After several years competing with all of the other players in the burgeoning PC marketplace of the late seventies and early eighties (Atari, Radio Shack, Sinclair, and so many others), Apple emerged as one of the best of the breed. They were largely eclipsed, however, by the dual introduction of the IBM PC and Windows. They have been in second spot, and usually a distant second, for 25 years.The Apple line of Macs, however, has always been popular with graphic artists and for other similar applications. They have been associated with the introduction of much business and business-related software, starting with Visicalc in 1977 and continuing through to the Final Cut Studios series of applications today. Along the way, they introduced the world to desktop publishing via PageMaker, among many other business software accomplishments.
Still, they represented by far the smaller of the two markets. The bulk of business software development was done originally for the PC and Windows, mainly because the sales possibilities were so much bigger. Some, but not nearly a majority, of the PC software was eventually ported to the Mac. A lot of business software never made it to the Apple side of the table.
Apple’s market share languished around 2% for many year, but has recently had a large (for Apple) increase, up to just below 4%. A lot of industry wags (including me, if I’m a wag) credit this to Windows Vista, which is probably the worst operating system ever released. Whatever the reason, sales are up. In addition to users fleeing Vista, there are some other likely contributors.
First, Apple is at last abandoning the Motorola chips they grew up on and changing to Intel-based hardware. Models like the MacBook Pro are now more competitive in terms of performance. They also long ago deserted the somewhat arcane Apple software infrastructure and moved to a Unix derivative. By all accounts, the latest version (Leopard) is an excellent operating system.
Still, there are negative points. They are more expensive, by far, than PCs with equal performance. Many people, including me, do not want to pay a premium price so that Apple can continue their elitist, overblown hype. How many Mac vs. PC commercials can you sit through when you know that the hardware comes out of the same basic bins as Dell uses?
In my mind, though, the biggest reason not to buy a Mac is the proprietary nature of the company. Not since IBM has anyone held their “secrets” so closely, and we all know what happened to IBM in this marketplace, and others. The rest of the world is moving closer and closer to the Open Source (7) model. Neither Microsoft or Apple seem to have noticed that. By the time they figure it out, it may well be too late. All of that said, there is some chance that I am going to buy a Mac. More about that later.
Next column: Linux.
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