US consumers flock to Mac laptops

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/10/01/apple_market_share_boost/

by nickb • 18 years ago

24 33 18 years ago

reghardware.co.uk

jacobscott• 18 years ago

Is this just straight contradictory to recent analyst downgrades (and Apple's resulting stock price drop)? I never know quite what to hink of this kind of market data.

jeroen• 18 years ago

"... 20 per cent of retail notebook sales during July and August."

These numbers may not have been influenced by the credit crisis if awareness of the situation was not widespread. Or those analysts could be wrong in their predictions.

laut• 18 years ago

No, not contradictory. Apple is going down with all the other stocks. It has had a high multiple (Price of the stock/earnings) and still has IMO. The growth in Mac sales is not news and has been known by the market.

metatronscube2• 18 years ago

I love mine!! Its a real road warrior. Got Windows, Ubuntu and Open Solaris on there and my entire itunes library...and I think for the price points are great too (and I'm from the UK and it was way more expensive than you guys pay for it, so I can see why its top on the list)

unalone10• 18 years ago

Out of curiosity: what is the advantage of having Open Solaris on your computer?

metatronscube2• 18 years ago

Some of the work I do involves Cramer and NetCool and its just sometimes easier to test things on that platform.

Edit: Oracle too...

jcromartie• 18 years ago

I have been a regular Mac user since 2001, and had always tinkered with them before. One of the most annoying things I find about the platform is its user base. I mean they types of people who would rail against Windows and Microsoft, and then freely admit that they had never used Windows a day in their life. Now there are hordes of users who are just flocking to the platform because it is so hot right now. A whole new generation of smug Mac users is born.

I don't even bother going to the Apple Store unless I know I can get something fixed or exchanged right away, since it is invariably filled with giggling teenage girls that just want to ogle the shiny hardware.

Maybe it's the inner hipster in me, but I almost feel like I have to ditch this scene now that it's so popular :)

James_Johnson2• 18 years ago

Exactly. Now that I have a Mac, Mac fanboys all assume I'm one of them and come up to me in the coffee shop to say, "hey, aren't we so much better than everyone else because of the computers we bought?"

I proceed to rant about all my little pet peeves about Mac OS X and say that as soon as I get around to it I'm installing Boot Camp and putting Linux on it.

unalone10• 18 years ago

Aww, those are the bad Apples.

I promise, some of us know that our system is flawed. (Not that we aren't smug, we're just realistically smug.)

The college Mac type is inevitable, though. I'm biased, though, since I'm in college and have a Mac, so I don't get Mac Smug from other people.

unalone10• 18 years ago

An artsy friend of mine insisted that he couldn't use Mac because it was too popular. He used Vista instead.

Kind of silly, IMHO.

TweedHeads• 18 years ago

I got two dells before my 4-yr-old iBook G4 and let me tell you, quality is king.

Dells are now pieces of crap falling apart and my iBook is still runing like new. Nothing loose, flaky or damaged at all.

You get what you pay for, I got quality and a beautiful piece of hardware.

electromagnetic• 18 years ago

Being the owner of a 3 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 (E1705 in the US) I would have to agree. There's nothing physically wrong with it, and it performs as good as ever. However, the rubber grips came off the bottom due to excess heat being transferred through them, which is Dell's problem as the fans don't run in it until the CPU temp gets past like 50C so the entire metal case starts acting like a heat sink.

Problem two is that with the rubber grips gone (I've replaced them, but I've yet to find any of similar quality so I'll pick up my laptop and the damn things are adhered to the table because it's heated them so much the vinyl surface adheres to paint or varnish) the bottom of the laptop has started losing paint. The plastic shell is fine, sadly it also has metal casings to protect the ram slot, which is now incidentally a nice chrome.

There's also multiple other problems I've noticed through prolonged use of the Inspiron. Note these are nothing I'd dump a $3000 laptop over, however the next laptop I buy is going to be a macbook. The most annoying problem is if you don't close the lid properly, like you're just picking up your laptop to move it while still in use, it can turn off the screen but as it didn't fully close it won't turn on without a hard reboot. Another problem is that Dell doesn't supply up-to-date drivers; Intel released updated drivers for multiple things, including an overhaul of the built-in GPU making it compatible with more games and improving the shader emulations making the thing run a whole lot faster. In fact it improved it so much I stopped using my desktop for games as my laptop got better refresh rates. Sadly I had to uninstall the Intel drivers shipped through Dell and install the Intel ones manually. Obviously the few crash occourances Intel patched weren't important enough for Dell to bother testing and it still hasn't been released.

So even though I do love my Dell as it's served me extremely well. I would just prefer more quality for the price.

jackchristopher• 18 years ago

I don't mean to crash the party, but notebooks by many brands are manufactured, and even designed by the same few Taiwanese companies. Apple included.

But I agree with your point. Apple designs their own stuff, and despite what keep being repeated by some here, design is not just about looks.

Apple simply puts more thought into their products. That's what design is all about.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanta_Computer

[2] http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/01/17/report_quanta_...

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

The high end thinkpads are the standard for quality.

unalone10• 18 years ago

I've used Thinkpads before and I always feel slightly dirty doing so. They're powerful, but they're ugly and they feel wrong when I'm using them. There's a disconnect in particular between the hardware and the software.

I'm using a MacBook Pro right now and everything about it feels perfect. Multitouch in particular: it's the only feature on a laptop where I now feel bad using desktop computers because now they feel less smooth.

So I'll go out and disagree with you and say that Apple's the standard for quality, though (as always) I'd be interesting in seeing your counterpoints.

DabAsteroid• 18 years ago

I got two dells ... now ... falling apart.

