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journal: mac
The growth of the Apple tree
Editor’s note: Pilky originally published this on his personal blog on March 4th. He agreed to republish it here at our request. We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization and punctuation.
There seem to be two conflicting arguments about the marketshare of the Mac. The first is of rapidly increasing number of users, the 50% of Mac buyers being new to the Mac, the transition to Intel and the iPod halo effect. This must mean a huge increase in market share of the Mac and lots of figures show this. However, there are also many other figures showing only minute increases in market share, just a fraction of a percent. One thing is certain though, the market share of the Mac is increasing. The only question is, how much? Well I’ve been doing some research and I can tell you that it’s a lot, and it’s all gained from Microsoft.
Source
So what’s my source for this? Net Applications. It collects data from 1000s of sites on the Internet to work out various trends such as browser share, OS share etc. But this is just one source. How is it significant? Why not take more sources? And probably the biggest question: How can it show the Mac having over 6% market share when most stats show it having a 2% market share? Well, I obviously need to back up my choice of source before I give you the figures.
The reason for choosing this source is that it shows Internet users. This means it shows actual computer users. Many figures are based on units sold. These are very bad for showing long term market share figures, as they deal with just how many computers are sold. If we used these figures then PPC Macs and PCs running the likes of Windows 2000, Win 98 etc would have close to 0% market share.
By using the Internet you can see the real user base. If a user buys a Machine this month they don’t exist in the next month in sales market share. However, they still exist in the Internet market share. There has long been the argument from Mac users that the market share figures don’t represent the fact that Macs users often wait 3-4 years between updating their Machines, compared to 2-3 years for PC users.
There is one last question that relates to one of the figures I’m going to show, and that is that the rapid growth shown would be more than Apple’s manufacturing capability. This is very true; there are billions of Internet users and Apple just shipped a few million Macs. However, it isn’t as simple as one computer to one Internet user. Many computers at home are for families, leading to 3, 4 or more users on maybe one computer. I myself have two computers, though in the greater scheme of things that is a rare occurrence. Many public computers service 100s of different people on the Internet, and this is especially true in poorer countries. These figures show the OS’s used to access the Internet, not the number of computers sold or the number of actual users of those computers.
Of course these won’t be perfect. There are millions of websites on the Internet, some that attract more users from one OS than another. They also don’t show servers, which could help to explain the low figures of Linux and Windows 2000 compared to what anecdotal evidence would suggest, and also the absence of Windows Server 2003 (though there is the possibility that this is grouped in with another version). But with all that said and done, let’s move onto the figures.
October 2004
The earliest stats available are from October 2004, so it makes sense to paint the picture of when these figures start. So what was the OS landscape like almost 2 and a half years ago? Well Microsoft was clearly on top with various versions of Windows totalling 96.39% of the market (the net apps figures show market share for XP, 2000, 98, 95, ME, NT, Vista and CE). The Mac had 3.23% of the market and Linux had 0.27%. Together these three totalled 99.89% of the OS market. Longhorn, as Vista was called back then, was still years off after having gone under what is now known as the Longhorn reset. The iMac had just been updated with a G5 processor and a new design a few months earlier and updates to the iBook G4 and Power Mac G5 were released. The other thing to note is that this is the lowest market share that either the Mac or Linux have over the next two years and the highest that Windows has.
To focus more on Windows, XP has been out 3 years and now has 63.47% of the market. Showing the longevity that versions of Windows have, Windows 98 still has 11% of the market and 2000 commands 15.79%. Even Windows 95, which is getting on for 10 years at this point has 0.43% market share, higher than that of Linux. So at the moment Windows looks pretty secure at the top. Over the next 10 months it will slowly lose market share but never fall below 96%. In total between October 2004 and August 2005 Windows will lose just 0.27% market share, hardly cause for concern. Of course, this has to go somewhere and over the same period there was an increase of 0.25% market share for the Mac and 0.05% for Linux.
September 2005: The winds of change
It seems odd to place the start of Apple’s market share growth to a single month, but September 2005 appears to be that month. In the past 10 months Apple’s market share had fluctuated between 3.23% and 3.57%, settling around 3.4-3.5% for June to August. There is growth, but it is insignificant. During the same time, Linux had done very little, peaking at 0.33% in June 05 but never really showing any rapid growth. Windows XP has continued to grow to take 75.92% of the market. Users of 98 and ME have virtually halved to 5.85% and 2.32% respectively. XP is definitely picking up users’ steam and it seems to be picking it from older versions of Windows.
Then we come to September and something happens, something very obvious. Microsoft’s market share drops below 96% for the first time to 95.86% from 96.12% in August, representing a 0.26% drop in market share. Again, it doesn’t seem too significant, until you realise that in the past month Microsoft has lost almost as much market share as they have over the past 10 months. What is even more significant is that Apple shot up from 3.48% market share in August to a new high of 3.74%, a gain of… 0.26%, the same amount of market share that Microsoft lost.
So what is the cause of this? Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the iPod halo effect. “But what evidence do you have for that?” I hear people exclaim. Well, none, but if you think about it, it makes sense. There were no major product announcements from Apple during September 2005 and a few months earlier Apple had announced the switch to Intel, which many thought would cause people to hold off buying new Macs. The only possible thing to explain it is that September is the back-to-school season, when many people in both North America and Europe head back to school or university and buy new computers. These same people are the generation of people who Apple targets with the iPod. I believe that this massive shift represents the reality of the iPod halo effect, while at the same time showing that it isn’t leading to a huge gain in absolute terms. Microsoft may have dropped below 96% market share, but they still have over 95% of the market.
October 2005 to March 2006: Growth of the Apple tree
September could have just proved to be a blip, but it turned out to be just the beginning. Over the next 5 months Microsoft would lose a further 0.54% market share offset by a gain of 0.17% in January, which can be explained by Mac users holding off until mid-January for Macworld, while PC users were buying discounted PC’s in the January sales. January of course is highly significant as it represents the start of the switch to Intel. As such, we see the first month of Intel Macs being on the list in February, where they account for just 0.03% of the market.
