The question is: Why do most people own PC’s over mac’s? Then why do they always use mac’s in tv? And why do most proffesional’s use mac?
[ul][li]I’m not sure that Macs are more common on TV. You might notice Macs more because the latest ones look a lot more distinctive than most PCs.[/li]“Most professionals” is a bit sweeping. Some industries use more Macs than others. In my experience, advertisers, marketers, graphic designers and journalists use more Macs, perhaps because traditionally Macs have had a far superior range of specialist software packages for those occupations. I don’t know if this is still true or not. Other industries hardly use Macs at all; no company I have ever worked for or visited as an IT consultant has ever used Macs predominantly.[/ul]
I think that you see more Macs on TV and film because a lot of the creative folk who make movies use Macs, love Macs, and want to see them represented on their shows. I think they get a kick out of doing this—they feel Macs are superior and they want to let everyone in their audience get a good look at them.
Also, the newer Macs (1998 - present) are quite stylish and look very good as a prop.
Simplified view: Macs cost more to buy. That’s why people don’t buy them as much. TV shows don’t care about cost just looks, and the Macs look better.
Oh. God.
How long has it been since the last one of these? Are we due for another already?
Macs are better. But Bill Gates has lied and deceived the whole world, with the result that the Gospel of Jobs only reaches a lucky few of us.
And this is headed for the Pit, I predict.
I’m sorry for doing this, but I cannot let this stand.
Every single one of those apostrophes is incorrect. Apostrophes denote possession or contraction.
Also, PCs are cheaper than Macs.
Macs were originally marketed towards the professionals and so called elites. Bill Gates saw how the Mac OS was a lot more fun to use than DOS, so Windows was born, and then installed on PCs to market them for the everyday customer. Apple stayed on its pedestal while Microsoft bought the whole coliseum around it. Apple’s just now gotten around to marketing its product for Joe Six-Pack, but it’s still going to shoot itself in the foot for being too elitist in its SWITCH ads.
Another point: The reason only Wintel boxes are called "PC"s nowadays is due to the IBM PC became synonymous with “PC” and it in turned spawned all those cheap clones. Since IBM (eventually) blessed having PCs in business, business managers (such as Dilbert’s boss) then equated IBM PCs (or compatibles) as the machines suitable for business. In no time at all IBM was selling huge numbers of PCs and overran the competition. (Even though the machines weren’t cheap, by comparison to the old Apples.)
There are also reasons like Apple continuing to think like a hardware company when it really is a software company. (That’s where the $ is.)
Ironically, IMHO as long as we avoid making statements like yours, we can keep this discussion out of the Pit. I don’t mean to single you out, but you’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same goes for any likewise pro-PC comments.
One consequence of PCs being less expensive than Macs is that schools were (and still are) quick to pick PCs over Macs when it came time to stock their computer labs. As a result, many kids have grown up using PCs, and will become adults prefer PCs.
AudreyK , wasn’t one reason PCs are more popular is because more of them were donated to schools? Or were they Macs…?
I’m sure some schools get their computers via donations, but all of the schools I went to had to buy theirs. The vast majority of schools likely do have to pay for their machines, and cannot rely on donations alone.
I do know that companies like Dell and Apple have educational discount programs, and occasionally donate computers. They understand the importance of being tops in schools.
Oh, please insert a “who” between “adults” and “prefer” in my first post’s last sentence
The reason that people use PCs and not Macs? The Franklin Ace 1200. This was a 100% compatible with the Apple IIE, essentially a clone.
Apple went after them, claiming piracy, and in 1983 (?) won.
WAG, but this sort of failure to allow cheap clones to be made limited severely the number of people that used that platform. It would be a different story had Apple allowed this (in the same way that IBM allowed IBM compatible machines to be made).
A large, but not dominant number of computers in schools are Macs.
PCs are cheaper. Mostly becasue there is more than one manufacturer. This doesn’t make for much in the way of variety, but it did mean some price competition.
Originally in the 80’s it was Apple vs. IBM, with a bunch of also-rans (C64, Atari, DEC, as well as Apple II’s and PCjrs). Eventaully, the “cloning” of IBM’s computers led to cheaper models. Oddly enough, many of the companies that started the PC run no longer make PC, or at least not many (At&T, IBM)
The Mac had a distinct advantage in its user interface. Its still does, but the lead is much less pronounced. That advantage was very important in schools where any fool could sit down at a computer and boot the word processor with clicking instead of typing in the exe.command.
Macs were somewhat proposed as elite machines when they fist came out. Jobs resisted the developement of games on the Mac because he was worried that the Mac would not be taken seriously. This ended up inhibiting the Mac’s popularity.
Apple also made some serious mistakes with pricing in the 90’s. Many proclaim that their ultimate failure was not allowing cloning. But given the fate of IBMs PC dominance, and the brief experiment with Mac Cloning that did more harm than good, it would seem that such a choice was not a bad one.
Apple made other mistakes as well. They failed to take Windows 95 seriuosly, they allowed Gates to get away with windows far too long before suing. (Depsite the claims of many, Apple did not steal graphical interface idea from Xerox PARC, the PARC visit merely convinced Jobs that GUI was possible. The guy originally in charge of the Mac development team wrote his college thesis on GUI…in 1967.)
This is not to say that PC makers were immune to error. The handling of the Pentium floating point error would have devastated (but probably not destroyed) Intel had competing chipmakers been in place. (Funny Sidenote: When Intel released the Pentium, they produced an IMAX educational film with a plot involving Alien trying to sabatoge the Pentium.)
