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Reality Check: The Mac is a Viable Platform
There's little reason for most consumers to not give the Mac a chance.
Between my job at a computer store and dealings with normal computer users on a daily or near-daily basis, I like to think that, despite being a power user, I have a pretty firm grasp on the pulse of the average computer user. The average computer user is a completely different person from the aeverage computer geek (that goes without saying). As such, the two groups have completely different needs. These differences are most evident in the realm of computer purchase priorities.
I can tell you that the majority of things that geeks I’ve debated with online (especially on the PC side--sorry guys) consider to be of great importance to a computer are either greatly less of a concern or complete non-issue to most consumers. In my experience, the availability of software’s bearing on a computer purchasing decision is greatly overstated. The bearing of processer speed is overstated. The bearing of kick-ass graphics systems with 256 MB of VRAM is overstated. I can only think of a couple instances where graphics capabilities were a major concern to people I’ve conversed with. To most, it seems to be a non-issue. I can only think of a handful instances where raw processing speed has been a big concern; most people are only looking for “fast enough.” Games availability is also a very minor issue. Hardware configurabiulity/tweakability hasn’t come up much either. 7.1 surround sound? Generally not an issue.
From my work experience and from other experience with non-geek-types, I can tell you that consumers want something that lets them get online. Consumers want something fairly easy and straightforward. Consumers want something where they don’t need to worry as much about malware. Consumers want to listen to their music. Consumers want to retouch their photos. Consumers want to be able to write from time-to-time. Consumers generally are not interested in building their own machines.
Most people aren’t driven by the factors listed above; they are driven to find a solution that best fits their needs. Consumers don’t just want specs, consumers want to have a computer they enjoy and works best for them. There are only a few situations where the Mac would be absolutely ruled out: if they require high-powered Windows software that wouldn’t run well in Virtual PC, their workplace/school requires Windows, or they happen to want/need what the PC provides. More often than not, most customers I’ve dealt with seem to be at least somewhat open to the Mac (once they’ve seen OS X--I managed to switch someone on Dashboard alone!), unless their work requires it.
Translation: there’s little reason for most consumers to not give the Mac a chance.
So what’s keeping the masses from switching? Fear and ignorance of the unknown. A common response to the notion of switching seems to be “I’ve always used Windows.” And that’s fine, Windows does a lot well. However, there’s no mention of Windows being a better solution or anything along those lines. And it rarely seems to have to do with running Windows-only apps.
Then there’s that misconception that Macs are exorbitantly priced. More expensive than your average Wal-Mart discount PC? Yes. Horribly overpriced? No.
So here’s a challenge to people out there reading this who are tired of Windows (or have no particulart attachment to Windows): be open to the altrernatives. You have a choice; don’t be afraid to explore different operating systems. Instead of defaulting to Windows, do some reasearch. Inform yourself of your options. And when you’ve gathered a mess of information, make an informed decision. Even outside of school and the workplace, I feel I’ve opened many eyes to the fact that the Mac is a viable computing platform (I’ve also learned a great deal about Windows as well by working around it more; I can now feel confident in suggesting a good Windows PC to someone when I feel they’d be best served by Windows).
Many people I’ve spoken to have nothing particular against the Mac. Many people seem to actually be willing to give the Mac a chance once they see what it does well. So what’s up with Apple having a mere 4% market share? I think there are two main factors limiting Apple right now: misinformation and relative lack of reatail distribution. When many people think of the Mac, they think of OS 8 or something. Also, outside of CompUSA and The Apple Store, there aren’t many brick-and-mortar national retailers that carry the Mac.
Right now there is a golden opportunity for Apple. Many PC users are increasingly frustrated with Windows. Vista is still a year off. Tiger is a very solid operating system and Apple’s hardware lineup is the best they’ve ever had. Oh, then there’s the iPod, which has gotten Apple some positive buzz. The iPod is still doing very well, but it can’t fully cover up the other issues facing the Mac’s image. Apple needs to remove the misinformation; the new Apple Switch site is a good start, but Apple needs to do full-fledged advertising, as many Mac users have clamored. Apple needs to confron the Mac misconceptions head-on with a clear, focused marketing effort. Apple needs to further expand their reatil reach, either by expanding the Apple Store or bringing in new retailers into the fold and training employees about the Mac.