On the PPC Mac front there have been huge gains of 0.5% market share, reaching the new high of 4.35% market share in December 05, a full 1.1% gain over October 04. Linux on the other hand has stayed roughly the same, doing nothing much interesting. Of course, that was about to change.
April to August: Penguin mating season
Now, I’m assuming this is some sort of glitch in the stat collector or my eyes or going or something, but Linux appeared to do something in April 06. It shot up from 0.32% to 0.46%. In the same month Microsoft dropped just below 95% market share. This was another date to pinpoint. It may not have been as big as the gains Apple had been seeing, but needless to say, April 2006 was the month Linux started to gain traction. Over the next few months it would fluctuate from a low of 0.38% in June to a high of 0.47% in August. These figures aren’t very big, and the installed market share of Linux is likely much higher, but most of those Machines are servers. Though after doing next to nothing for 18 months Linux actually started appearing to move in the desktop market space. Could 2007 really be the year of Linux on the desktop?
But while Linux decided to stir things up Microsoft and Apple weren’t that exciting during this time period. While Microsoft was preparing Vista to ship to businesses in November and Apple was showing off Leopard in August their market shares didn’t change much. One of the predictable things that happened was the decline of the PPC Macs, dropping from their 4.33% high of April to just 3.71% in August, though this was to be expected. Apple reached a high of 4.49% in April with the help of the Intel Macs on top of strong PPC sales. April was also the month Microsoft hit its low of 94.96%. By August however, Microsoft had gained 0.15% market share back while Apple had lost 0.16% market share. While this does represent a small move back to Microsoft, it was nothing compared to the huge changes that had happened over the past 2 years and paled in comparison at what was to come.
September 2006 to Now: Fertilising the Apple Tree
If September 2005 was when the Apple growth spurt started, September 2006 was when it became significant. First, let’s get Linux out of the way. Linux hasn’t done much interesting over the past 6 months, starting at 0.4% share, dropping to 0.35% and then rising again to 0.42% last month. For now it seems to be leveling off, though that isn’t a bad thing as it could have lost market share.
So obviously this means that it is Apple and Microsoft that are the significant players over the last 6 months. September is significant for Microsoft as it was the first month stats appeared for Vista, which gained 0.06% of the market, not bad for a then-beta OS. However, Apple saw another growth spurt, this time at the expense of both Linux and Microsoft. It grew 0.39% to 4.72% market share, a new high, causing linux to drop from its high of 0.47% to 0.4% and Microsoft to hit a new low of 94.81%, after clawing back to above 95% over the summer.
One thing that has to be said though, if any people have switched, then they have either switched from older versions of Windows, or the number of Windows users updating to XP has been larger than those switching from XP to OS X. Between October 2004 and December 2006 XP saw continuous growth, from 63.47% to 85.3%. This is phenomenal growth, which Microsoft hopes it can replicate with Vista.
So that’s a lot of babble, but what actually happened over the past 6 months? Well, in a nutshell, Apple took a massive chunk of the market from Microsoft. In October it reached 5.21%, rising 0.49% from September. During the same time Microsoft lost 0.49% market share to drop to 94.32%. This trend continued until we got to the figures for February, with Apple at an all-time high of 6.38% and Microsoft at an all-time low of 93.04%. During those 6 months Microsoft lost 2.07% market share and Apple gained 2.05% market share. But what’s surprising is where this market share has come from:
As I noted earlier, the PPC Mac was losing market share, which was to be expected. But a funny thing happened between September and January: it gained that market share back. The PPC Mac market share actually grew to 4.34%, the all-time 2nd high for PPC Macs, a year after the Intel Mac had appeared. This means that almost all of the gain in market share by the Intel Macs has been growth for Apple. And with the Intel Mac now making up 2.09% of the market you can see that it is a lot of growth.
Where now?
“Where now” is a very good question. Apple seems to be growing at a huge rate, but the question is whether it can keep that up. Vista is also gaining market share. February was the first full month of its release and it grew 0.75% over its January market share. Vista is obviously going to grow quickly, and if it follows a similar growth rate as XP it will be at around 15-20% of the market by the end of 2007. However, reports are saying that sales of Vista PC’s are slower than expected. This could be a sign that the Mac is still going to grow.
So what are reasonable estimates for the future? Well, assuming the inevitable slow down in Apple’s growth I would say that 10-15% of the market within the next 5 years wouldn’t be too big an ask, though certainly 7-8% by the end of 2007. Linux could make quite a few gains over the next 5 years, though I don’t see it getting more than 2% of the market. 0.5% would be a reasonable bet for the end of 2007.
So where does this leave Windows? Well, it has started to lose market share rapidly, and I believe it is simply due to the failure of Microsoft to combat the threat that should have been obvious at the end of 2005. That said, I don’t see them falling from their position of being the market leader by quite a way, though I doubt they will see above 90% of the market again in the future, but I also doubt we’ll see them looking at below 80% of the market.
I’ve put the figures from Net Apps in a spreadsheet, and you can click the thumb below to see an image of it.
To see the original figures click on the link below:
Top Operating System Market Share Trend for March, 2006 to February, 2007
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thinkback
I don’t have a clue how accurate the numbers are, but I do think the general attitude towards Windows isn’t that positive right now.
I’ve read an article or two about how some companies are seriously considering Macs today when they wouldn’t before. The reason is they figured the cost to upgrade their systems to Vista was comparable to switching to Macs.
A university in Pennsylvania switched all their PCs to Macs recently:
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/03/15/wil kes/index.php
He also cited the additional security of Mac OS X, school-wide access to Apple’s iLife suite, and Apple’s OS itself as side benefits. “It is, well, the superior OS, isn’t it?� said Byers, who before the switch was a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user.
They also pointed out that just the hardware cost was less because instead of having to buy PCs and Macs, they can now just buy Macs and run both operating systems, so they were buying fewer units.
