What is Digg?Sponsored by HTC
You and You and You. view!
youtube.com - You don't need to get a phone. You need a phone that gets you.
273 Comments
- ladbroke, on 08/31/2008, -8/+103When will analysts stop pushing OS X licensing as the panacea for whatever ails Apple? What's that you say? It's 2001 and Apple is trying to get back on its feet? License the Mac OS. It's 2008 and Apple is widely recognized as the world leader in industrial design? License Mac OS! Why do people keep pushing this idea that had nothing to do with Apple's success, and will have nothing to do with its success in the future?
- soapycub, on 08/31/2008, -5/+74Why on earth would anyone want Apple to "gain significant OS market share" ? What does the end user have to gain by this? Wow, I really love OSX, I would love it so much more if everyone used it ... ???
I use to think it would be great if OSX was offered by Apple for PC, but I soon realised that it wouldn't be long before it turned into another XP/Vista -- ie. An OS held back because of legacy hardware. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that as I still require some legacy support with some old apps, but why would I need two of the same thing.
No. I like how my desktop machine is running XP and I like my MacBook Pro -- Why should I limit myself to just one OS? I enjoy having the best of both worlds. - rebotfc, on 08/31/2008, -4/+46Wow I expected more from Ars than this crappy ill researched piece of journalism. The reasons why Apple doesn't license OS X are clear and present. Apple would much rather get $200 profit from selling a laptop than $2 profit from selling an OS and having to support countless combinations of drivers and hardware.
- Ironcell, on 08/31/2008, -1/+28I remember at one of John Carmack's keynotes he talked about how console systems were much more efficient compared to PC hardware due to the fact that there was only one hardware configuration for consoles vs PC's thousands of possible configurations. For similar PC and console configurations he said the consoles performed 50% to 100% better than their PC counter part.
What John Carmack said is important in relation to how OS X is tied to it's hardware, it may not be one single hardware configuration, but it's definitely not thousands like the PC, so it becomes easier for Apple to optimize it's OS for a small set of possible hardware configurations, and in large part avoid most hardware conflict issues Windows has, which mainly impacts people that prefer to build their own PC rigs, I do this b/c I love PC gaming, Alienware and Dell XPS is over priced.
The strength of tying software to hardware will only be amplified in the mobile arena, developers are currently enjoying a console like experience on the iPhone. There is no unknowns, display size, resolution, input types, storage space, RAM and features (such as GPS) are all the same for iPhones, allowing developers to create just one version for the iPhone. But if you look at EA mobile, they said it wasn't out of the norm for them to have 60+ variations of one game to cater to each handset's unique set of hardware. This just shows the advantage of tying software/hardware for developers, allowing them to create applications or games with less time/money, increasing their margin of profit.
Resolving software bugs is much easier when you only have to test it on one hardware configuration, so this is a win for the consumer, lowering the chance of encountering dodgy software. It's still up to the developer to do a good job of course (rushed iPhone 2.0 cough cough). - rdldr1, on 08/31/2008, -7/+32Wow, put out this theory without researching Apple's past. Apple did license the Mac OS to hardware manufacturers. In the 1990s, Mac Clones were on the market, but failed to be a hit. When Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the Mac Clone license. Its probably better for Apple in the long run to remain "un-PC like."
- wphj, on 09/01/2008, -2/+24I completely agree.
Apple doesn't care at all about their market share. The only important thing is how much money they make. - thegamingguy, on 08/31/2008, -20/+39The average person has no idea that Apple only has 8% of the market (still), if you watch tv or ask your hipster friends, they might try to convince you the exact opposite.
- realityiswhere, on 09/01/2008, -4/+21Hackintoshes ftw.
