Why arn't mac's as popular as PC's?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Sdrawkcab: Until you can go and assemble a Mac from off-the-shelf components, it’s non-standard.

Every major CPU change that Apple has gone through broke compatibility with the previous one. Apple’s trick is to use good emulation to allow older apps to run properly, and to have its compiler generate fallback copies of programs that will run on the older hardware. On OSX this is even easier, as applications and the OS simply have to be recompiled for the new architecture.

Apple lost the Mhz (now Ghz) race a long time ago, but that’s not really at issue. The point is, Apple’s processors simply can’t deliver the performance that Intel or AMD’s can. When AMD switches to 64bit, and Intel makes Hyperthreading mainstream, the gulf will become even wider.

Patience isn’t infinite. The company has not been keeping pace with PC hardware advancement, and unless Apple does something about that, Apple computers will no longer be viable in the marketplace. People are going to keep jumping ship until Apple doesn’t have a userbase left.

42

What??!? Remember ADB? AppleTalk? NuBus? When Apple still had a chance to achieve parity, they fumbled it away in part by creating their own proprietary standards. It hardly matters what they do today because the battle is already lost.

Which as has already been pointed out, was a huge mistake. Look at Microsoft as the counter example, they are Apple’s true nemesis, not IBM. The comparison to Be is not as apt, since they were entering a market already dominated by MS. Apple had a chance when the market was still open.

Thanks in part to a large infusion of MSFT’s cash and commitment to build Office apps for Mac OSs

Regardless, the current condition of Apple is not really germane to the question, because Apple’s position in the market has already been determined. The OP asked how Apple failed to capture a larger market share. That Apple has today remedied some of the mistakes it made in the past barely matters.

43

I just wanted to note that, while Apple may get most of its cash from hardware sales, it is, in my opinion, primarily an operating system company that forces users to buy its hardware in order to get its OS. As racekarl noted, look at Microsoft, INSANELY profitable and with almost no hardware production. Trying to control several sectors of the market will quickly kill a specialized company, as 3Dfx discovered when it decided that since it was so good at making GPUs, it should make videocards. If Apple were to switch to standard PC components, it wouldn’t have to do hardware R&D anymore and could stick to simple assembly and OS R&D.

44

Frankly, elfkin hit the nail on the head.

The reason PCs are more popular than Macs is that there’s simply a larger selection of software. There’s a lot of reasons why that is, historically, but TODAY it’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

Take me. I don’t particularly care for one company or another; I have the money to buy any computer I want. My last purchase was a PC. My next will be a PC. Because that’s where the really cool software is. I simply do not have any reason to buy a Mac.

45

Thats where all the really cool software is?

most everything is out on Mac now… and whats not out I run on Virtual PC.

I have a PC, I am a PC support manager.
and my mac does everything that I want it to… and it does it better… I am sick of PC’s… but as long as Microsoft keeps builing crappy products… I will have a job… (must admit… XP is a step in the right direction)

and speaking of cool software…
iTunes and iMovie… are pretty damn good… not to mention… iCal, iSync, iChat, and Apples Mail…

46

“Apple is losing the megahertz race, but megahertz are pretty meaningless nowadays”

Well the number of Mhz is perhaps the biggest selling point of a computer, (people aren’t very technical, but they are very susceptible to marketing), so I would say it’s very meaningful

To most of these people 1000 feet appears bigger then 500 meters.

47

'cause they smell

48

First of all, Gates and Microsoft have little to do with hardware.

Second, as already pointed out the sheer number of PC clones has made PCs cheaper and more plentifull. Like any piece of technology, the PC is part of a system and you want your piece of technology to be compatible with as many other pieces as posible. So…long story short, PCs are more popular than Macs because they let PCs and their clones become more popular, which inspired more people to prodice compatible software and hardware, and so on.

It’s like HDTV, alternative fuel cars or any other bit of new technology. You need to build up a critical mass of users before its cst effective to build the supporting infrastructure and you need to build supporting infrastructure to gain a critical mass of users. Apple didn’t allow that to happen with Macs.

49

Well, no, it’s not like that at all. The process you described is a Catch-22.

In the case of HDTV and alternative fuel cars there was NO incentive to build the infrastructure because no one would buy the products that relied on it and wait till it got built. In both those cases and many similar ones, the government stepped in and mandated that the infrastructure be built. TV stations have been broadcasting HDTV signals because they are required to by law, not because there was a massive base of users with HDTVs clamoring for programming.

