was
seriously hot for one before I told her that she couldn't run Windows on
it. I had to pull up a web browser and *prove* this to her).
I believe the Mac market penetration is about 10%. It will continue to be
around that, unless Apple can do what I describe above with the mac.
IMNSHO of course.
--------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@foo3.com>
Cisco Certified Network Associate, Sun Solaris Certified Systems Administrator
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