Vista woes fuel Mac sales surge - analyst
Apple sales growth 3x industry average
The 3G iPhone may be getting all the attention this week, but let's not forget Apple's other product line, the Mac family, which is enjoying new-found success thanks to... Microsoft.
According to US investment house BMO Capital Markets, cited by AppleInsider, Apple will have shipped up to 2.5m Macs between April and June inclusive - enough for a 39 per cent year-on-year growth rate.
More to the point, that rate of increase is more than three times the industry average of 12.2 per cent.
BMO analyst Keith Bachman told investors that it's largely the result of Windows Vista: "Thus far, user satisfaction ratings for Vista have been weak, and start-up times for Vista have been known to be much slower than the Mac OS X. Thus, more than 50 per cent of recent customers buying Macs in Apple retail stores are first-time buyers."
Pricing is helping too. Mac specs may not match directly PCs from rival suppliers, but Apple has the balance between price, performance and features about right, Bachman reckons. Experienced tech buyers may disagree, but if BMO's numbers prove correct, the Mac family is clearly winning over plenty of consumers.
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COMMENTS
It could be that MS are about to get a kicking
For many years, MS has enjoyed an almost total monopoly in the OS and office productivity markets. In the early days this wasn't such a terrible thing. Their products were reasonably well made, not too expensive (compared to the cost of the hardware) and they helped to kickstart a previously fragmented PC market.
Trouble is, they abused that monopoly for years and squeezed the market until it bled. Nowadays there are viable alternatives and MS have lost their way. They never were all that good at innovating and now they have run out of compelling reasons why you need to pay them for newer versions of Office or the latest bloated operating system.
So it's a kind of natural reaction. The more you take the piss, the harder people will look for a way out. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens over the next few years.
Poke/Flinch
Given that retail stores have the audacity to sells Macs alongside boxshifter PCs this trend is hardly surprising.
Take the cheapest Macbook and the fastest Vista laptop you can find in a store and click on an icon. Usually the Mac will do something straight away whilst you will have to wait for the MS crippleware to stop doing whatever it was doing, acknowledge your request, do a bit more of what it was doing and then actually do something you want it to do.
To the non-tech savvy, the Mac will seem faster. Compatability issues aside, who wants to pay more for a slower PC?
@ Adam Foxton
"To anyone who actually read through that minor rant, could you please point out to me in what way Macs are freer than Windows PCs?"
Well, for a start MacOS is an open source BSD under the hood and comes complete with X11, so most Linux/*nix software can be ported much more easily than it can be to Windows.
As a result, since I bought my MacBook earlier this year I've installed mostly open source/free software. What makes it "freer" is that I have all that open source software available, plus a range of commercial software to choose from: best of both worlds.
As for MacOS being tied to Apple hardware, well as others have pointed out it's a) not actually as expensive as the nay-sayers would have it and b) it's actually very nice hardware! Nicely built and very well thought-out.
Last Saturday I fired up my XP Vaio for the first time in a couple of months and it spent a couple of hours updating inself and its security software and its virus defs and scanning itself etc etc. Meanwhile I was actually *using* the Mac...
My advice if you want something cheaper but still well thought-out and free of Windows hassles is to get an eee. I have a 701 and it's wonderful.
All you have to lose are your chains, my friend.
Mac sales up, no surprises were fed up buying crap...
Good for them, Macs are miles better than PCs, Im fed up with unreliable half finished slop in the form of windows operating systems that dont do what they are supposed to, susceptible to scumware & viruses & waiting for eternity every time you make a PC do something a little bit different.
I open my Macbook its instantly ready & I do my work without interruption by some idiotic thought bubble to tell me theres 125 updates to install because I havnt connected to the Internet for the last 10 minutes & if I really do need windows I run it under VMWare where it runs quickly & stable
I will never even think of buying another PC again & Vista? its bollox.
Mac is better
In the office I have a Dell. It's horrible. It's slow, it's buggy it's just not nice to use to get things done.
I come home to a 24" iMac and do my stuff. Much nicer.