Apple presently seems somewhat content to have a minor share of the market, but would certainly like to have it much larger than the 5%- 10% often quoted. Certain markets are pretty much dominated by Macs, such as advertising and graphics. As long as Apple isn’t too arrogant about them they should be fairly secure…MS has been trying to covet them for years to no avail.
School often get good deals from Macs, a recent deal with the state of Maine gives an ibook to damn near every student. Computers aren’t often donated, at least not new ones. But good deals can be penned. Del is very aggressive in this field.
Apple does have a very aggressive (and often effective) marketing department. They mange to buy product placement for their machines onscreen. The are very good at doing this. PC manufacturers don’t often have the budget or knowhow to get many PC onscreen, and at this point most have probably given it up in favor of traditional advertising.
Some folks have claimed that PCs are dominant over Apple’s because Microsoft has “great marketing”. In fact this is completely untrue. While MS has very aggressive business practives, its track record in Marketing has been atrocious. As much as peope grumble about the “Switch” ads, they are working. Compare this to “The Butterfly” ads MS is showing right now, or to some of MS’s ad campaigns that would have crippled a smaller company (When introducing a new version of IE, for example, MS showed a kid looking into his screen in what they must have presumed was wonder. In fact the image and expression on the kids face could easily have been captioned “Jimmy’s first visit to a Fisting Site”. Other campaigns have been equally inept, including the “Fly” campaign. Apple has had some weak ads, but these at least their ads get noticed. By comparison, MS ads are sometimes laughably clumsy.
Jeez, could I ramble on any more? Well, I hope I didn’t pull this into the pit.
Sigh.
In a nutshell, PCs are more popular for a few simple reasons. I’ll touch on some, but not all of them.
- (Simplified a lot) When IBM released the original PCs, they used off-the-shelf parts. Once the BIOS was reverse-engineered, there was nothing to stop people from building inexpensive clones. PCs became a commodity product, e.g. cheap. Later attempts by IBM to reacquire the proprietary rights by releasing the PS/2 architecture pretty much failed.
Note that this resulted in the success of the PC *architecture* but it didn't assure that any company made much money producing them. Margins were razor slim and lots of companies went under or lost gobs of money trying to establish their brand name (AST Research, DEC, ATT, Packard-Bell, etc...). I doubt IBM ever made much money on their PC division.
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In the early days of PCs, there were many operating systems/ manufacturers. No one wanted to get stuck with expensive orphaned hardware. The common expression was, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” At the same time, Apple had this cute colorful logo, a reputation of making educational (kids) computers, and corporate culture that was pretty alien to corporate America.
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Apple made a number of questionable decisions. Not licensing their hardware early enough might be one of them. Lack of focus on the gaming and business markets might be another. It was arguably still neck-and-neck until Windows 95 came out – at the same time Apple was undergoing some significant quality and management problems and lost significant market share.
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The “mind-share” effect. Once you get a certain share of the market, you’ve effectively established a standard, for better or worse. So once everyone is using Microsoft products, they become a standard of communication (e.g. Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, and so on.) While Mac products exist to produce documents in these formats, they have not always been produced in a timely manner, nor are they always 100% compatible due to changing formats.
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(Again, simplified). Choice of processor. Apple did not back the winning team here. The PowerPC architecture is considered more elegant and is potentially more efficient than the legacy Intel architecture. It was thought that Intel would exhaust the capabilities of their architecture and fall behind in the performance race. But Intel has always managed to pull one more rabbit out of its hat (billions in research pays off) while Motorola, the primary producer of the PowerPC chip, was not motivated to invest the necessary research dollars to keep up.
(It is, however, true that a PowerPC chip draws much less power than an Intel chip of equivalent power which is significant in laptop production.):rolleyes:
[sarcasm] And I’m sure they’ll all completely agree with you at the pit.[/sarcam]
As has been pointed out already, Apple had the misfortune to go up against IBM in the mid 80’s. I think they compounded that disadvantage with their marketing.
In the famous 1984 commercial, they cast themselves as the little guy going up against big brother, which while essentially true, gave businesses the implicit message that Apple wasn’t interested in selling to them. Rather than playing up the Mac’s strengths, they went for style – alienating a lot of people who aren’t stylish and just want a machine that is reliable (and yes, I know PCs are terrible in this department) and supported. By sending the message, “we’re the little guy”, they also sent the message, “we may not be around next year”.
Consider a manager who’s tasked to buy 1000 computers for the company, which product would [s]he consider the better decision, IBM (or an IBM compatible) or those other guys? Just a few decisions like that and you suddenly have several thousand people who are experienced and comfortable with PCs.
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- My guess is originally, Apple sold to schools while MS sold to business. MS guessed that businesses would dictate what computers employees used (no matter what type they learned on in school), and MS was right. When I entered high school some 15 years ago, the Apple II’s were already considered lame compared to the PC jr’s for this very reason–already most jobs that involved computers used MS/PC’s.
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- The Way We Live Now: my guess is two reasons interlinked: Apples cost more than comparable PC’s, therefore, regular electronic stores will not carry Apples. Or the other way around, if you like. Either way, customers shopping at the local mall/megasuperstore don’t even see Apples, much less consider them.
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And it’s getting worse (for Apple, anyway): skipping Windows for Linux (which is now very practical in many business situations) chops another couple hundred dollars off the price of a PC, and potentially provides better administrative control/security besides.
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Maybe I have misunderstood the meaning of “elitist” all these years. The recent SWITCH ads say to me in loud, blaring tones “If you are not smart enough to use a Windows based computer then buy a Mac!”
Adding to the above; I personally use an “IBM Clone”, if that can be the right term after all these years. I also use Windows XP and Mandrake Linux about equally. I have nothing against the Macintosh, just problems with the message I receive from the ads.