So if anyone from Apple is reading this, please don’t let this chance pass you by.
Random notes School starts tomorrow; if you’re a fellow Berkeley student, look for me on Bonjour!...A rreview for BeLight Swift Publisher 1.0.1 is coming soon...Go A’s.
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| Nick | comments | views |
thinkback
Why the persuasion? To combat ignorance, mostly. Why does Windows have most of the market when it has a bazillion viruses, ships new OSes years late, and when it does, still has trouble embracing new technologies?
Microsoft got its start by being the default operating system on IBM PCs, and “nobody ever got fired by using IBM”. It got much further by being, in the words of the Department of Justice, “a convicted abusive monopolist”. The PC business has proven to be so good for IBM they are now out of the business.
If Windows is so great, why has it spent 20 years copying the macintosh operating syste (poorly)? Why did Excel come out for the mac before it came out for Windows?
Maybe this is why Apple has started its own line of stores, to show people (who just don’t know any better) what a superior computing system can do. Show them all the software available for it. Show them there is a better way.
Apple may not have made as many good business decisions as Microsoft in the past 20 years, but they certainly make a better product. I think the days of Apple making bad business decisions are over for the foreseeable future.
Remember, part of that ~95% market share (a significant part, I’d say) that run Windows are corporate number-crunching machines, machines bought for the sole purpose of writing reports in Word, and so on. Companies don’t buy Macs for these purposes; they buy generic, cheap PC’s, running some variation of Windows, with one or two software applications. And they buy lots of them.
Informer: Why not the persuasion? Why shouldn’t Apple push its products and encourage people to switch? Many high-quality products simply do not get the necessary exposure to create a significant market penetration, and are killed off by lesser competitors. For instance, harken back to the decade of the Mac’s birth, when another consumer product had a short life and was killed by an inferior competitor. Sony significantly pushed the Betamax format for its technical superiority in several respects; however, they never managed to become better than VHS, and Betamax ultimately died. It’s actually remarkable that Apple had a similar competitive story, and still manages to create high-quality products that reach a core audience, like the Mac, or even branch out and capture the majority of the MP3 player market.
PC’s are ubiquitous, especially Windows PC’s; that should be obvious. But ubiquity does not mean there are not better products out there. Fast food is ubiquitous; however, the quality of the food at fast food restaurants is generally quite poor. High-quality products can sell themselves based simply on the experience of using the product; but they do not necessarily sell themselves to the masses, and that is the market Apple wants to reach.
Why Apple does not increase their advertising amount and quality, I don’t know. They produce very few Mac commercials, and those they do make are based more on aesthetic appeal than actual capability. Apple does advertise in magazines and billboards, but I think the greatest potential for new consumers is television, and if Apple commercials showing off the strength, ease-of-use, and aesthetic grandeur of Macs in general started saturating the airwaves like Dell and HP commercials do, Apple would find many more customers. It worked for the iPod; it may very well work for the Mac.
And of course, it’s a whole cycle. If Apple started aggressively advertising the Mac, and selling more Macs, demand for software would increase. Yes, there is a lot of Mac software out there (claims to the contrary notwithstanding); yes, the Mac can already do the majority of what the average consumer wants to do; but there is still room for improvement. A significant portion of the Internet video “market” uses Windows Media Player, and WMP for Mac is currently complete crap compared to its Windows counterpart (video is choppy and poorly optimized, many codecs do not play, etc.), and sites like Myspace contain incredible amounts of Windows Media movies. And the gaming market is vastly dominated by Windows titles; though a number of quality games come to the Mac, or start with the Mac on occasion, I can think of several titles just off the top of my head that I can’t play on my iMac, or for which performance is miserable. Were general marketshare numbers to increase, the demand for high quantities of high-quality software would rise as well, pressuring developers to write more cross-compatible, and just better, software.
> Why do the Apple people feel the need to use
> something like a switch campaign to tell people
> that what they have is better?