No matter what people say, they do work, sometimes perfectly, depending on compatible hardware that is not nearly as expensive as buying a real Mac. Mine's a Q6600, 3GB RAM, 640GB HDD, 512MB 8500GT (with hardware accelerated video), perfectly working sound and everything. Software updated from 10.5.0 using a retail Leo dvd to 10.5.4
A similar Mac Pro would have run me over $3000, but I got this for less than $1200.
http://forum.insanelymac.com - digitalpencil, on 09/01/2008, -0/+15for a 'real web developer' i'm kind of surprised you're attempting to use w3c to calculate accurate OS shares but whatever..
has it ever entered into your head that 'real' designers focus on strong aesthetics and functionality instead of the logo of the machine they use to pen their creations? what's more annoying then a fanboy is the likes of you who tries to reduce an entire userbase to retarded Starbucks-drinking chimps..
honestly the attitude on digg is getting worse by the day, i'm not sure if its just down to new users seeing repetitive comments and jumping on the bandwagon as there have always been stupid fanboy wars here but lately all i seem to hear is 'Linux users are all pseudo-intellectual douche bags' and mac users appear to be less than human..
i can't say i have a strong preference towards any OS although I do hold Apple's recent endeavors in high esteem but seriously can we just get back to discussing tech?!? i'm ***** tired of the flame-wars.. no-one gives a ***** what pc you've got and you're choice of OS does not define you're personality, i've met pricks who use everything.
i can't be the only one thinking just stfu & quit whining like a bitch.. - nixfu, on 09/01/2008, -5/+19Thats 8% total.... since the BUSINESS market is like 99.99999% windows. It takes probably 20%+ of the home market to make the TOTAL MARKETSHARE= 8%.
That is why it does SEEM LIKE MANY people have Mac's because that is much more true outside of the desktop sitting in cubicles. - drallo, on 09/01/2008, -0/+13Best Buy has sold Macs for over a year.
- skingers, on 09/01/2008, -1/+14I don't think Apple can hear the cries of the nerds to license Mac OS X over the volume of the cash registers singing to their current strategy...
- suinmind, on 09/01/2008, -5/+181st step, stop those Mac-PC ads.
- Gavagai80, on 09/01/2008, -1/+12As someone who doesn't use OS X, I'd like OS X to gain ~20% market share simply because competitive markets benefit the consumer and it might get people thinking about using languages/tools that work with every OS.
- Pliep, on 08/31/2008, -10/+21"Apple should license OS X" has been repeated over and over since 2001. They haven't done it and they will not do it because hardware sales (Mac) deliver 40% of Apple's income. Apart from that, this would mean supporting crappy hardware, millions of drivers, etc.
Besides, Apple has no need to gain "significant market share" because they have a whopping 20 billion in the bank and Mac sales have been rising 30% every quarter for the last 6 years. The smart people buy Macs, and those who don't want to, well, have a good life. - ferrariman60, on 09/01/2008, -2/+13"but are too cheap to get good hardware,"
I don't think so. Don't nerds usually get good hardware? I mean, if they can afford it. I have good hardware. Better than what comes in an imac, in fact, and I've had this hardware for the last year or so. Maybe it's that I don't want to pay an assload for the same hardware I can get elsewhere. For example: 4 GB of apple mac pro ram (ddr2 800, 2x2gb) is a whopping $999 at apple.com. http://store.apple.com/us/memorymodel/ME_8CR_2GEN_ ...
Or I could go to newegg, get 2x2gb corsair dominator, which I promise is faster and cooler, for $104. For the sake of math, that's a $796 savings. On 4 GB of ram. You could buy a whole new computer for that.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 ...
Or how about video cards, again for a Mac Pro? Well, I could get a Geforce 8800GT 512! For $279. http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB560Z/A?fnode=M ...
Or at newegg, same card, probably the same exact hardware as is given to a reputable company like EVGA or BFG, that card is $154.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 ...
That's not being cheap; it's being sensible. Please don't mix the two up. - birch25, on 09/01/2008, -3/+13as long as apple is making a profit and they keep making their os better and better, i don't care if they never crack 10% market share.