50

From an I.T. professional’s (who has worked with both, extensively) perspective:

Macs have vastly fewer software titles. Mac users also are very vocal in saying “when will this come out for the Mac?” thus increasing the non-Mac-user perception of this fact. As has been pointed out above, games were a large part of this phenomenon, so many young people learned the PC because they played games on it.

Contrary to popular opinion, I have always found the Mac OS less stable than Windows. It was positively less stable than Windows NT-based OSs. Before the era of OS X (which I have no experience with), “An Error of type 10 has occurred” was the bane of my Mac experience. It was very often the case that a Mac that broke stayed broken no matter what efforts were taken to repair it. Motherboards on Macs tended to fry themselves for no apparent reason. Additionally, a Mac with an application crash quite often equaled a Mac with an OS crash, accompanied by an unhelpful message (“An error of type 10 has occurred.” - thanks).

Macs were not good at allocating memory to applications. Users were annoyed that applications had to be manually adjusted in their RAM assignments. This wasn’t even an issue in Windows, which had Dynamic memory allocation from 3.1 on.

A critical opportunity was missed when the “blue” G3s came to market, as they were riddled with bad components and shoddy quality control. All of the first generation blue boxes (Yosemite?) had bad network cards that could not properly negotiate a 10/100 ethernet connection and had to be switched to 10mb by force at the network level. They were pretty, but an I.T. nightmare.

Despite rabid insistence that Macs were faster at various tasks, no one could ever seem to demonstrate this. Abstract Photoshop filter tests seemed to be the only thing Macs excelled at, which didn’t impress very many people. “How fast can it gaussian blur?” is not the first question from a typical user.

The vast majority of Mac users that I encountered were no more fluent in the ins and outs of their OS than were PC users, rendering the real benefits of the OS (cleaner file structures, no registration of components, better built-in tools for cleaning up the system, easier networking) fairly moot. Most didn’t even know how to use the Chooser.

With the exception of graphic designers, there were very few job types for which a Mac was any better than a PC. For most jobs, a PC was a better choice based on price, compatibility, and user base familiarity.

The two-(and three-)button mouse that became the Wintel standard was simply a much better and more versatile tool than the Mac’s one-button variety. Windows 95, though flawed, was the first GUI to really make some innovations over the Mac OS and, while it built on those innovations, the Mac OS remained very static. It seemed that Apple was more interested in making things look pretty than making them better. This trend continues today - I can’t begin to count the times Mac users have said that Windows XP copies the “look” of OS X, as if the look is the most important part of an operating system. Usability features in Windows were notably absent from the Mac OS, including resizing windows from any side, maximizing and minimizing windows, multiple instances of a single application, a menu for each window, long file names, et al.

Since Windows 95, Windows has handled memory management, virtual memory, crash recovery, and file management better than the Mac. In many cases, such as networking, the Mac has been somewhat easier to use, but no better (Appletalk was easy, but a lousy network protocol because it yammered all the time, filling up the network with Appletalk “here I am!” packets.)

That’s about all that comes to mind immediately.

51

Nice job, Scupper, I couldn’t have said it better myself. One thing I’d note is that I think PCs got a reputation for being unstable because users would buy the cheapest thing they could find, and then act surprised when it crashed often. Apple didn’t allow someone to cheap out and buy substandard hardware, thus users may have experienced fewer problems.

52

Scupper, most of your post would make sense, if this were still the days of the Classic Mac OS. It’s not. OS X eliminates virtually all of the problems (stability, memory allotment, the confusing Chooser, long file names, etc) that you mentioned.

And your usability features whine are totally opinion: I don’t want to resize windows from the sides, if anything I want to be able to grab them from any side to move them. Menubars in windows make the menus harder to hit, and waste screen real estate. The Mac’s zoom function makes a lot more sense than the Windows maximize function.

And as for “file management,” take a look inside the Applications Folder on your WIndows computer, or Programs folder, I threw my Dell out a window when I got my two Macs, its just a bad memory now, so I don’t recall what it was named. And then look in the /Applications folder on a Mac OS X system, and tell me which makes more sense to a human eye.

53

Hmm Sdrawkcab I think you are missing scuppers point re: file management. I don’t think he’s talking about how they appear on screen, but on how they are actually stored on disk.

Also, for Mac users to crow about how OS X solves all the previous Mac OS’s problems as if the Apple guys are geniuses is laugable to me. OSX is basically just a shell on Unix, and is more of a “borrowed” OS than Windows ever was.

54

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Scupper *
**From an I.T. professional’s (who has worked with both, extensively) perspective:

Virtual PC and the point is mute.