What kind? Precision?

Ben65• 18 years ago

Being a hardcore geek, I love running on top of a "unix" like environment. I should flock to Linux, but Mac OS X is just prettier, and more stable. I don't know better fonts maybe? For that reason, and I know it seems small, I prefer Mac. BTW. I only use emacs and Firefox most of the time anyway.

omouse3• 18 years ago

If you were a hardcore geek you'd try and find a BeBox :P

http://www.josephpalmer.com/BeBox/BeBox.shtml

unalone10• 18 years ago

I know you're joking, but: when did "geek" become synonymous with "doesn't care about rich user experience?" Can't you be a geek and care about things working beautifully? Because according to some people on HN (not you, omouse, this isn't against you), the minute you start worrying about aesthetic you abandon being a TRUE geek, and that's stupid and demeaning.

sfk• 18 years ago

I cannot refute the bold statement about stability, since I have no experience with Mac OS X. However, I have extensive experience with Linux and OpenBSD and I've had zero stability problems with Linux. OpenBSD is a different story.

The funny thing is that BSDs have this nimbus of being ultra-stable and bug-free; my experience is just the opposite.

josefresco• 18 years ago

My iPod is pretty, but "stable" and OSX are not two words I use in the same statement. I think my iPod has gone down more than my two Vista machines since I've owned them.

unalone10• 18 years ago

An iPod isn't the same as Mac OS X.

My computer crashes once every week or two, but it does that when I'm running ten stressful applications at once. Before my computer I'd never have thought of trying to burn a CD, create a movie, run diagnostics on my library, and several other things all at once. Things on Windows crashed haphazardly, unpredictably. I can run my Mac for days straight and they still go well for the most part, and when they crash it takes one reset to get it all working again.

iPods have a much lower standard, sadly, though my iPod touch hasn't crashed once since the software update.

James_Johnson2• 18 years ago

I recently acquired a MacBook after using a variety of standard laptops with Linux installed on them.

In my experience, the Mac is better as a /consumer/ laptop, while the Linux box is better as a /geek/ laptop. I'm sure that I'll get better at getting under the Mac's hood at some point, but right now it's frustrating to have to use GUI tools for everything.

In general, everything (apps, UI) in Mac are prettier and easier to use than their *nix counterparts, but /far/ less functional.

Also, Mac OS X is internally UNIX-y enough to make me /think/ that things still work in the same way, but are different enough to make me sorely disappointed when I find out that I was mistaken.

Herring3• 18 years ago

OS X is prettier than linux? When was the last time you tried linux? It has come along way in the past year or two.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI-ye1oa4N8&feature=relat...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=934741

unalone10• 18 years ago

I'm sorry, but you're going to be the brunt of this small mini-rant about Linux users being incredibly unaware of what we mean when we say pretty.

Fuck Compiz. It's wholly unfunctional. A rotating cube does not make something pretty, it makes it resource-intensive. Wobbly windows are not functional and they serve no purpose.

Pretty is something that looks good WHILE having a definitive meaning. The "genie" effect, for instance: it shows me exactly where I have to go if I need to restore a window. Or Expose: seeing my windows fly out and reveal themselves. Or stacks in Leopard, giving me one-click access to whatever I want one-click access to.

Pretty is trying to do something and realizing you can. It's my being in iTunes, talking to a friend about a song that came on, and realizing I could just drag the song out of iTunes to send a copy to him. That's not an advertised feature of iTunes. It's just something that you can't do in Windows Media Player or Amarok. It's something that made my life a wee bit simpler.

Pretty is my searching Help for something, being given a menu item instead of just a result, and having that item highlighted with a spinning arrow to point out the result.

Pretty is spring-loaded tabs. It's picking a color and being given a set of crayons as a visual metaphor. It's opening TextEdit for the first time and realizing that it's not just Notepad, it's a fully-featured visual text editor that can produce pretty beautiful results.

Pretty is CMD-Space-s-a-enter opening up a web browser, or CMD-Space-s-h-e-space-l-enter opening up a song. Out of the box. Without any fiddling, having an ultrafast system for opening files.

When we Mac users talk about pretty, we don't mean the fact that our windows look beautiful, although let's be honest, they do: they're minimal, they look very pretty even though they're gray, and I love how menu options appear as part of the chrome instead of having two distinct dividers apart from content (not to start talking about the lozenge button or the top menu). Pretty is how things just work. It's things making perfect logical sense as you do them. It's about whenever you wonder if you can do X, you find that you CAN do X.

Linux is not pretty. It's not it's not it's not. It takes a good screenshot nowadays, and that's more than it used to be able to do. But that doesn't make something pretty. That makes something PRETEND to be pretty. It's what's on the inside that counts, not what's on the outside.

I'm not anti-Linux. I ran Ubuntu for a year before I got OS X. I like it more than Windows, when it works, when my audio and graphics don't get messed up (and they ALWAYS do, of course). It is not pretty, though. It's pretty on the surface, pretty before you realize just how incapable it is of doing some things easily. And some Linux users are honest. My friend says that he cares only about if Linux does what he wants at no price. That I can respect. But don't say that your wobbly cubes make your OS pretty. That's like saying Vista is pretty because of Aero.

tl;dr: OS X is much, MUCH prettier than Linux. Period.

omouse3• 18 years ago

Just curious: so has anyone tried running Haiku, AmigaOS or some other non-mainstream, non-UNIX-based OS on their Mac laptops?

drawkbox• 18 years ago

I got one for the sole reason to develop with Unity3D. And the iPhone. A better python environment than windows. To help develop multiplaform games and so many other reasons. It is attractive to developers as well as consumers.

US consumers flock to Mac laptops

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