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Vista Taking a Nibble Out of Apple in OS Wars? 406

PetManimal writes "Despite all of the positive buzz about the Mac operating system and the 'halo effect' of iPod sales, Mac OS X market share actually dropped last month, reports Computerworld: 'The share of PowerPC-based Macs fell ... from 4.29% in February to 3.94% in March. That dip was not fully offset by an increase in Intel-based Mac hardware, leading to a overall net decline in Mac share of 0.3%, to 6.08% in March.' Meanwhile, Vista is rising, the article says, with just over 2% of computers connected to the Internet using the new Windows OS. The figures are from a company called Net Applications, which collects its data from the browsers of visitors to its network of 40,000+ Web sites."
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Vista Taking a Nibble Out of Apple in OS Wars?

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  • pfft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:11PM (#18638107)
    One word - 'LEOPARD'

    If there is a down blip, it's due to people waiting for Leopard, not because of vista, and ho boy...wait 'till you see her hit the track :)
    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      I was patiently waiting for Leopard to be released so I could buy my first mac but I got impatient when a good deal on a Thinkpad (with Vista Premium) came along and took the plunge. Maybe I will still buy a mac, but now that I don't need a laptop there is less of a reason to.
    • Re:pfft (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Overly Critical Guy ( 663429 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:29PM (#18638357)
      Not to mention the unreliability of relying on web browser stats to determine OS market share. How about we go by, I don't know, actual sales figures to determine market share? Call me crazy.
      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by norman619 ( 947520 )
        OK. You're crazy.

        Happy?
      • Re:pfft (Score:5, Insightful)

        by HairyCanary ( 688865 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:49PM (#18638709)
        Sales figures don't tell you the whole story either, so keep looking. If Mac users keep their machines for five years on average, versus say two and a half years average for Windows PC users, then Macs could have half the sales rate of PC's and still be staying even with market share. What you want to reliably assess is installed base.
        • Re:pfft (Score:4, Funny)

          by Mike Buddha ( 10734 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:14PM (#18639125)

          Sales figures don't tell you the whole story either, so keep looking.
          Yeah, and most Mac users replace 3-4 PowerPC Macs with just one Intel Mac, so there's the explanation of why the numbers are changing. And you used to have to go to a page 2-3 times, whereas with an Intel Mac, you only have to go their once to get the same information. That would explain the drop in PowerPC Macs browser stats without a similar increase in Intel Macs.

          Also, people who use Intel Macs are just not getting on the web because they're so busy making movies and recording their bands and stuff. That would explain the difference as well. And they're probably playing World of Warcraft, or some of the other great two year old games instead of getting on the web.
        • Re:pfft (Score:5, Insightful)

          by diamondsw ( 685967 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:45PM (#18639575)
          And you really should be comparing market segments. After all, every Windows-based cash register, eTicket terminal, etc counts towards its market share. I'd rather see market share in segments - home, education, enterprise, utility, etc.
      • Re:pfft (Score:5, Insightful)

        by syphax ( 189065 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:16PM (#18639153) Journal

        The criticism about sales vs. avg. machine lifetime is valid.

        In the auto industry we look at UIOs- "units in operation" - that is available via state vehicle registration records. On the whole, the data is pretty good.

        Of course, we don't need to register our computers (yet), so we don't have that option.

        Assuming the data [hitslink.com] isn't crap, I noticed that Apple has been gaining market share at an average of 0.34% a month since last September, until the 0.3% dip this past month. They went from 4.3% to 6.4% pretty quick, and it's notable b/c that's switching vendors (unlike Vista, which is mostly same vendor, different product). What will be interesting is the next couple of months- was this just a blip? What happens when Leopard comes out?

        I'd put my money on 'blip'. I hereby forecast continued growth for Apple, though maybe averaging 0.1-0.2% per month unless they come out with some kickass hardware soon.

        And no, I'm not a fanboy.
        • Re:pfft (Score:5, Interesting)

          by syphax ( 189065 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:22PM (#18639251) Journal

          This chart [hitslink.com] on browser trend is interesting too. IE's market share is slipping like the Big-3 autos. Slow and steady.