Contrary to what some people believed, the Intel processor in the Mac and the ability to run Windows natively has been a huge success for Apple.
The Vista launch, to me, doesn’t seem to be a big deal to anyone. Instead of a revolutionary OS that mows our lawn for us and has a photo manager that is superior because of some silly 3D view, we got an OK update to a seriously flawed OS. They needed more than an OK update to make it better than mediocre, in my opinion.
If Windows had improved greatly, there would be choirs singing it’s praises throughout the world.
But I think any talk about Apple taking any real market share from Windows is wishful thinking. I think it’s U.S. market share will probably raise significantly, but not worldwide.
In a few months, Apple’s going to be getting all the press. I think speaking in general terms of mood, Apple is doing very nicely and Microsoft is being too defensive.
| Mar. 19, 2007 | ||
| 3:43 pm |
Instead of a revolutionary OS… snip
Vista was only launched a month and a half ago. There’s a million things in the Vista Wave that haven’t and won’t make their impact until the more people adapt Vista and Longhorn server.
For instance, WPF (WPF/E), WWF, WCF, HD Photo, Hypervisor/VPC 2007, DX10, 64-bit, GPGPU, resolution independence, sideshow, readydrive, FATex, SQL Server Anywhere/Everywhere, IIS 7, Powershell, OOXML, XPS, MCE, Xbox/Vista Live (Live Anywhere)…
The only way you can ignore the impact they’ve have on the industry is by… well… trying to ignore it.
There are so many obvious examples:
We see what WMP10/Vista MCE did to iTunes
How “desktop search” took off because of the Gates PDC 2003 keynote.
Every corporate/business OS (Redhat, SUSE ETC.) are doing their best to integrate virtualization thanks to MS and their Hypervisor/VPC/VS movement.
FrontRow/AppleTV vs MCE (even the PS3 and it’s similar capabilites)
The massive XPS/OOXML/MARS/ODF battles
Even in some areas where Apple was the clear leader, it seemed that no one responded until Microsoft came along. Perfect example: Aero’s effects ( many of which were preceded by Apple years before) clearly caused the Linux community to create Beryl/Compriz/AIGLX etc.
Have you used Leopard yet? There’s a ridiculous amount of Vista influence considering how much they made fun of Microsoft for the same thing. The Spotlight menu, Time Machine, Document (icon) Previews, Quicklook, icons for music files, core animation, the new dashboard features (:rolleyes), screensharing/meeting space/ichat. Oh yeah, and that “illuminous” thing is hillarious even if it is mainly a rumor right now.
Obviously the Vista (wave) has been the most influencial event since… a long time. The OSX wave/rebirth of Steve Jobs was huge because it brought the iMac, iPod, and iApps but ultimately the OS itself was ignored by MS, Novell, RedHat and other OS makers until 2003. Can’t really say the same about Vista.
The Vista launch, to me, doesn’t seem to be a big deal to anyone.
Why should it be? Vista was RTM’d several months before and any techie who wanted to run it has been able to do so since last June. The featureset has also been roughly the same and well known since mid-2004. The launch was just a formality.
The Longhorn Reset link was interesting. Thanks. And it is significant Apple gained some market share these last few years.
Kuaidang, I expected you to roll off some list of things you think Apple copied from Microsoft. We get it. Microsoft invented everything (or demonstrated it in a basement somewhere before anyone implemented it). If Apple implemented a feature first, Microsoft demonstrated it years before and Apple copied that. If Microsoft implemented a feature first, Apple didn’t start work on that feature until after seeing it in Windows. Cough.
And frankly, listing applications and technologies in Vista that anyone can install on XP doesn’t really help sell Vista, nor does it at all relate to what I said in my post.
My statement was about the general mood that I perceive towards Microsoft and Vista versus Apple, which relates to this article.
For example, C|Net’s review of Vista actually brings up OS X:
Windows Vista is not the Apple Mac OS X 10.4 killer one hoped for (or feared).
PC Mag’s review says:
Nor is Vista bug-free. As I assessed final code, I ran into a variety of small but annoying glitches and found plenty of features that didn’t work as seamlessly as I would have liked. I can’t shake the feeling that Vista’s release was rushed.
BOTTOM LINE: Vista offers a lot of improvements over Windows XP, but most of them are conveniences rather than essentials.
How does Vista stack up compared to its competition, most notably, Mac OS X? Well, feature-wise, they are pretty much on-par, if you ask me. Stability- wise, XP was already on par with OS X, and left little to improve upon. In the looks department, it all depends on your taste, of course. I like the Glass theme better than I like the Aqua look, but that is so totally personal it is irrelevant for this discussion. Security-wise; now that is where only time will tell. On paper, they seem to be on par, but theory is always different from practice. When it comes to personality, I would still say the Mac has the advantage - clearly.
The fact that so many sites that are not Mac-oriented are even bringing up OS X in a review of Windows is amazing, in my opinion. Again, I do see a momentum shift towards Apple and I see it swinging further later in the year. How this translates into market share is yet to be seen.
| Mar. 20, 2007 | ||
| 6:26 am |
The fact that so many sites that are not Mac-oriented are even bringing up OS X in a review of Windows is amazing, in my opinion.
Why? The same thing happened for Windows 95, 3.1, XP etc.
And frankly, listing applications and technologies in Vista that anyone can install on XP doesn’t really help sell Vista, nor does it at all relate to what I said in my post.
It addresses the exact issue I quoted. The issue of how “revolutionary” the Vista wave is or will be.
I even took the liberty of using an unconditional format to my post so you could easily find the topic statement:
Vista was only launched a month and a half ago. There’s a million things in the Vista Wave that haven’t and won’t make their impact until the more people adapt Vista and Longhorn server.
You simply can’t write off something like .Net 3.0 or DX10 a month after Vista’s consumer launch. When developers start utilizing more of Vista/Longhorn Server then the gap between it and XP/Tiger/Leopard will grow very quickly. Hell, the Vista developer tools aren’t even fully complete yet.