Uh, I don’t know what television channels you watch, but on the ones I watch (Discovery Ch, Science Ch, History Ch), I’ve seen countless commercials about Windows XP and none about the Mac.
Let me see, the one about “my grandson can travel the stars, all thanks to Windows XP”. Despite the fact that the best personal planetarium software which is Starry Night Pro runs best on OS X not Windows.
Then there’s the one about the teenage girl who got dumped but “that’s cool” because now she can write a song about it using Windows XP. Except the best software for doing this sort of thing is generally acknowledged to be GarageBand which only runs on ... OS X.
Then the one about the young girl who’s little brother bothers her or something. Saved due to Windows XP, somehow.
Last non-ipod Apple commercial I saw was like a couple of years ago, I think? What I’m wondering is on the contrary, with such a clearly superior product, why Apple doesn’t advertise OS X more? My guess: because nobody cares about the subtleties of computers and OS’s, because there’s one and only one thing people really know to be wary about (even if they stay in the Windows world), and that’s COMPATIBILITY. Being different is scary if you don’t know much.
>Between my job at a computer store and dealing
> These differences are most evident in the
>realm of computer purchase priorities.
You’re wrong if you think the average computer buyer’s priorities lineup with what you have said. While I agree that they don’t need the fastest processor, biggest hard drive, or most ram, I don’t agree that it isn’t a priority for them anyway.
That’s why e-Machines was able to grab so much marketshare in such a short amount of time. They offered really high specs for a low price. That’s how Intel was able to get 80% of the processor market… the megahertz myth makes the specs look better than they are.
Most people aren’t looking for “fast enough” but “fast as they can afford”. That’s how Dell, e-Machines, HP, Gateway, and Compaq work and that’s why they have 70%+ of the computing market in the US.
You can say they don’t care about the massive amount of Windows software titles and expandibilty but they do, even if they don’t ever use them (it). Anyone who has sold computers in retail (not at an Apple store) will tell you that.
>Then there’s that misconception that Macs are
>exorbitantly priced. More expensive than your
>average Wal-Mart discount PC? Yes. Horribly
>overpriced? No.
Yes, they are highly over priced. I’m not talking about $200 Dell’s either. Go look at your weekly Circuit City, Best Buy, or CompUSA ad and notice that they advertise complete packages (printer, monitor, and computer) starting at $500 with good specs and a nice software package. These days, an $800-1000 package will get you dual core P4 (gateway) or very fast A64, an LCD monitor, a printer, lots of ram, Media Center 2005, a flash card reader, front mounted audio and USB ports, a huge hard drive a dual layer DVD burner and more. And on top of all that it’s “on sale” and has rebates, both of which have proven to cause more sales.
Apple chooses to ignore the way the specs other companies are putting in their machines and you’re trying to rationalize ti by saying it’s what consumer “need”. It’s not what they want and they’ve proven that everyday for the last dozen years since Apple’s marketshare and sales peaked at 12% and 4.5 million respectively.
People don’t want non-expandable computers even though most people never use the expandabilty. People don’t want to get lower specs at the same or higher price.
People don’t want to search the internet for “alternatives” as many Mac users do.
People don’t want to run stuff in VPC.
Those are the facts.
I’m so sick of those Computer store computer “packages” as kuaidang mentions above. What he fails to mention (and for that matter the stores do to) is that most of the bundled pieces of hardware are barely passable in a quality standpoint. The printer ususually is a piece of garbage whos print cartridges cost more than the printer did, the monitor is usually not the one pictured in the ad, but a 14” CRT and if you want a flatscreen you have to shell out another $150, the computer itself has some real low end motherboard that uses shared memory for the video and the keyboard and mouse looks like they were plastic snap together models. The other big part of the picture he failed to mention is that you have to pay approx $400 more and then you get it back in 6-8 weeks, that is if you remember to send in the rebate. Plus you pay tax on that amount, not on the post rebate amount, so basically you are lending money, getting taxed on that money and then getting it back two months later, oh and if you want to return it, your screwed, since your ripped off the upc labels on the boxes to get the rebate and now the store won’t take it back.
What a scam...... SURE it’s cheaper.