If you are going to compare errors from OS8.x then compare it to win95 or 98… both of which sucked…

fixed in OSX… you are right it was not an issue in windows to ajust memory settings… instead you would get the “out of resources error”

they were actually just pointing out that Mhz is not always the telling factor on speed.

probably true, but the point was that they didn’t have to know any of that crap… they wanted a computer that works and they had one…

so buy a mouse with more buttons and progrem them for what you want them to do…

yeah I should hope so… they had 11 years… mac did it in 84…

try OSX…

55

OSX does solve most normal problem with any previous OS…

OSX is an apple based GUI running on Unix because it is stable…
apple openly admits that…

Windows steals the LOOK of the OS outright…

56

No it solves the problems of the MAC OS

Those of us who have been using Unix or NT based operating systems never had those problems in the first place…

57

wow, you are cool… you use unix, and NT… wow…

please… no normal user wants to use that at home… ass…

come on…

and you are right… NT NEVER CRASHES…:confused:

yeah right… I had to reinstall a service pack 2 weeks ago because everyone lost the access to the internet…

ask me how many times I had to do that at my previous job supporting a mac network???

58

Sdrawkab:

I won’t characterize any of your comments as whines, please do me the same courtesy.

And, as I stated in my post, I don’t use OSX, don’t know it, and am not qualified to comment on it. I wasn’t explaining why Windows is better, I was explaining why it was better during my experience with both platforms at the same time in an attempt to explain why Windows gained a larger user base.

In my post, I specifically cited elements of the Mac OS that I thought were superior to Windows, maybe you should go back and read it again.

My usability features comments are not “opinion,” they are fact. Just because you don’t want a feature doesn’t mean that others don’t. The fact of the matter is that the particular facet of the OS that you’re challenging me on there is more versatile in Windows. Whether you prefer it or not is not the issue.

File management, in the sense I intended it, has nothing to do with applications. I should have said “document management,” and for that I take your correction. The Mac, without a doubt, has always had better file placement on the application side. Where it fails is in the vagueries of file typing. Some folks like Windows’ file extensions (.EXE, .DOC), some don’t. But the fact is that when you’re looking through a lot of files, it’s useful to have a good way of sorting them.

Just like we’re no longer in the Classic Mac era, we’re also no longer in the Windows 3.1 era. Evolution of operating systems has happened, yes, but the user bases have remained relatively constant. This isn’t because of the Mac’s current features (which may well be better than Windows, I have no idea), it’s because of the history established in the Classic Mac period. In my experience (which, with Macs, mainly ended in 1999), Windows was just better, and, more importantly, was perceived as such by average users.

merge:

Saying Virtual PC makes the point moot is simply not true. Try playing Morrowind on Virtual PC sometime. Virtual PC also isn’t free, nor is it bug-free, in my experience.

I was comparing OS 7.5 - 9.0 to windows 95, 98 and NT. On the balance, the Mac OS was less stable. Period.

I absolutely agree with you that Mhz is not an accurate indicator of speed or processor power. My comment was that Mac benchmarks simply didn’t move average users. Almost every benchmark I’ve ever seen comparing the two compares how fast they can do certain tasks in Photoshop. Photoshop costs $750. How many home users do you think even know what the hell they’re talking about?

I think you missed my point about user fluency. I said that because the Mac users were no more fluent than PC users, they couldn’t take advantage of the things that made the OS great.

Suggesting that I buy a non-standard mouse and program it to do things for me in the Mac OS is a bit disingenuous when you just said people didn’t have to know how to use the Mac well to use it. Find an average user who can program a 3-button mouse to do everything it does in Windows on a Mac and I’ll be extremely surprised.

Again, I’m not commenting at all on OSX. I’m explaining the history of MY experience with the Mac, as a user and as a technician, vs. MY experience with Windows in the same capacity. I don’t know OSX and have never used it. It could be the God of all OSs and I wouldn’t know it. But the reasons I cited in my post are not exaggerations, they are an accurate representation of my experience and the experience of just about every tech I know.

59

Merge, you are the reason why people were wary about posting to this thread.

60

And how is the way Windows stores files on disks superior to the Mac OS X way? I find navigating the user folder in Mac OS X far more logical than the mess of files and directories one has to sort through on Windows.

Well, Windows NT was just a revision of OS/2, which was just a redo of VMS, which was not a Microsoft product, so it’s not exactly “original” either.

And in any case, the most important part of the OS, the user interface, is not borrowed from Unix, its a combination of (arguably) the two best graphical interfaces to ever grace computer screens, Mac OS and NeXTStep.

Aqua is more than just a window manager, its a totally separate operating environment. Yes, it has underlying Unix technologies, but its not just a GUI poured over Unix, like much of KDE or Gnome.