Again, I do see a momentum shift towards Apple and I see it swinging further later in the year.
By “towards Apple”, you mean “towards OS X”? If so, I disagree. I see a big shift towards their other products and services (iPod, iTunes, iPhone, FCP, Apeture etc.) but Leopard has been rather unimpressive to most people, even many Mac fans (no pun intended).
From what I’ve seen the updates are getting smaller and smaller. Panther was a great update. Tiger less so but Spotlight and Dashboard (and their competitors) were very hot issues at the time. Leopard’s headlining feature is a backup application… how bland in comparison to Spotlight or Exposé.
I can’t help but think that had Time Machine been released with Tiger that it would have been the 5th or 6th feature instead of the headliner.
I think you’re right that many people were/are looking for something to steal Vista’s thunder… Tiger did a good job of that but unless Apple has a rabbit to pull out of the hat then they missed a golden opportunity with Leopard.
After all that talk of Microsoft copying them they turn into hipocrites. After all that talk about how late Vista was they are behind their original “late 2006/early 2007” release schedule.
I ask again, have you used Leopard at all?
Since you brought up the 3D photo manager… what do you think of Photosynth?
Gzzy, just to address some of the points you raised:
• Sites like Digg and Slashdot would have a minimal impact with such a large data set.
• The figures used are for computers connected to the internet. Dumb terminals, unused computers in labs, servers etc are not counted. A much higher percentage of Macs out there are used regularly than PCs.
• The Vista stats are coming from the Vista sub category that appears from September 2006. And do we know that 3 million people downloaded Vista and it wasn’t 3 million download attempts? I remember there being a lot of problems with people downloading Vista due to server load
• The “glitch” thing was a joke. Linux had done nothing for 18 months and then suddenly shot up. I wouldn’t say that either are glitches, given that they show consistent trends.
• You pointed out why the totals don’t add up to 100% earlier, they don’t include the “Other” section. For example, February 2007 showed the main 3 OSs making up the lowest share they do for the whole chart, a total of 99.85% so 0.15% missing, not exactly your 0.5% (just to point out, I seem to have got the Win95 figure wrong and it’s actually 0.03% for february). If you look at what makes up most of that other you find it lists the Nintendo Wii with 0.05% (higher than Windows CE and 95) and Hiptop, PSP and Web TV, each with 0.02% each. This adds up to 0.11% bringing us to 99.96%. The remaining 0.04% is likely to be various other minor OSes that aren’t big enough to warrant their own slice
• The iPod halo effect was mentioned as a possible reason for the jump in market share during the back to school season. Other factors could have been taken into account, the fact that Apple is big in Education for one (one of the highest in the US and the top company in europe).
Just a last point, try reading the article carefully before making comments like this, as I address many things in the article, state where things are guess work etc. For example, I don’t say that I’m looking at install base, in fact I say that what the figures show isn’t the install base
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| Mar. 20, 2007 | |
| 4:04 pm |
Why? The same thing happened for Windows 95, 3.1, XP etc.
I don’t remember PC magazines saying the Mac OS was better or the same as Windows in the reviews of those versions of Windows.
You simply can’t write off something like .Net 3.0 or DX10 a month after Vista’s consumer launch. When developers start utilizing more of Vista/Longhorn Server then the gap between it and XP/Tiger/Leopard will grow very quickly. Hell, the Vista developer tools aren’t even fully complete yet.
You are talking about technical impacts and I’m talking about the public perception of Vista.
OK, so your point is people will be raving about Vista later when they realize that DirectX can now do things OpenGL was doing a couple of years ago in Doom 3 once they spend $700 on a video card that supports it and wait for a game that utilizes it. Alright. Fair enough. I doubt it. PCs are insignificant in gaming, haven’t you heard?
By “towards Apple�, you mean “towards OS X�?
No, I mean what I wrote - Apple. I said all the press will be about Apple in a few months and I said Microsoft is being too defensive.
I also talked about how I didn’t think the Mac would gain any significant market share in the entire world. You read all that, right?
but Leopard has been rather unimpressive to most people
Yeah, this is where you flip your point of view from “you can’t judge Longhorn because it’s just beta” to judging Leopard based on beta builds that we all know are feature incomplete because the CEO said in his keynote that many features would be kept secret.
You continue to be a person who is disingenuous.
I think you’re right that many people were/are looking for something to steal Vista’s thunder… Tiger did a good job of that but unless Apple has a rabbit to pull out of the hat then they missed a golden opportunity with Leopard.
Because you have a final version of Leopard, right.
Listen, I totally agree with you that backup and mail stationary and virtual desktops aren’t making me excited. I personally have talked about how I think Time Machine has a “Fisher Price” user interface. I’d much rather have Time Machine be a category in Spotlight results, giving me thumbnails of the different versions of the same file at the same time versus having to click on stupid arrow buttons to manually go through each file one at a time.
But this wasn’t about Leopard stealing Vista’s thunder. People weren’t looking for something to steal Vista’s thunder. I think everyone in the world would be singing the praises of Vista if it were a better OS than it is now. We all use Windows one way or another. And if Vista was the best damn OS in the world, I’d be happy to use the best damn OS every single day. People are yawning because Vista isn’t that big of a deal. Many reviews I read say “Stick with XP because you can download and install so many of the “new” features in Vista, so save yourself the trouble.”
The problem is Vista is just a yawn of an update and that was my point. And it’s not just Mac zealots saying that because they hate Microsoft and Windows. It’s PC magazines saying that. You are trying to convince me that everyone’s experience in Vista will improve greatly once all the amazing things under the hood start making toast for us in the morning automatically. I’ve been hearing that from you for years now - “just wait, Windows is going to totally blow you away!” OK. Still waiting.
Again, I think Intel processors are a big deal, and you were really, really, really wrong about that, as usual (because your partisan bias makes you say irrational things about Apple which turn out to be wrong). According to you, Apple will be switching back to PPC.