          I can't wait until IE dips under 50%. That should drive off the last of the 'IE only' websites, which seem to be decreasing in number (of course, I support one at work, though for a limited corporate audience- gack! I am lobbying heavily with the vendor to support Firefox!!).

          But I hope Firefox doesn't get too dominant (fortunately, it won't). Competition and the adherence to open standards (at least for more mature technologies) are good things.
      • Yep... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pb ( 1020 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:34PM (#18639445)
        Even if we do assume that their figures [hitslink.com] are incredibly accurate, this is how it shakes out:

        Windows: +0.20
        Linux: +0.15
        Mac: -0.30


        Not a huge deal, although I think the Linux uptick is a bit of an unreported story here. Also, what's with the share of Windows NT growing from 0.71% to 0.80% (the only other MicroSoft OS showing growth)? That's like a 12.7% increase for an ancient OS! So, yeah, given that anomaly, I'm somewhat disinclined to give their figures that much weight.
      • Re:pfft (Score:4, Interesting)

        by w3woody ( 44457 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @05:12PM (#18639951) Homepage

        Not to mention the unreliability of relying on web browser stats to determine OS market share.
        No kidding. Safari in debug mode has a feature where it advertises itself as a different browser than Safari, and I find that there are a few web sites which block me out the browser advertises "Safari WebKit", but works perfectly if it advertises itself as "Windows IE".

        Further, a variation of 0.3% seems within a margin of error for the ebb and flow of users visiting a block of web sites--even tens of thousands of web sites. For all we know the dip in MacOS X users visiting those web sites came from an "Apple TV" effect: MacOS X users may have been more likely watching their bright shiny new Apple TV boxes rather than surfing the web.

        (I'm not saying this is what happened; I'm saying that the statistics used here are hocus-pocus at best.)

    • Should I care that much about Leopard? It has nice features, but Tiger works pretty well.

      I do wonder though, if somewhere within Microsoft there is an optimized image that will allow you to load Vista or XP on a Mac, giving the Windows user the positive experience of the consistent hardware Apple makes, and all of the Windows software they are used to using.

      Sure, they could use Bootcamp or Parallels, but what if they don't care to for various reasons? It's also possible that if they are using Bootcamp or P

      • by dave562 ( 969951 )
        Why would anybody spend the extra money on Apple hardware if they are going to run Windows on it?
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Should I care that much about Leopard?

        Yes you should if you're thinking of deploying Small Business Server or deploying/upgrading Exchange. If Leopard Server lives up to its promises, it will be a serious Exchange/SBS killer and if Micro$oft isn't worried, they should be.

        As far as notebooks go, I love the Macbook pro, but I don't like its price tag. Though its superior engineering should translate into a longer lifespan than most PC notebooks, which are almost throwaway items now.

  • Dualboot? (Score:5, Informative)

    by norminator ( 784674 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:12PM (#18638109)
    I guess Boot Camp has just barely started supporting Vista, but how much of this could be due to dual-booting OSX and Vista on the same machine? Or from people that beta tested Vista? I tried out the beta, then installed a release copy of Vista on my work laptop, but then I switched back after a couple of months.
    • That's a possibility. I'm also a little leery about the Vista numbers including all of the copies sold on new Dell (and other PC manufcaturers) boxes either. My roommate has a new Dell sitting in our apartment so he can remove Vista and install XP because Vista breaks some of the programs that need to be run on in apparently. This probably doens't happen in a majority of cases, but I wonder how often one of these new boxes is purchased and for whatever reason Vista is removed.

  • 2%? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stormx2 ( 1003260 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:13PM (#18638125)
    This strikes me as low for a brand new windows OS. I'm not familiar with previous statistics, but I would have thought that sales would increase quickly after the release then slowly decrease. If it is at 2% now, I don't expect we'll get much more after this.

