Okay, it’s no secret I’m an Apple user. I use them for work, for home, even for blogging. But for the longest time it “felt” like I was alone. And by longest time I mean for the last 20 years of my life. I was a lonely Mac user occasionally bumping into another. No wonder I got excited about seeing one on TV and in the movies.
Well that rare feeling is starting to wane. I’m speaking in at the Streaming Media conference in San Jose this week and EVERYWHERE I look I see Macs. Mostly pretty new MacBooks (white seems to be in vogue) and it feels like they are 50% of the laptops I’ve seen. And when I speak to people who are using PC laptops, they almost always offer the fact that they are “thinking” about moving to a Mac.
I know Apple had a pretty good quarter on the strength of great Mac sales, but my informal poll is indicating a huge resurgence here – I’m going to start predicting 20-25% marketshare soon. With Apple’s market-cap now at $162B – (more than IBM and Intel) it is now half as valuable as Microsoft – and it has less than 10% of the market for PCs.
So let’s recap. Apple in the late 90s was close to dying. Then Steve came back and the Mac (and great marketing) was reborn. the iMac begat the iPod, then the iPod begat the iPhone. And now the Mac is back again, primarily because a whole new iGeneration is willing to look at the Mac for the very first time. And they like what they see, they get one, and they tell their friends. And the cycle is just starting to spin up. Enjoy the ride!
Its been the same story in science. Over the past few years, I’ve gone from being the only Mac user around to moving my entire group to Macs while seeing a wholesale seachange in meetings where Windows users have been migrating in droves to Macs. Perhaps more encouraging, the alpha users are switching to Macs as well. For instance, many, many of the faculty and students in our internationally renowned computer science program are using Macs and while I found great reluctance to developing Mac specific applications through collaborations with CS in the past, these days we are developing some exciting applications based on OS X.
A big part of the equation is the fact that the “Computer guy”, you know that one guy in everyone’s circle of friends who they all go to for help and advice on what to get and how to fix it. Well now that he found out Macs can run Windows too he’s got one and he quickly realized that if he tells all these computer information leaching friends and family to get a Mac, his troubleshooting time is reduced exponentially and that means more Mac time for him…
Mike – Founder – http://www.switchingtomac.com
You’re so right! I began using Macs in 1987 and have never stopped. I was forced by an employer to use a PC for about a month in the 1990s and it was so painful I bought a PowerBook for myself and turned in my company laptop. Part of the issue was lousy internal support, but the laptop they gave me just wasn’t reliable and I could support myself and troubleshoot problems on the Mac myself. I’m not a geek of any kind, just a normal person who wants to be productive and not futz around with a computer that doesn’t work. Nowadays, I smile at the enthusiasm of the switchers and say “I told you so!”
I still take jabs at work about having a Mac (2 actually, MacBook Pro and brandy new MacPro). I work for a tech company yet we have nobody at our help desk that can troubleshoot a Mac, so they told me just to set them up myself = Admin rights!! Slowly but surely more Macs are popping up in cubicles. I need mine for all of the editing and production work, but others are getting them just to use standard Office programs. Having bootcamp set up on my MBook just continues to reassure me as to why I HATE Windows and PCs so much. Leopard looks GREAT by the way, after using it for only a day. Due to your previous blog post, I set up Time Machine IMMEDIATELY.
I’m a student at San Jose State and I love Apple products so much that I even made a commercial about it!!
Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IRs__TpOnw