Hmm, Macs are starting to look better now huh?
>The printer ususually is a piece of garbage
> whos print cartridges cost more than the
>printer did,
And Macs don’t even come with printers so it’s still better than what Apple offers. Plus, you can usually just pay the difference between the bundled printer and another one. In fact, at Best Buy the rebate is on any bundle so you can pick any computer, monitor, and printer, and get a large rebate.
>the monitor is usually not the one
>pictured in the ad, but a 14� CRT and if you
>want a flatscreen you have to shell out another
>$150,
Completely false. In the US it is illegal to show one monitor with a package and really be selling another. You can be selling the computer by itself and show a monitor but that’s another story.
But the monitors that come with iMacs and eMacs suck anyway.
>the computer itself has some real low end
>motherboard that uses shared memory for the
>video and the keyboard and mouse looks like
>they were plastic snap together models.
Hate to break it to you but Apple uses the same kind of cheap mobos and even cheaper mobo’s in many of there laptops which is why they have so many problems.
Mac Mini’s don’t even come with a kb+mouse.
The newer integrated GPU’s on PC’s these days destroy the dedicated cards on Macs in the same price range. Case in point, the Radeon Xpress 200 in the high-end e-machine blows away eMacs and Mac Mini’s in any game you want to throw at it and at any resolution. The card in the Mini isn’t even DX9 level so it’s not even worth comparing and at worst you’ll get about the same performance as the mini in the lower (DX8) mode. But the key is that the PC supports higher memory allocation (up to 256mb’s), uses PCI Express, and has upgradeable graphics which only the PowerMac has on the Mac side.
>The other big part of the picture he failed to
>mention is that you have to pay approx $400
>more and then you get it back in 6-8 weeks,
>that is if you remember to send in the rebate.
Even on the best of days $400 in rebates is at the top end. Case-in-point, back to school sales are happening right now and the max rebate at BBY is $330. Besides that all the prices on their website are before rebates.
>then getting it back two months later, oh and
>if you want to return it, your screwed, since
>your ripped off the upc labels on the boxes to
>get the rebate and now the store won’t take it
>back.
Not true. All they do is deduct the rebate amount from the money they give you back. It’s the law, they have to let you return it if it’s within the time quoted in their return policy.
There you can see all the packages with the proper monitors displayed, prices before rebates, and everything else I talked about.
“But the monitors that come with iMacs and eMacs suck anyway.”
Bullshit. 
My iMac G5’s screen is awesome. It’s quite crisp and bright, and the only thing it’s lacking in is size… 
| Aug. 31, 2005 | |
| Arden | 1:08 am |
GH, I don’t know which planet you came from but who is to say that all the best people are working for Apple? Next thing you’ll tell me that the best cars comes from America too.
I’m a consumer, I don’t care who was first or who copied who, I just want a great product that would keep me happy.
99% of the population would agree with me.
We got what we wanted, I guess you did too.
Arden,
Again you try to mislead the masses by saying what a great survivor Apple is due to their sheer brilliance (but they should really thank Mr. Gates right?).
The Commodore Amiga was a better system than both Apple and PCs, yet died out because they simply did not have the budget or advertising power to really have an impact in a competitive market. PCs had their business users, Apple had their desktop publishers, Amiga had their gamers and intuitive OS. That was ultimately their downfall since Nintendo, Sega and Sony came out with better gaming systems and better deals with gaming companies.
Betamax couldn’t sell because there were no real benefits when being compared to VHS. The system was more expensive, the tapes were more expensive, and I suppose the cost to produce titles on betamax was more expensive as well. People are not willing to change if VHS does the same thing and cheaper. That pretty much sums up the Apple and PC comparison. If people want to buy the betamax just for the experience, they can, but they’ll be the only ones doing it.
How many countries have you visited recently? I have not seen one Microsoft commerical yet I see the same 2 colour tone Apple ads constantly. Luckily we’re not getting it too often here in Japan.
The fact that Apple could never sell their computers/notebooks well enough is not because of their poor advertising (or over advertising whichever comes first), but because their computers are under-achievers.