    $20 says Microsoft will simply disable XP machines to boost sales.
    • Re:2%? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by casualsax3 ( 875131 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:21PM (#18638251)
      You're suggesting (seriously?) that you don't expect Vista to show up on more than 2% of desktops? I would like some of whatever it is you smoked this afternoon.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        You're suggesting (seriously?) that you don't expect Vista to show up on more than 2% of desktops? I would like some of whatever it is you smoked this afternoon.

        I think OP was being hyperbolic. Point is sound, though - you think 2K and 98 had a slowing effect on XP uptake, I'd say XP will slow Vista much worse.

    • This strikes me as low for a brand new windows OS

      I get the joke, but Vista seems to do rather well on retail (at least that's what big retailers say here [infoworld.com]). And MSFT commented somewhere (says the article in the link) that Vista sold more licenses in the first month after release than XP sold in twice that time.
    • by dave562 ( 969951 )
      What's so surprising about that? The majority of the world knows better than to rush right out and install a brand new Microsoft OS. Just like people might be waiting for Leopard, there are a lot of people waiting for Vista SP1 before they even consider touching Vista. Personally I'm not going anywhere near Vista until I have to, and that won't be for quite some time.
  • by normuser ( 1079315 ) * <normuser@whyisthishere.com> on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:14PM (#18638131) Homepage Journal
    Vista TAKING a NIPPLE OUT of Apple in OS Wars?
  • by varmint jerky ( 810306 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:14PM (#18638137)
    I powered my Mac off yesterday and forgot to turn it back on. Try it again now...
  • by Sneakernets ( 1026296 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:14PM (#18638145) Journal
    *throws hands up in the air*

    Ok, Microsoft, you win.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:15PM (#18638151)
    My new operating system had 100% growth as I sold my 2nd copy and it still had far fewer reported bugs than either OSx or Vista....Only 2 users reported blank CDs but thats just a distribution problem...

    =)
  • New Hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Snap E Tom ( 128447 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:15PM (#18638159)
    Maybe it's because a lot of people knew that the iMac, mini, and Mac Pros were due for a refresh.
  • by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:17PM (#18638175) Journal
    What websites do they monitor so I can fire up my Windows 95 machine and make an entrance?
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by wallyhall ( 665610 )

      "... and in further breaking news, Microsoft report also that Vista's net share is rising, their article says that just over 78% of computers connected to the Internet are using their new OS. The figures are from Microsoft themselves which collects its data from the browsers of visitors to its network of 40,000+ Web sites, including Live!, MSN, Hotmail and of course Microsoft.com ..."
  • Not a shocker (Score:5, Informative)

    by SengirV ( 203400 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:17PM (#18638193)
    The macs haven't been rev'd in quite a while. I had hoped that revs would occur more frequently with the switch to intel, but it's simply not the case. And sorry, I don't count an additional option for 8-core on the Mac Pro a rev as much as it's another BTO option. Especially when they didn't change anything else on the machine.

    http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/ [macrumors.com]

    mini is still at CD, not C2D. iMacs haven't been updated in over 200 days. macbook and MBP in 150. Compare that with the ONLY way to upgrade on the PC side - buy a new machine, and you begin to see the appeal of Vista over OS X when it comes to hardware sales. Finally, Tiger is on it's way out as well. So people are holding off on new Macs until they come pre-installed with leopard.

    Would like to see the figures once leopard comes out ;)
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ChatHuant ( 801522 )
      Compare that with the ONLY way to upgrade on the PC side - buy a new machine, and you begin to see the appeal of Vista over OS X when it comes to hardware sales.

      I'm sorry, what?
      Maybe I misunderstand, but what do you mean, the only way to upgrade on the PC side is to buy a new machine? That is *so* not true it's not even funny. I certainly upgraded my PCs dozens of times; I still have a chimera machine somewhere that started it's life back in the dark ages as a 486/66 running DOS and Windows 3.1 and is
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by SengirV ( 203400 )
        I was talking about upgrading to Vista and kinda highlighted it to draw attention to the outrageousness of the statement. With the recent lawsuit about the sales of computers up to the release of Vista as "Vista ready" even though they were really not, points out that the upgrade process to Vista is pretty damn steep.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by wnknisely ( 51017 )
      That's certainly true here. I'm holding off switching half of our users from Windows XP machines that have gotten long-in-the-tooth to new Mac minis until Leopard comes out and/or the Mini is refreshed.