Have you bought any TV shows from Microsoft? You know, Apple started that trend. 
Since you brought up the 3D photo manager… what do you think of Photosynth?
I haven’t used it. Is this one of those movies like the ones about WinFS you were showing us three years ago that was suppose to make me think Microsoft was so much better than Apple at innovation?
| Mar. 20, 2007 | ||
| 4:34 pm |
I don’t remember PC magazines saying the Mac OS was better or the same as Windows in the reviews of those versions of Windows.
WTF? Aren’t you old enough to remember all that talk about Windows 95 = Mac 84?
You are talking about technical impacts and I’m talking about the public perception of Vista.
Which I already addressed. MS started giving Vista away last June. Unlike Apple, they didn’t NDA most of it and the RTM held very few surprises compared to the public releases.
OK, so your point is people will be raving about Vista later when they realize that DirectX can now do things OpenGL was doing a couple of years ago in Doom 3
Sure it was lol. Geometery shaders, built-in GPGPU/physics, unified shader model, Xbox Live integration, hardware feature consistiency… all in OpenGL/Doom 3 years ago… oh wait.
Can you provide some specific examples to back up your statement? Doubt it.
The current state of OpenGL (games) is for all practical purposes at the same level as DX9.
once they spend $700 on a video card that supports it
Not even half that today. Disengenious, as you would say.
http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.p hp/form_keyword=8800/topcat_id=/Search=Search/pa ge_id=5/popup3[]=260:371/lo_p=0/hi_p=0/sortb y=priceA
PCs are insignificant in gaming, haven’t you heard?
Sure it’s insignificant, which is why developers keep releasing so many AAA games for the PC, right? Console gaming maybe bigger but PC gaming clearly isn’t insignificant.
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/01/26/more-le opard-screenshots-details-emerging/
I said all the press will be about Apple in a few months and I said Microsoft is being too defensive.
What are they doing that makes them seem defensive? If anything Apple is overly defensive with all the anti-vista/windows ads and all their shit talking at the WWDC.
Yeah, this is where you flip your point of view from “you can’t judge Longhorn because it’s just beta� to judging Leopard based on beta builds that we all know are feature incomplete because the CEO said in his keynote that many features would be kept secret.
No, this is from the “I spend a lot of time on Arstechnica, Macrumors, Appleinsider, and Thinksecret and many hardcore Mac fans aren’t happy with what they’ve seen from Leopard” point of view.
But this wasn’t about Leopard stealing Vista’s thunder. People weren’t looking for something to steal Vista’s thunder.
“Vista 2.0”, “Hasta la Vista. Vista”, All the shit talking about Vista at the WWDC, the whole “released at the same time as Vista” garbage
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/02/07/anti-vi sta-marketing-at-apple-stores/
Obviously they were looking to steal Vista’s thunder.
I personally have talked about how I think Time Machine has a “Fisher Price� user interface. I’d much rather have Time Machine be a category in Spotlight results, giving me thumbnails of the different versions of the same file at the same time versus having to click on stupid arrow buttons to manually go through each file one at a time.
The interface really isn’t that bad. I have no problem with that part. Just the fact that it has fairly steep requirements considering their are zero Macs that come with dual hard drives and most Mini’s don’t even come with hard drives big enough to correctly partition for such purposes.
I think everyone in the world would be singing the praises of Vista if it were a better OS than it is now. We all use Windows one way or another. And if Vista was the best damn OS in the world, I’d be happy to use the best damn OS every single day. People are yawning because Vista isn’t that big of a deal. Many reviews I read say “Stick with XP because you can download and install so many of the “new� features in Vista, so save yourself the trouble.�
Two slightly conflicting statements considering the context of Tiger. How was Tiger any different? Quicksilver, Konfabulator etc.
Also, you’re so ridiculously biased (since you say that I am) that you just immediately wrote off anything Microsoft ever demoed, beta tested, or publically released. It didn’t really matter what they did to Windows because it woudl never be good enough for you… unless it was a Mac. Hell, you even went through that whole phase where you claimed Longhorn and WinFS didn’t exist because it wasn’t for sale… even though several people gave you links to download the workign versions of the software.
Again, I think Intel processors are a big deal, and you were really, really, really wrong about that, as usual
No, you’re wrong. At no point did I say moving to Intel wasn’t a big deal. Wrong as usual. Moving to Intel gave them dual core, hardware virtualization, closed the speed gap, and the new notebook chip they had been wanting for years.
I DID SAY that bootcamp wasn’t a big deal to non-Mac users. That much is still very true.
According to you, Apple will be switching back to PPC.
I still believe that to be true. The Cell processor (PPC BTW) is coming along very very nicely and IBM/AMD are building a general purpose Cell processor for use in a supercomputer running Red Hat Linux. Given the great specs of the Cell (power, speed etc.), the ridiculously low cost, and the fact that it’s cutting edge technology.. it would seem to be a perfect match for Apple, especially as they try to push their server technologies more and more.
Then you consider that the tech world already knows Apple’s deal with Intel was only for a few years (remember the comments they made about being able to move to AMD) and that OS 11 has to be coming sometime… it’s a far out guess but so was people believing Apple would move to Intel and that happened.
Don’t be surprised if you see a Cell-PS3 version of Darwin popup in the next year or so. Shit, there’s a version of OS X for ARM processors now lol.
I haven’t used it. Is this one of those movies like the ones about WinFS you were showing us three years ago that was suppose to make me think Microsoft was so much better than Apple at innovation?
Blah, blah blah… working product link. But yes, like WinFS, you have been provided with a link/method to obtain the working product and you choose to ignore it in order to bash it. Typical.
Have you bought any TV shows from Microsoft? You know, Apple started that trend.
Sure they started that trend. :Rolleyes *cough*INDemand*cough*, *cough*akimbo*cough, *cough*VOD*cough*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_on_demand
Hate to break it to you but I ordered numerous TV shows via Comcast iNDemand long before the iTunes Video store showed up. Valiant effort though.
