PCs are now fucked in the moneyed mass market. The 'PC' brand is sunk - PC is to computer what Blackberry is to phone - you'll get one from your company, but you covet an iPhone/Macbook. This is thanks to:<p>a) The sub-par cheap plastic laptops/netbooks that have been thrown out for the last three years at $300. They were barely usable at first, and now the keys have fallen off the keyboard and the speakers don't work. And that advert to renew some antivirus keeps popping up. And the computer whizzkid who used to fix it says he doesn't know much about PCs now - he's moved to an Apple Mac.<p>b) Windows and IE. People are noticing that Facebook runs like crap in IE. And that their harddrive still needs formatting every year or the computer runs like a bag of shit. What's that Microsoft? Windows 8 has all this fixed. It doesn't matter - there are still millions of computers out there running Vista and Win 7, taking 60 seconds to boot up (standby mode never works - fuck knows why). Everytime I sit in front of one and right click-Exit all that shit down at the bottom right I curse you.<p>c) The death of desktop software.<p>-<p>This is one of the two reasons I'm bullish on Apple (the other is that I want to see them move into the living room.)<p>Now PCs and Linux - that's more like it but there's no profit in it.
It's kind of sad that Apple has virtually no competition for its MacBook Pro and MacBook Air in terms of build quality (last time I checked, I'd be happy to be proved wrong). Nowadays, I barely care about "hard" specs (CPU, memory, etc.) when shopping for a laptop, what I really care about is: low heating, low weight, thinness, long battery life and strong build quality. Although I'd rather use Linux than OS X, it's hard to find a laptop of comparable quality to the MacBooks for the requirements I mentioned (of course, it isn't to hard to find if what you are interested in is raw speed and performance).
Easy to understand why this is happening. When Vista launched you could walk into a store and buy it on a PC that could barely run it. Mostly due to lack of RAM and bloat ware. Sure it was cheap but not a good value. A $350 borderline unusable computer is no bargain. I think people are starting I catch onto this. Things are better now in the PC market bur if you got burnt in the last few years the take away lesson is cheap isn't always better. If you only plan to replace your computer every 3-4 years $1000-$1500 isn't a huge investment to make.
Could that graph possibly be more misleading? Plotting the ratio of a number to one much smaller exaggerates small changes so you miss the big picture: PC sales dwarf Mac sales.<p>A better graph: two lines, one showing PC sales each year and the other showing Mac sales. It would show that Mac sales are less, and it would also show how much the market has grown since 1984. Even better: the number of machines of each type currently in use.
Better headline: Apple's share in the PC market increases.<p>Wikipedia says:<p>> The Macintosh ( /ˈmækɨntɒʃ/ mak-in-tosh),[1] or Mac, is a series of personal computers (PCs) designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc.<p>And some random quote from a comment here:<p>> the computer whizzkid who used to fix it says he doesn't know much about PCs now - he's moved to an Apple Mac.<p>You mean he doesn't know about windows since the Apple Mac is a PC too.
Would love to see that graph against the trend from desktops to laptops. It definitely seems like people when buying their first Mac are doing so in a laptop form factor usually the Air.
I love this comment: "The working class folks who buy PC's are getting whacked financally, while rich people who buy Macs are making off like bandits."