      Given that there's a new operating system expected in a few months, there's no reason to hurry. And for what it's worth, we made the decision to switch back in the late fall. We've been waiting that long for some sort of announcement.
  • Here I come (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spackler ( 223562 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:18PM (#18638195) Journal
    ' Meanwhile, Vista is rising, the article says, with just over 2% of computers connected to the Internet using the new Windows OS

    They won't be connected for long:
    net start BOTNET
  • Guilty as charged (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spineboy ( 22918 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:21PM (#18638231) Journal
    I bought an iPod and liked it sooo much got one for the wife. She then after liking the device so much, became tired of the "crazy damned computer" that I set up for her that ran Linux, and bought a Mac laptop.

    My wife still has some problems, but seems quite happy so far.

    So yes, in our case, buying an iPod led us to buy a Mac.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by PitaBred ( 632671 )
      You obviously didn't use AmaroK with her iPod then. My girlfriend likes it better than iTunes for dealing with her iPod.
  • Very misleading (Score:5, Insightful)

    by apachetoolbox ( 456499 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:21PM (#18638237) Homepage
    The tone of this article is very misleading.

    I do a lot of consulting work and it's very hard to get a new PC for someone that doesn't come with Vista. They don't want Vista but they have no choice. Then we get to deal with figuring out what software they need works and what needs patches and what just plain doesn't work and never will.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by mrsmiggs ( 1013037 )
      You aren't looking hard enough Dell (for example) will still sell XP to business and if your chosen vendor doesn't then you can still buy XP OEM from the most online retailers. The business I work for currently is still insisting on XP installs until the tech guys get up to speed for Vista support.
    • by dave562 ( 969951 )
      We buy HP desktops from CDW and they all come pre-installed with XP SP2. We just bought five dx7600's last week. The sticker on the box says, "Designed for Windows XP, Microsoft Vista Capable" The OEM serial number sticker is for XP too.
  • by topham ( 32406 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:23PM (#18638269) Homepage
    The actual decline they have reported is 0.3%; which I'm sure is well within there margin of error.

    Which means, Apple's share hasn't changed. Despite the fact there are less PowerPC machines than before.
    • Poor statistics (Score:4, Informative)

      by wass ( 72082 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:44PM (#18638637)
      The article's credibility is actually worse than that, the 0.3% they quote is ONLY the decline in market share of the PPC brand Macs. TFA briefly mentioned that increases in Intel OS X market share didn't offset the PPC decrease, but they didn't give the Intel numbers. And then they quote the PPC market share decrease, subtely implying it's the overall OS X market decrease.

      So TFA was inaccurate, not sure whether it was on purpose or just due to incompetence.
  • 2%? Seems high. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Conception ( 212279 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:24PM (#18638283)
    According to this: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933606.html [infoplease.com] there are about a billion internet users worldwide. 2% would be 20 mil. MS claims to have shipped 20 million, or so, copies of vista. So that means that every copy they have shipped, even on new computers at stores, has been sold and brought up on the internet pretty much. This seems... fishy.
    • by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:26PM (#18638305) Journal
      One corporate copy could easily account for thousands of machines.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by dbrutus ( 71639 )
        A copy of Vista is not simply a physical copy of the retail box but a Vista license wrapped up in whatever form you like (retail, pre-installed, volume licensing). A company ordering 100 Vista licenses and a single physical copy of the software traditionally gets marked down as a sale of 100 copies, not 1.
  • Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:26PM (#18638315) Homepage

    Can we get real? Apple's market share dropped for one month? Let's see what could cause that:

    1. People waiting for Leopard
    2. People waiting for CS 3 to come out (this was February after all)
    3. Vista's sales jump (in both hardware and software) from heavy promotion and tons of news coverage

    There. That took about 3 seconds to think up. When Vista has displaced Apple for 3 months in a row, we can talk. Until then this is stupid hype designed to make Vista look like it isn't a dog sales wise (when from MS you would think it would have started selling like Windows 95 did). Plus, this is the PowerPC share that dropped. They are old and slow as hell (I'm using one). Now that CS3 is out (and was about to come out by the time they did this survey) you'd be an IDIOT to buy one. So the Intel side didn't jump up. People are probably waiting for CS3 (to put their requisitions in at work), or for Leopard (coming any time now, June 21st at the latest).

