[Ti] Apple's True Market Share!

[Mike Stanley]

On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 09:30 AM, Alex wrote:
> If it were possible to separate the Macintosh from the MacOS then I 
> think you might have a case to make, Maklar aside.  Apple is 
> predominantly a hardware vendor the fact that the rest of the market 
> of hardware vendors choose to use the same 3rd party OS makes no 
> difference. If you are comparing you must compare like with like, 
> otherwise the figures are useless. I am talking about hardware unit 
> sales and comparing manufactures of that hardware within the market 
> they compete. The fact that only Apple also creates its OS 
> indisputable, it is also not relevant, therefor neither is the fact 
> that the other manufactures use Windows.

Of course it is relevant.  Nobody buys a computer as simply a piece of 
hardware - as if it were a couch or a coffee table.  The software IS 
important, in fact the software is probably one of the most important 
things - which seems to have been one of the things Apple has prided 
themselves on since the beginning.  Sure, for years the Mac crowd got 
to crow about using SCSI drives in their pricey machines but nowadays 
everybody is using basically the same parts - my new G4 DP 1.25 is 
about as plain vanilla as it comes as far as drives and memory and such.

Apple is selling the MacOS every time it sells a Macintosh just like 
Dell and Gateway are selling Windows every time they sell a Dimension 
or Profile.


Now if *none* of the computers being sold came with *any* software, I'd 
almost be willing to buy your argument that the OS is irrelevant, but 
even if you could wave a wand and make that true the reality is all the 
rest of the Wintel/AMD world would run Windows and every other OS under 
the sun *except* OS X and Apple hardware would run OS X and maybe some 
PPC variants of Linux - so the software would still matter.

Maybe because Microsoft has won the OS war most people don't fully 
consider the OS to be a factor in their computer purchase, but again 
that is because it is such an ever-present thing - the OS and in many 
cases the basic software bundles will be the same or similar whether 
you go to Dell's website or Gateway's retail stores or pick up a 
Compaq/HP at Circuit City or some no-name brand from your local 
computer store.  Aside from the major numbers (CPU speed & memory) I 
*know* your average computer buyer isn't thinking of the hardware when 
it comes to a computer purchase - I have to help way too many of them 
among friends and family to not know it.  Well, there is one other 
thing they consider, almost above all else - price - and yes, I mean 
initial price.  TCO isn't a concept that most people consider when 
buying a computer - at least not most of them I know - both for 
personal and business use.