• Sites like Digg and Slashdot would have a minimal impact with such a large data set.
You don’t know that. That’s actually another problem with the data. Without knowing how many users that data represents then you have no idea how representative of the entire market that data is. You also don’t know if the total number of users measured is 1/5th the size of slashdot users or 100x the number of slashdot users.
Just a last point, try reading the article carefully before making comments like this, as I address many things in the article, state where things are guess work etc. For example, I don’t say that I’m looking at install base, in fact I say that what the figures show isn’t the install base
Yes, you give that disclaimer but the entire article makes the point that your research into Netapplications stats show approx how much and where Apple’s “marketshare” gains come from. In fact:
“ One thing is certain though, the market share of the Mac is increasing. The only question is, how much? Well I’ve been doing some research and I can tell you that it’s a lot, and it’s all gained from Microsoft.”
You can’t support that idea at all with Netapplications stats because of the issues I outlined.
Netapplications data isn’t even meant to be an approximation of the internet… just of sites using netstats products. It would be one thing if the sites used were carefully choosen to be a accurate cross-section of the internet/www but they aren’t. It’s not really much different than, say, OSNews giving marketshare stats for OSnews.com and all the other sites they link to.
WTF? Aren’t you old enough to remember all that talk about Windows 95 = Mac 84?
PC Magazine said that?
Which I already addressed. MS started giving Vista away last June. Unlike Apple, they didn’t NDA most of it and the RTM held very few surprises compared to the public releases.
Ah, so you now know that “most of” Leopard is NDA. Making progress…
The reviewers are giving Vista poor to mediocre reviews and telling people to not bother upgrading to it because Vista had a public beta? Ha!
Can you provide some specific examples to back up your statement? Doubt it.
Motion blur, ultrashadow, volumetric FX.
The current state of OpenGL (games) is for all practical purposes at the same level as DX9.
No, Doom 3 had ultrashadow, motion blur and any volumetric effect id wanted - new features to DX10.
You still don’t get it, do you? Anyone can add those functions to OpenGL at any time through extensions.
This is just like the crap you said about procedural synthesis:
Sony doesn’t have many of the technological advantages, like procedural synthesis and better compression, that Microsoft has so their games will always be much larger even for the same title (assuming both are optimized for both platforms).
It turns out the PS3 has procedural synthesis and even uses the same procedural synthesis middleware as the 360 in Oblivion.
Geometry shaders are programmed in the following languages: Assembler, HLSL, GLSL.
That’s OpenGL, Kuaidang.
nVidia updated OpenGL spec:
NVIDIA has updated its collection of OpenGL extension specifications. These updates include an unabridged PDF collecting all NVIDIA-supported OpenGL extensions (2,097 pages) and an abridged version (462 pages) with only the newest OpenGL extensions for the latest GeForce 8 functionality.
These new extensions for GeForce 8800 expose geometry shaders; constant buffers; texture arrays; new compressed, integer, and packed texture formats; transform feedback to stream out vertices into buffers; shadow cube maps; programmable integer instructions; and more. Each PDF also contains a table detailing which NVIDIA GPU architectures support which extensions. Additionally, every specification is available in plain text.
So, as you see, if Microsoft puts something out in DX before OpenGl has it, nVidia and ATI will just add it to OpenGL via extensions and so their cards will have the same functionality across both APIs.
But OpenGL will have features before DX and games created in OpenGL, like Doom 3, can utilize those features before DX is equipped with the same feature.
Don’t forget that the PS3 is using OpenGL.
Not even half that today.
Not the GTX, but you are right that you don’t have to spend $700 to get DX10 abilities.
Sure it’s insignificant, which is why developers keep releasing so many AAA games for the PC, right? Console gaming maybe bigger but PC gaming clearly isn’t insignificant.
And if we were talking about the Mac, you’d agree it’s insignificant, yet it too has AAA games. So much for your theory on that.
PC gaming is insignificant - it’s not important anymore. Portable gaming and console gaming outsell PC gaming by a huge factor. The days of anticipation for the greatest in games coming only to the PC are gone. PC-only studios are now doing console games. Heck, Spore is coming to the consoles.
The company that makes billions off of PCs, Microsoft, puts out their most anticipated games for the console first and PC gamers have to wait...like a common Mac user. How ironic.
What are they doing that makes them seem defensive?
Interviews with Gates and Ballmer. Gates was asked about the Apple ads and he replied very defensively and said there are daily exploits of OS X. Ballmer has been whining about Goolge for a while now.
No, this is from the “I spend a lot of time on Arstechnica, Macrumors, Appleinsider, and Thinksecret and many hardcore Mac fans aren’t happy with what they’ve seen from Leopard� point of view.
Nah, you are being a hypocrite because when hardcore Windows fans weren’t happy with early Vista builds (Paul Thurrott included), you were there telling us all that it’s beta and to not judge it (or you were saying that even though Thurrott called it a disaster, he liked it).
“Vista 2.0�, “Hasta la Vista. Vista�, All the shit talking about Vista at the WWDC, the whole “released at the same time as Vista� garbage
That’s Apple, sure. Of course! But you really have a hard time keeping track of what our discussion is. I’ve been talking about the general public and reviewers. My opinion is that the general public and reviewers of Vista aren’t very positive about it.
I quote reviews and you say people were looking to steal Vista’s thunder. PC Magazine and C|Net and OS News (and many others) aren’t Mac zealots or Apple’s PR department.
The interface really isn’t that bad [Time Machine]. I have no problem with that part.
I think having a list in Spotlight results would be much more productive to go through than a full screen interface that requires I go one at a time. I’m hoping that Leopard has both. Having it as a category in Spotlight results is just a no-brainer to me.
How was Tiger any different?
Because Windows XP is garbage and Microsoft has a lot more to overcome. OS X 10.3 was not garbage. OS X 10.4 did not take six years to develop. Apple didn’t show us science fiction demonstrations over the last six years, telling us about the marvels that will be OS X 10.4, like Microsoft did (with your help).