    Non-story.

    • Re:Oh please (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lostboy2 ( 194153 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:50PM (#18638729)
      Worse still, Hitslink (the app/service that generated these statistics) does not measure sales or even overall usage -- it only measures hits to websites that use Hitslink.

      From Net Applications' site [hitslink.com]:

      There is nothing to install. You simply paste a small piece of HTML code on each page you wish to track statistics on.
      Ok. What kind of code is it? JavaScript? What if I regularly browse with Java and JavaScript disabled?

      Or even simpler, what if I don't browse websites that use Hitslink? 40,000 websites is really not that much. Pandia [pandia.com] notes that one estimate of the number of active websites in 2006 was 47 million (using the low end). Assuming that's true, 40000 websites is only 0.08% (less than one-tenth of one percent). That's hardly enough data to accurately portray what's going on worldwide, in my opinion, especially if the sites used to generate the stats are Windows- or Microsoft-centric.
  • by mattgreen ( 701203 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:28PM (#18638341)
    Give the guys at Roughly Drafted a week or two to point out all the reasons this sort of assessment is downright wrong, while decorating the article with all sorts of nice pie charts, graphs, and equally questionable statistics. Then we will know what really happened. Because the mainstream media certainly has an anti-Apple agenda, we can't trust just ANY statistics.
  • by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:28PM (#18638345)
    I use both Macs and PCs and it seems like I buy and upgrade PCs a lot more often. My latest Mac is a Powerbook G4 from early 2004 and I'm just now starting to think about a replacement. Over those last 3 years I've bought 2 PCs and will probably buy a 3rd long before I replace the Mac. The PC's just feel dated after less than a year while the Macs take about 3 years to feel the same way. At least to me.

    If PCs have a much shorter useful life, their percentage of sales will be higher than their actual percentage of machines in use.
    • I use both Macs and PCs and it seems like I buy and upgrade PCs a lot more often.

      Yep me too. I have a few machines on both platforms. One is an old iMac G3 from '98. It works fine, a little slow sure but still perfectly serviceable - still on it's original hard disc, although it isn't frequently used. It runs much better in fact than my Compaq laptop from 2002 running XP. It's pretty much done, been through 2 HD's already, the monitor is dodgy and it's slower than the iMac.

      But yeah, like everyone else

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by norman619 ( 947520 )
      YOu are joking right? Why on earth are you replacing your PC THAT often? Are you a gamer? I used to do broadband helpdesk and most of the peopel I helped had machines they've been running for 3 or more years. It was usually gamers who had the nice new systems. Oh how they loved to tell me what they upgraded to. LOL!!! I recently purchaced a whole new PC just for Vista. My old system is about 4 years old and still runs great. I'm converting it to a file server. So the question again is what are you
    • When you get your third new PC, put Ubuntu on the old one. See how snappy it feels, and how long it stays good. I know that my "old" P4 based desktop is kinda slow by modern standards, but damn if it's not fast as hell under Linux, especially since Linux doesn't become useless when you're running a heavy processing job, you can still surf the web or type up a document while something else is processing. The whole thing just feels snappier, even on older hardware.
    • At this studio I worked at, we went through dozens of PCs through the years, always upgrading, always replacing broken equipment (those NT-based SGI machines were the worst ... we ended up replacing every single one of them), etc.

      Meanwhile, the payroll computer was a 1991-vintage Mac Quadra 700 running some custom Foxbase program (precursor to FoxPro). When I left in 2002, it was still running, still cutting checks.

