[X4U] Apple's user base geezers?

[Zane H. Healy]

>I spend a lot of my time working in the graphics/publishing worl. 
>This breakdown of ownership is not valid in my experience. Apple's 
>market share is still fairly low on a percentage basis of all 
>desktop computers, but there are still a whole lot of Macs out 
>there. And in my opinion users tend to keep Macs in service much 
>longer than they do the PC's. An interesting question would be what 
>percentage of working Macs are running OSX vs OS9 these days? I keep 
>an old G3 tower computer on hand to run OS9 when I need to but that 
>is very infrequently now. I'd guess I have not booted that computer 
>up for 6 months or so.

I think the PC Press at least, if not even the Mac Press tend to 
forget just how long many Mac users keep their systems.  With my Rev. 
0 G4/450 AGP I kept it for 4+ years, and the Rev. 0 G5 2x2 that 
replaced it is now over 3 years old.  When the G4/450 was 3 years 
old, it felt slow, the G5 2x2 doesn't even feel slow.  It sometimes 
feels like it needs more than the 3.5GB of RAM it has, but it doesn't 
feel slow.  I think Safari and Firefox help contribute to that. 
Mozilla had a way of making systems feel slow.  The G4 might be 7+ 
years old now, but it's still capable of doing useful work (says the 
person that still uses 20-30 year old PDP-11's and a ~15 year old 
VAX).

>Just today I read a news article stating that half of the 'business 
>computers' in the US are not even capable of running Microsoft's 
>VISTA.

Have you seen the requirements?

>And by the way, I am in that +55 group. ;(

I'm still a ways away, however, due in part to the cost, I didn't own 
a Mac until I was 28, though Windows 95 had more to do with my 
changing than anything.

I just helped two 55+ users pick out 17" MacBook Pro's and all the 
software they'll need/want.  The salesman was a bit older than I am, 
and commented on how most of his customers are an older crowd, 
however, he doesn't believe that the Mac user base is primarily older 
people.  He said the reason for most of his customers being older is 
that they gravitate to him, while the younger people gravitate to the 
younger salespeople.

BTW, back on how long Mac users keep their systems.  The two 17" 
MacBook Pro's are replacing a 7 year old and a 6 year old iBook.  The 
salesman said he's getting a lot of people with systems that age 
coming in as they're finally being forced to upgrade in order to keep 
doing stuff on the Internet.  Apparently the same thing happened 
around '99.

		Zane


-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)           | Classic Computer Collector |
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