- sdotbrucato, on 09/01/2008, -0/+9Best Buy and Circuit City both sell Macs. Best Buy just rolled out a big campaign last quarter, putting Apple "Shops" in all their stores.... Circuit City sells them, theyre just not on display.
- serif69, on 09/01/2008, -0/+9Apple shareholders care about the stock price, and the stock price doesn't care about OS market share. Apple has a larger market cap that is 60% of Microsoft's, but they only control 8% of the OS market. But then there's that old 70%+ of the portable music player market, being the #1 music retailer in the country, and now 20%+ of the smartphone market, only to grow as the year wears on. Now tell me the OS market share means anything.
- SilverBlade2k, on 09/01/2008, -1/+10Maybe they can gain some market share by building a mid-priced tower?? All they give us is either laptops, the mac-mini, desktops built from laptop parts, and a very expensive tower.
I want a reasonably priced *tower* with the same specs as the iMac built from standard *tower* parts, not *laptop* parts. Is that so hard to do for Apple?? - ladbroke, on 08/31/2008, -10/+18And why does Apple need more software? Apple is already overflowing with great software, not because they have a monopoly market share, but because they offer developers outstanding tools to work with: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/what-micro ...
The only advantage M$ wields over Mac OS in that regard is commercial software and embedded systems, and why does Apple need that? - vawksel, on 09/01/2008, -0/+8I dugg you up but there deserves some notes on this comment.
I tried what you did to my machine, it wasn't that easy.
One of my on board SATA controllers wasn't compatible. My Firewire PCI card wasn't compatible, I had to go buy a PCI Express Firewire card, which was $100.
The Nvidia 7950GT 512 meg boards do not work correctly (the 256meg ones do), there is a bug where you get a black screen unless you start OS X in some debug mode. I had to buy a 8800GT to get the video to work right.
Once it was all working, I decided to patch my OS with Apple's updater, and that was the end of that. Had to re-install.
My audio finally worked, but only after hours of pain all my fault, I read 868 instead of 888 as the number on the realtek sound chip on my motherboard. So much pain.
In the end, after a few hundred dollars and some pain, it worked. - RobTyree, on 09/01/2008, -3/+11When will these people realize that the most important thing to Apple is not market share - it's user experience. OSX on 3rd party hardware reduces the control Apple has over user experience, which is why it won't (and shouldn't) happen. Apple has positioned itself as a premium brand, knowing that people will pay more for a better experience, plain and simple.
Discerning customers who care more about user experience than they do about getting their PC for $500 buy Apple. Everybody else will continue to suffer from Windows' shortcomings, or, they will start trying other alternatives like Linux. Either way, it's a great situation for Apple. - inactive, on 09/01/2008, -1/+8No, Leopard (10.5) does in fact run on 800Mhz G4 processors and up, including all G5s.
- wukillabee, on 09/01/2008, -2/+9how the hell:
3 Firefox 2.0 22.32%
4 Firefox 1.5 3.52%
5 Firefox 3.0 3.16%
W3counter is ***** imo - MacHarborGuy, on 09/01/2008, -1/+7thats exactly it, people buy what they "feel" is best, thought it may not be the best.
Kind of like when I was in a web development class. When I started talking in the class about "web standards" the teacher said that "Internet Explorer is web standards" and everyone in the class that actually knew a thing or two about the W3C laughed at that statement. - DrRaoulDuke, on 09/01/2008, -3/+9Apple is "the most respected brand in the entire industry"? Really? Based on what? Next...
- gfxlonghorn, on 09/01/2008, -6/+12Yes call us the nerds why you spend 2000 dollars on a box that it only cost apple 500 dollars to put together. If having a mac classifies me as a hipster cool guy, I would much prefer to pocket the 1500 bucks and be a nerd. You clearly have NO idea about the hardware that is in the mac, because if you did, you would realize they using the same manufacturers as every other hardware manufacturer.