      I too have a raft of Mac hardware from 1999-onward that is still in use; I have a 1999 G4 tha
  • Isn't that noise? Or margin of error? Or sumthin' like that? Looks like much ado about nothing, to me, just like a headline stating that IE's market share dropped .3% in a month. Actually, looks more like "Computerworld Has Slow News Day, Posts Stupid Article."
    • See, you quoted ".3%" That's not what they said. They put the zero in front of the decimal place and everything - it must be accurate and precise and therefore correct. Have we learned nothing from 24.56 years of USAToday Snapshots?

  • Must be a slow day. Fangs will eventually shred the competition.

    I had to buy a Mini for extra work, but am holding out on the MacBook Pro for Leopard. Got a strong feeling many existing Mac customers know they need to wait 2-3 more months.

    One friend with XP Pro has had inumerable problems with XP Pro, mostly because of the various crap that managed to infect his machine even with decent malware protection. Then a hard drive started to go wacko, and the scanner wouldn't work. The time & money this gu
  • Microsoft's share raised relative to Apple's for computers connected to the Internet...

    Step 1: Release buggy O.S.
    Step 2: Require users to constantly go on line to get patches.
    Step 3: ???
    Step 4: Profit.

    It turns out Step 3 reads, "Wait for market share to be calculated by number of machines going on line."

    Broadband usage figures are hard to track down but seem to sit around 40% of households and 70% of active internet users. That's a hell of a lot of home computing users that still use dial up. 0.3% variation
  • apples and oranges (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spittoon ( 64395 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:39PM (#18638561) Homepage
    Apple's market share is attempting to take away from that of Windows.
    Vista is cannibalizing the market share of XP.

    Market share is like your weight. It's going to fluctuate, and there are too many variables for a month-to-month evaluation to be useful to anyone other than short-term traders. Today I'm 1.5 pounds heavier than yesterday. Tomorrow it will be down.

    Seems way too simplistic to reduce the situation to two "equivalent" numbers. At least, if you expect the information to have any use other than getting us to click on the story and be exposed to banner ads.
  • Bogus data (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekwithsoul ( 860466 ) <geekwithsoul@@@yahoo...com> on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:44PM (#18638629)
    FTA:

    "Net Applications collects its data from the browsers of visitors to its network of more than 40,000 Web sites."

    Any statistics that purport to show "usage" based on browser hits is inherently suspect, especially if the stats are used to imply they have some larger meaning. If they can answer these questions, I'll believe them:

    - How are the servers of these "40,000 webs sites" identifying unique users? (server logs, scripts, or both? How long are the sessions they are looking at?)
    - Are they looking at number of hits, unique user views, or what?
    - How well can they ensure that machines are not being counted multiple times?
    - Which sites are included? Are both microsoft.com and apple.com sites included? What about msn.com or mac.com? How many tech-savy sites are included and how many might-as-well-be-AOL newbie sites?
    - Are the results from some sites weighted above or below other sites?

    I'm not saying they haven't taken all these things into account, but publishing them (or referencing them by a third-party) without including how the data was gathered makes this all just so much noise.
  • That is killing some sales as well.
    Also mac osx likely will sell big if it where out for all hardware.
    hackers may even buy 10.5 and hack it to run all hardware as well.
  • As already pointed out we should expect a decline in mac sales as people await the release of leopard. Also remember that XP numbers are actually going to be inflated by anyone using parallels on a Mac (they are XP users but Mac users as well).
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by catbutt ( 469582 )
      You really think a significant number of people are using parallels to web surf? And if they are -- running OS X but actually choosing to do basic stuff like web surfing within a virtualized XP -- that actually says to me that they prefer XP, and they are being correctly counted.
  • I see people that are looking seriously at Ubuntu (and switching) because of Beryl/Compiz because they either a) don't want to get Vista or b) get Vista and aren't happy with it. Combined with the number of people that are switching to Ubuntu from XP, I'd say that it's almost half as many switch to Ubuntu as are happy with Vista. And every day there are more people getting annoyed with Vista and realizing it won't do what they want. Completely anecdotal, but if it's a trend across computer buyers as a wh
  • by edunbar93 ( 141167 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:55PM (#18638797)
    just over 2% of computers connected to the Internet using the new Windows OS.