The hype for Vista was huge huge huge. Tiger was a yearly update to the Mac OS that costs $129 and doesn’t require nearly as much hardware power to run with all of its features supported.
, you’re so ridiculously biased (since you say that I am) that you just immediately wrote off anything Microsoft ever demoed, beta tested, or publically released.
No, I said “I’ll believe it when I see it” all the time. When you and xp_user said WinFS was going to revolutionize Windows and be a relational database-drive file system that blows away CoreData and Spotlight, I repeatedly asked a) what functionality it would have that OS X did not have, and b) I would believe it when I see it.
Hell, you even went through that whole phase where you claimed Longhorn and WinFS didn’t exist because it wasn’t for sale… even though several people gave you links to download the workign versions of the software
No, of course it exists. So did Copland. So did a lot of things. I said Windows Vista wasn’t going to have a relational database-driven file system, aka WinFS. It doesn’t. It basically has CoreData and Spotlight, which isn’t an improvement over XP since you have been saying for years that XP does the same exact thing - metadata-driven file system with plug-ins for applications.
No, you’re wrong. At no point did I say moving to Intel wasn’t a big deal.
Yeah, you said:
1. Sales of Mac hardware would go down because the excessive price of Macs would become more obvious since they will be using the same hardware. Wrong. Mac sales are way up because of Intel.
2. The speed of Intel Macs would be slower than PPC Macs. Wrong. Intel Macs are faster.
3. The drop in sales would force Apple to switch back to PPC.
Blah, blah blah… working product link.
Working product not for sale. OK. Great. When can I buy it? Did you even read their copy on that page?
Sure they started that trend. :Rolleyes *cough*INDemand*cough*, *cough*akimbo*cough, *cough*VOD*cough*
Nope, they didn’t sell commercial free TV shows. Apple was the first. When they announced it, you said that nobody would follow in any significant amount. You said it would not be a trend. You were still bashing Apple for not having a DVR. You were all about DVR functionality and you said buying TV shows wouldn’t be a trend. Now Microsoft does it.
Hate to break it to you but I ordered numerous TV shows via Comcast iNDemand long before the iTunes Video store showed up.
It’s not the same thing at all. I don’t know about now, but when you made this same argument back then, the on-demand shows were not commercial free and they were not to own. They gave you 24 hours to watch it. You couldn’t put the shows on an iPod.
| Mar. 21, 2007 | ||
| 9:59 am |
Kuaidang, Mac Fan, I’d like to remind you guys of some of the rules for this site…
Deep Thought: Rules of Conduct
11. Please keep on topic wherever and whenever possible. Please do not counter-argue against a topic for no other reason than you think the topic is wrong; disagreeing simply to disagree is strongly discouraged. If you have a reasonable, well-thought-out counter-argument, by all means post it; but please do not argue a point so much that the horse has died, decomposed, and been eaten by buzzards. Reasonable discussion is welcome; continuous, ongoing back-and-forth sniping is not.
Knock off the continuous back-and-forth, here and in the future. It’s annoying, it’s pointless (as neither of you are going to change), and it usually strays from the original topic enough that it should be in its own discussion thread (preferrably on a forum far, far away from here). If it’s lots of people making comments, that’s one thing, but this brother-and-sister bickering needs to stop, now. Keep it up and both of you may be looking at a permanent ban.
Additionally, this applies to you in particular, KD:
6. Do not use more than one screenname. Using multiple screennames for any reason without the consent of Deep Thought’s staff will result in a permanent ban. If you would like to change screennames, please contact an administrator. If you were banned and use another screenname to rejoin the site, well, you’re just a jackass!
To date, you’ve gone by at least three screen names, either as a registered member or as a guest. I probably won’t ban you for this, partly because I don’t think you’ve actually registered more than one account, and partly because I’m a nice guy, but I can and may at any time at my discretion. If you’re concerned about your information being harvested or your right to privacy, I can sympathize, and there are ways to avoid your email address and other personal information falling into the wrong hands (and we do take steps to prevent this, as well). But please choose one identity and stick with it.
Remember, guys, I run this site, and you have to play by my rules or you don’t play at all. Comment once, maybe rebut once, and leave it at that.
| Mar. 22, 2007 | |
| Arden | 3:15 am |
| Nick | Mar. 22, 2007 | |
| 10:32 pm |
Interesting…
| Apr. 06, 2007 | ||
| 8:28 pm |
Ahhhh, so now this is a legitimate determination of user base, when it shows the Mac has declined.
Good to see you are still platform agnostic, Funktron 2001.
It’s interesting that as Vista’s percentage of Windows versions being used increases, IE’s share is still falling to Firefox. There’s still a need to “browse safe” on Windows, even with Vista?
Although Microsoft has touted sales of 20 million copies of Vista, analysts have pointed out that the company counts those that have been shipped to retail but not sold, or sold to OEMs but not installed on PCs or installed on PCs still in inventory.
This was listed at the end of the article you linked, Funktron:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article .do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=90146 86&pageNumber=1
And that’s why Microsoft should read the vibe and think twice about ignoring Apple this time. Microsoft nearly missed the boat on the Internet last decade. It backed into a giant antitrust brouhaha. It has had huge problems with security this decade. Through its own inattention to Internet Explorer, it allowed Mozilla’s Firefox to gain a bridgehead on browser market share. Even dyed-in-the-wool Windows enterprises are fed up with me-too Microsoft upgrades, the never-ending blizzard of security patches, the increasing hardware requirements for Vista, volume licensing snafus, and a litany of other complaints and sore points.
Nothing lasts forever. The bloom is coming off the rose on Microsoft. I would never put it past the software giant to come up with a way to remake itself in a better light. But the current course doesn’t appear to me to lead in that direction. As much as Apple is doing things right, Microsoft is doing things wrong. That’s a great combination for Apple, if it can keep walking the current tightrope.