So your argument is that you understand that Apple is about profitability, and how they mark the hardware on their pcs up like crazy, yet you still continue to buy from them. If you don't work for them, then I ask you, who knows all about economics of the computer industry, why the ***** do you buy an overpriced piece of hardware? - MScrip, on 09/01/2008, -3/+9> "It runs more software"
What software do you need on a Mac?
Photoshop
Firefox
Office
iMovie (consumers)
Final Cut (professionals)
iPhoto (consumers)
Aperture (professionals)
There are plenty of programs for Macs. FTP programs, text editors, VLC, audio programs, video converters, chat clients, etc. You know... there are people that use Macs every day... do you think they just stare at an empty desktop all day?
I'm sure there are some professional business apps that only run on Windows... but for the average consumer a Mac will run everything they need. - smallwang, on 09/01/2008, -4/+10Apple doesnt really live up to its mystique. Products look nice but never quite work as well as the fanatics make it out to be. I have had plenty of trouble with my imac and iphone.
- norman619, on 09/01/2008, -5/+11DCM:
What were you doing to your computer that you always had to "fix" it? I have never had any real issues with my systems that weren't caused by me.
News flash. People already use what works for them. I use Windows for everyday work and play and use Linux on my servers. - Godzilla07, on 09/01/2008, -1/+7The problem for Apple is that they don't have a traditional tower computer. You have the Mac mini which is underpowered. Then you have the iMac which you cannot upgrade. The iMac is the closest thing you have to the traditional tower computer. But it uses mobile PC parts which makes it underpowered. Your next step up is the Mac Pro which is a traditional workstation. It is overkill for a regular desktop user or a power user. So you have two underpowered computers which use laptop parts and a workstation that is overkill for a power user even. If I want a computer with laptop parts I'll just buy a Macbook. Apple could gain much more users if they did this. But ever since Jobs has been at Apple they haven't had a bridge between the standard desktops and the workstations.
- Seaton, on 09/01/2008, -0/+5Since we are talking clones:
My 2 Umax C600 and 2 S900 towers served me extremely well. Aside from the PCs I own today, they were the only tower computers I actually enjoyed working on. Unlike other Mac users back in the 90s, I could buy any off-the-shelf CD Burner and it would work. No drivers required. I bought PC RAM instead of more expensive Mac branded RAM. The computers were faster and more reliable than anything Apple was producing at the time.
This is why Apple will never license the OS. Manufacturers will produce towers that run Mac OS X, better than Apple does. - timpanik, on 09/01/2008, -1/+6I don't know if this article is completely accurate. I don't think people that are buying newer computers are downgrading to XP. RAM is cheap enough now that newer computers come with plenty to run Vista. I built a new computer and put the student version of Vista on my desktop and the only problem I've had is that VLC likes to crash from time to time.
I work at a computer help desk on campus, and the mac people who come in usually don't know much about computers in general, so I think they buy macs after having previous trouble with a computer, probably based on lack of computer knowledge. - inactive, on 09/01/2008, -0/+5Opinion: How Apple can gain significant OS market share: Lower the cost of hardware?
- Pake, on 09/01/2008, -0/+5"They can easily restrict the number of hardware configurations."
And when you consider this, it really doesn't make any sense for Apple to ever license to other companies. Right now they can easily get away with selling a $600 computer for $1200. The moment they allow competition to be created using their OS, the moment they lose their own market share to companies who do it better for cheaper. - franksands, on 09/01/2008, -1/+6As a lot people already said in here, Apple *does not* want to change, it is doing just fine, thank you very much. A co-worker gave me a very good analogy for Apple:
They are like Ferrari. They don't want to embrace the whole market. They want to do their thing, the way they think it's right. You don't like it? Fine, buy something else. End of the story.
I think that pretty much sums it up. From the changes brought with Leopard, if they are going to change anything is to make the Mac into a huge iPhone. - dood, on 09/01/2008, -1/+6My vote: top quality video games, available first (or only, if they can swing it) on Macs. They'd need to subsidize the development and marketing at first, but I think it'd pay off big time in the end.