    And 4% of the desktop computers connected to the Internet are using Linux! Woo! We're beating Windows!
  • by ooglek ( 98453 ) <beckmanNO@SPAMangryox.com> on Friday April 06, 2007 @03:57PM (#18638837) Homepage Journal
    Virtualization I'm sure has an effect on the numbers. I installed Vista on my MacBook Pro. I don't use it very often, but I did install it. I still have a MBP, I still run OSX day to day.

    Numbers these days are becoming less and less useful as virtualization use increases. Just like "hits" or page views for web sites is less and less useful a number due to AJAX. Show us some numbers that mean something.
  • Look at a recent well-known switcher Robert Scobble:

    http://scobleizer.com/2007/04/05/i-love-my-new-mac / [scobleizer.com]

    Even though more people than ever admit the disaster that is Windows, the mind-set that goes along with it persists:

    (1) Get new Computer, (2) Load it up with every third-party cat-poop application you can lay your hands on, as long as you can find at least one other person using it, (3) Try and figure out what went wrong.

    Successful Apple users, and to a greater extent successful Linux users are much more
  • Without fully reading the article, this comparison seems to use random and unrelated baselines. Sales of Macs are falling. That is one assertion. I wonder if this is real, or just normal yearly fluctuations. Since the switch to Intel, the laptops have been unreliable and the desktops uninteresting.

    On an unrelated topic, the article seems to indicate that the some people are upgrading to MS Vista. Since this does not necessarily relate to purchases of new computer, I do not see how this indicates that

  • The statistic that impresses me is that they claim that there are 2% more computers connected to the internet than in the previous month.
  • Let's see...

    "Windows Vista more than doubled its market share in March..."

    Duh! It's the only thing most people have a choice of buying. MS isn't about to let XP continue as an option, so that statement is farcical at best.

    "Now ranked the fifth-most popular operating system by Net Applications..."

    Who is Net Applications? Who are they owned by? Google them [google.com] and see if you're any more successful than I am in answering those questions. As far as that being a meaningful metric, it seems Vista has bested Win9
  • by guidryp ( 702488 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @04:52PM (#18639679)
    I never contend that apple has to sell OSX for any old box, as that would be business mistake for them, but if they aren't going to sell OSX, then they need to offer more hardware choices.

    Mac market share is stable at about the 6% mark. These are the people who like integrated monitors or the toy mini. Pro just won't matter for market share as it is ultra high end.

    If Apple actually has the slightest interest in increasing market share beyond the current they have to offer what mainstream buyers want and are used to. A decent mid size tower at an affordable price.

    I actually want to buy a Mac. I use Linux/Solar/Windows at work and would like a decent Unix workstation at home, but don't find Linux polished enough (my desktop at work runs Redhat).

    What is stopping me is the lack of decent midrange hardware without integrated monitor. This gap has to be obvious to Apple execs, perhaps they are moving the company in the direction of devices and away from computer and don't care about computer market share.

    I will buy a new computer in the next 6 months. No midrange tower or equivalent and it will be another PC and that will be my computer for the next 4 or 5 years.

  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday April 06, 2007 @06:26PM (#18640855) Homepage Journal
    I went out to see it with some of my MIT buddies; we weren't expecting much after ST1, so it waay beat the expectation game. One of the guys gushed afterwards, "That was exponentially better than the last movie."

    All being geeks, we turned and started at him. "Ummm," I said, raising one eyebrow, "you do realize you are extrapolating from only two data points?" He turned red as a beet.

    But apparently industry analysts have no mathematical shame.

    There's a million reasons why market share could bounce down or up in single month. Maybe people were waiting for Vista machines with more memory. Maybe the manufacturers gave some nice rebates. Maybe a couple of big corporate customers decided to by a boatload of vista boxes for testing. Maybe somebody counted wrong.

    Wake me up when you have the quarterly figures. No, make that semi-annual.

Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall

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