In the end, this is about perception. It isn’t about Apple’s market share or even its quarterly sales numbers. (Apple’s notebook computer sales for the fourth quarter were 4.1% of all portable computer sales, according to DisplaySearch.) What this is about is that Apple is reaching the right people with its product, winning new converts, Windows user by Windows user—and creating buzz.
How do you measure buzz? You don’t. It’s something that experienced people in this industry can just feel. And that’s the condition Microsoft should fear. Because buzz can turn into something much harder to combat than sheer numbers.
That sounds so familiar! Oh yeah, at the top of this thread, I was saying the same thing!
Interesting…
| Apr. 07, 2007 | ||
| 7:58 am |
Ahhhh, so now this is a legitimate determination of user base, when it shows the Mac has declined.
To be fair, I don’t think he said anything of the sort, just noting an article that indicated Vista might be catching on.
|
| Apr. 08, 2007 | |
| Arden | 11:12 pm |
That was part of it, Arden, and I appreciate that you understood that…
But the other part was that things change quickly, as this comes just a couple weeks later.
Finally, Pilky’s post makes a lot of sense here and I agree with a lot of it.
My take:
I expect Apple to take more marketshare as time goes by. It’s a growing company that offers a solid platform.
If there’s a viable alternative to the dominant choice, as Apple and OS X certainly are, then they’ll make waves toward evening out the playing field - even if it takes a while and even if it never reaches true parity in sales, etc.
And ultimately, whatever side you choose - this is a good thing!
To be fair, I don’t think he said anything of the sort, just noting an article that indicated Vista might be catching on.
Yeah, I know. It was amusing to me that the same Net Applications that one Windows fan was dismissing in this thread when it showed the Mac was up was then touted by another Windows fan when it showed the Mac was down.
Vista is going to be #1 because it’s installed on new Windows PCs. That’s not very interesting or surprising. How many new PCs are sold every year? 230 million? More? So after one year, there will be around 10X more Vista users than OS X users, and that’s if you believe there are 23 million OS X users out there.
But only 12% in that Harris poll said they would upgrade to Vista in the next 12 months.
Finally, Pilky’s post makes a lot of sense here and I agree with a lot of it.
Now you tell us. Stick around, Funk. Let us know more often when you agree with the Mac fans.
| Apr. 09, 2007 | ||
| 6:58 am |
Mac Sales Rock Steady Despite Vista
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/04/ 18/apples_mac_sales_rock_steady_despite_vista.ht ml
PC shipments in the U.S. only grew 2.6% last quarter, year over year? That surprised me, with Vista shipping now.
| Apr. 19, 2007 | ||
| 6:23 am |
I know you are going to post this, Funk, but I’ll beat you to it: 
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/05/08/mac surfers/index.php
After losing ground last month — possibly to Vista — the Mac share rebounded from March’s 6.08 percent to April’s 6.21 percent, noted Net Applications.
The portion of people surfing the Web using a Mac has doubled in the past eight months, an Internet metrics analyst said Tuesday, and represents an audience that can’t be ignored by Web application developers.
| May. 08, 2007 | ||
| 3:23 pm |
1.
Good job on the article. You do have some massive logical and technical errors in it though.
1. You only have one source.
2. You didn’t look at HOW (or why) Netapplications obtains their stats. To sum it up, Netapplications sells some products that give you live reports on your sites vistors, activity, etc. The data they publish on market share IS ONLY OBTIANED THROUGH USERS OF THEIR PRODUCT.
Their site even tells you as much:
“We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on demand network of small to medium enterprise live stats customers.”
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/help/help.a spx?rid=5
This is a key point. Imagine if Slashdot, Digg, Macrumors or some other huge site started using netapplications product tomorrow. The marketshare stats would fluctuate in a very large way. Alternatively, a site could switch to a competitors product and have similar effect on the numbers.
The point here is netapplications stats are simply != to install base.
2a. Obviously, Apple’s market share or install base didn’t increase by 2% worldwide in the past two years. Think about it. A *very* conservative estimate of the number of Windows machines is 700 million (considering they’ve sold about that many machines in just the past 3 years you can see why it is conservative). The number of Office users is around 400 million. So picking a number in the middle (to help weed out all the windows terminals and other non-personal computer applications) you get 550 million.
2% of 550 million is 11 million. Which means Apple needed to add 11 million users in the past 2 years AND the rest of the computer industry had to have zero growth.
Since Apple only sold 8 million or so machines it would seem rather impossible to add 11 million users. Even if they had sold 11 million machines it would mean that every single one of those machines went to new users and zero went to existing Mac users. We know this is therefore impossible.
We also know that the MS-PC industry has been growing at 10-15% per year.
3. That also explains why you can’t attribute any change in marketshare (in the stats provided) to the “iPod Halo effect”.
4. You chalked a certian increase in Linux share up to “a glitch” with really no explanation. Couldn’t a similar Mac increase or decrease be attributed to the same “glitch”? You have no rhyme or reason for either fluctuation to any event or glitch yet you choose the most convienent interpetation. In other words, you didn’t look at the data and write about what it said, you formed a conclusion first then presented the data in such a way to support that conclusion.
5. Where are you getting those Vista stats from? AFAICT it seems you got them from the “other” category as opposed to a specific Vista category. This isn’t the only anomoly with the Vista stats either.
You’re chart doesn’t show anything for Vista before September yet we know that 3+ million people downloaded Vista Beta 2 during the month of June (2006)… not including all the pirates, beta testers, and MSDN downloads.
3 million is right around the number of Intel Macs Apple sold until that part of the year yet Intel Mac share is 0.83 and Vista share is just 0.09.
6. Why don’t the stats add up to 100%? Some months they are off up to 0.5%. That’s huge considering some of the Mac market share increases that you’re salivating over are that size or smaller. There is a large margin of error here.
7. Market share is technically just buyer share… hence the use of the word “market”. Things already sold aren’t in the market anymore.