Bullshit. My iMac G5’s screen is awesome. It’s quite crisp and bright, and the only thing it’s lacking in is size…
If you’re talking about the 17-inch monitor then you’re just flat out wrong. That monitor is near the bottom as far as DVI based LCD’s go. In fact, I haven’t ever used one as poor as the one on a 17-inch iMac. You can go do all the scientific tests you want and they’ll say the same thing… the 17-inch iMac monitor sucks in comparison to nearly anything on the market with a DVI port.
I haven’t used the 20-incher enough to judge it’s quality compared to other similar monitors but if it’s anything like the Cinema screen then it’s “okay”. We now have several Dell, Sony, and NEC monitors of similar size or bigger and they are all about the same or better (the NEC is spectacular and the color fidelity on the Sony is unmatched).
| Sep. 06, 2005 | ||
| 6:33 am |
If you’re talking about the 17-inch monitor then you’re just flat out wrong. That monitor is near the bottom as far as DVI based LCD’s go. In fact, I haven’t ever used one as poor as the one on a 17-inch iMac. You can go do all the scientific tests you want and they’ll say the same thing… the 17-inch iMac monitor sucks in comparison to nearly anything on the market with a DVI port.
I use two of those iMacs with the LCDs “ near the bottom as far as DVI based LCD’s go.” They are indeed quite nice. The 20” (one of which I use frequently as well) kicks total ass.
| Nick | Sep. 06, 2005 | |
| 5:52 pm |
For reference, I often use Dell, Sony, and Apple displays; iMac G5s; and IBM, Apple, Dell, and Sony laptops at work. Maybe I’m just blind, but I really can’t tell where the Apple displays are any better/worse than any other I’ve used (Sonys seem to be the only ones with any real distinct advantage).
| Nick | Sep. 06, 2005 | |
| 5:56 pm |
If you’re talking about the 17-inch monitor then you’re just flat out wrong.
My opinion is wrong?...........................
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| Sep. 07, 2005 | |
| Arden | 12:08 am |
Again you try to mislead the masses by saying what a great survivor Apple is due to their sheer brilliance (but they should really thank Mr. Gates right?).
No, I don’t think I’m saying that at all. I think Apple has managed to survive because they had a core, niche market that stuck with them through good and bad times, and in more recent years have produced products that, while not necessarily the best they can be, capture the public’s attention and increase publicity for Apple (iMac line, iPod mostly). I’m not saying Apple is the most brilliant company ever, and in fact many of their decisions and design choices leave me wondering if someone took some hard drugs before coming to work, but what Apple does is produce a quality product in a quality package, whether it can kick the competition’s ass to the moon and back or not.
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| Sep. 07, 2005 | |
| Arden | 12:16 am |
“For reference, I often use Dell, Sony, and Apple displays; iMac G5s; and IBM, Apple, Dell, and Sony laptops at work. Maybe I’m just blind, but I really can’t tell where the Apple displays are any better/worse than any other I’ve used (Sonys seem to be the only ones with any real distinct advantage).”
You may not be able to tell the difference if you have not really sat in front of LCDs long enough for various applications.
The Apple displays are usually dimmer compared to the others, their brightness have to be tuned up to make out anything on the screen.
Basically, its the quality of the LCD that they use. It doesn’t compare with Sony, Dell or IBM but for general use they do the job.
1.
But why the persuasion?
Why do the Apple people feel the need to use something like a switch campaign to tell people that what they have is better?
If the Mac was indeed a better platform, then why couldn’t Apple sell more of it in the last 20 years?
What has changed since then and why aren’t people still not buying it?
Cost? Incompatibility? Restrictive?
Take a look at a typical electrical store, there is an Apple stand. That’s the only place where people can see a Mac in action. Combine this with the software on the shelf and Apple’s advertising, people are only seeing that “Apple is better” signboards with no real content to demonstrate that.
Now take a look at the other side and you have the section for PCs, its peripherals and software and not a switch campaign in sight. Customers flock to the stores every day to buy “something” not only because they love their Dell or Sony PCs, but what they can do with them.
Successful products sell themselves without the need for the “hey we’re here” advertising because they have content, and that’s what PCs in general have a lot of.