- tenio, on 09/01/2008, -5/+10bigger market share -> more viruses
- MacHarborGuy, on 09/01/2008, -0/+5Apple already went thru the whole licensing and "clone mac" thing a little over a decade ago, and it didn't work. Support was crummy and even the better of the clone systems, those from PowerComputing, I found to be worse than Apple's own in-house systems.
If Psystar wins the court case and Apple is required to license out their systems, I have a feeling that Apple will restrict it to systems using EFI, could possibly charge huge amounts for the license and dump all of the "Psystar System Support" on Psystar (much like how OEM copies of Windows have their support left in the hands of the OEMs themselves). If that happens, Psystar will both win and lose. - ferrariman60, on 09/01/2008, -1/+6So, infinitely, the results from google are different based on the OS you're using? I think you're not quite making the point you're trying to make.....
And ladbroke, you're forgetting about games. There are no good games on the mac that haven't already been out for windows for ages. - thedragon4453, on 09/01/2008, -5/+10I think that people just misunderstand what Apple is - a hardware manufacturer. They only make software like OS X and iLife to make their hardware more appealing. Think of the Mac line like you do the iPod. The iPod hardware is pretty good, but made more appealing with the hardwares interaction to the software. Just the same as it doesn't make sense for Apple to sell the iPod software, it doesn't make sense for them to sell OS X.
If they started selling OS X on its own, they'd probably see what they did the last time they tried licensing OS X - cannibalizing of Mac sales. And why would they want to make $4 off of a license when they could make $200 on a complete machine? - ocbeta, on 09/01/2008, -1/+5Sir, I don't believe you understand how much profit is in hardware, vs. software.
- Palaceguard, on 09/01/2008, -0/+4Steve already left Apple once and Apple went to *****
- Wilddigi, on 09/01/2008, -0/+4What's wrong with Microsoft?
- EEdesigner, on 09/01/2008, -3/+7Apple should simply keep striving for originality that works. I left Microsoft eons ago, and have not had to rebuild a computer since. My hatred for the Microsoft's inability to innovate (or even make things work properly) is based on many years of frustration and four-letter words. If Apple starts to act as if Gates is running it, I'll leave them asap. Until then, we've got 4 Apple machines and 2 Linux machines in the house. No Microsoft...EVER!!
- wildmannz, on 09/01/2008, -0/+4Well - marketshare is a funny thing.
What do the numbers mean?
The figures you are looking at seem to be active users. If someone is using Bootcamp on a Mac , then they aren't identified as using Mac OSX. I'm sure there are plenty of these.
Also consider quarterly sales figures. I like these figures because they are more "current". Someone using a PPC Mac still represents an Apple customer and a real-world user... so don't discount them...
Look at this though.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=648619
So - they sold more than 1/5th of Dells sales. not bad, considering that Dells machines go into big corporate and Govt...
Having said all of that... Apple isn't busting their guts to kill Microsoft - and I don't think they should either. They (like Microsoft) should continue to refine what they have and become the best of breed.
That way - everyone wins. - MScrip, on 09/01/2008, -0/+4> "In the end, after a few hundred dollars and some pain, it worked."
That's exactly what Apple does NOT wanna put people though. Apple sells computers that work out of the box. Some people like that.
Apple will not sell their OS with a note on the box that says "good luck." Even if they did license OSX to work on "any" machine... you'd still run into problems with drivers, chipsets, etc. Apple wants to sell computers, not hassles. - inactive, on 09/01/2008, -0/+4As a for profit company, the most important thing to Apple is just that- profit. From a customer perspective, however, I agree that Apple products are very much about the end user experience.
- ethana2, on 09/01/2008, -0/+4We have anti-trust regulations for a reason.
-
Show 51 - 100 of 284 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is