'It's the brand, Stupid'

Discussions General
1

Why Apple finds it difficult to move out of its niche

“…my daughter excitedly wants to show me her school’s new website. I fire up my favored browser, which happens to be the Open Source Mozilla Firefox, and she says, “Why aren’t you using the ‘real’ Internet?” Now the young lady in question is not stupid; she has a PC in her bedroom, access to an Apple iMac, and she has watched her daddy using PCs all her life, but because Microsoft has become the brand “standard” for software in schools, both at primary and now secondary level, she now has a subconscious concept that the “real” Internet is accessed through Microsoft Internet Explorer…”

“…Now Apple Inc. is currently putting significant effort into gaining major penetration of the education market here in the UK, seeing it as obvious territory for its products. It has good case studies and reference sites, which testify to lower set-up and maintenance costs for deployments of Macs in schools. It provides training for teachers, and even has a section of its website dedicated to education…”

“…Unfortunately, Apple is still perceived from its brand as “specialist IT” and “consumerist.” with its computers being favored by the media industry, and its impressive recent fortunes being delivered on the back of iPods and iTunes. This does not just apply in the education market but also in mainstream business, where I have often been told by Butler Group subscribers that they would not consider the 1u rack-mounted Xserve as a replacement for their Dell or IBM server, because Apple “are best at iPods and design” and "are not a real computing company.” Yes, it can be argued that Microsoft does well in both the business and consumer markets, but again, people buy an Xbox, not a Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft software including Media Center is not deployed on Microsoft-branded hardware…"

http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers … t.php?2589

2

Wrong perceptions.

Incidentally, I also see a lot of people hitting & beating the bytes out of the poor innocent monitor because Windows screwed up.

3

not just pri and sec, but colleges and universities to…we have a PC:MAC ratio of about 100:1…(estimate)

4

and that’s also because of its exclusiveness and the pricing which makes it somewhat unfavourable to be acquired

i used PC most of the time, but I use Macs (G4 and G5) at campus lab (video editing works) and I could say that MAcs aren’t problem-proof either so believing Mac as a very stable platform is just a hype.

I read somewhere that the next gen (or the new, coming) Mac is going to be Windows compatible.

p/s: Apple even use Intel’s Core 2 Duo now.

5

Uh, newsflash - they are already Windows compatible. No computer is problem proof, give or take maintenance and know-hows, but at least they are light years ahead compared to problems you get in Windows.

6

Poor Apple.

Apple had their chance and they stuffed it up big time. They were the pioneer and market leader in the early 80s at a time when Microsoft was unheard of. But they were too arrogant to grant licensing rights. That was when microsoft jumped in. I don’t think they will ever bounce back from that colossal marketing blunder. It is a mistake worth a billion nightmares!!

7

But now the behemoth constantly shoots themselves in the foot.

8

[quote=“ian”]Uh, newsflash - they are already Windows compatible. No computer is problem proof, give or take maintenance and know-hows, but at least they are light years ahead compared to problems you get in Windows.[/quote]We don’t hear about Mac virus, that’s for sure.

Besides getting spyware, personally I rarely get problem with Windows. I think it depends on how people use their PCs. If they keep installing this and that without precaution, for sure they can easily get problem with their PC, or software corruption. We don’t hear about Mac gettting OS corruption because the percentage of people using them is very small, and those who use them are mostly people who knows more than just opening Windows and play solitaire (sarcasm).

9

[quote=“soulfly”]We don’t hear about Mac virus, that’s for sure.

Besides getting spyware, personally I rarely get problem with Windows. I think it depends on how people use their PCs. If they keep installing this and that without precaution, for sure they can easily get problem with their PC, or software corruption. We don’t hear about Mac gettting OS corruption because the percentage of people using them is very small, and those who use them are mostly people who knows more than just opening Windows and play solitaire (sarcasm).[/quote]

Unfortunately, the users are not protected well enough, and most average users still don’t understand about security, malware. Even those that do understand to some degree will still easily get into hotsoup at some point because malware are so well engineered now it’s easy to get average users to activate them. I know this as I have clients constantly getting downtime from such problems.

Not to mention amount of malware incubator software drifting about the hacker community on the Internet that is updated more regularly or even ahead of your typical anti-virus software.

Most Mac users are well versed in UNIX-based operating systems, due to the fact that you can just use it just as you would use any UNIX machine right out of the box.

The deal about having less problems due to smaller market share and ‘less software’ is a myth. The operating system they used before OS X (mac os 8, 9) had much more viruses and is much more unstable, and at the time the market share was even smaller. Explain that.

OS X is much more secure on the ground up, it being based on BSD, and any intervention for root access to the system requires user intervention. This is much better than letting loose malware that keeps changing the internals of the operating system without the user’s knowledge (until it’s too late).

A study of any UNIX system will show that any UNIX-based machine is much more secure, robust and better at handling networking than Windows, which goes against tried and true OS design standards anyway.

Just some of the advantages of Mac in my opinion:

  • I have yet to ‘reformat’ the system, having had the computers for more than 2 years now. And I install tons of stuff in it, most of it downloaded. Haphazardly too.

  • No mucking with DLLs.

  • No need to spend extra on anti-viral. When the time comes, maybe but my chances are by far lower.

  • No BIOS, it uses EFI, and settings normally found in BIOS on PC equivalents are found in the control panel on OS X. Meaning less restarts. I personally have had my machines up for past 3 months, and I only restart them because I want to. (These machines are the same I play World of Warcraft on sometimes.)

  • No need extra firewall. It comes built in, and you can stealth all ports. I guess Windows now has this too.

  • High price? You get better equipment that will stick for a while. Try finding a 10/100/1000 ethernet port (amongst others) in a RM2K notebook?

  • The software icon is the program. Move the software (icon) and place it anywhere and run it, and it will still work. For most programs, one icon = one software. No mess with installations and uninstallations. Just either put the icon anywhere you want it to be, or trash it if you don’t want it. Main point being it won’t ruin the program or muck up the OS by moving it about.

  • Root access is disabled by default, so nobody - even the administrator - can screw up the internals of the OS without some UNIX know how.

  • You can use UNIX commands.

  • Windows compatible, if you want to. (But who would want to?)

  • Photoshop runs on Mac, which is basically all I need.

  • Most of the peripherials work with it anyway, cameras, usb thumbdrives, phones, etc.

  • No stupid Microsoft license if you’re running a business.

I guess it is definitely not for everyone (gamers come to mind - and I also love playing games on the PC) but it is a worthwhile consideration if a person is willing to change and keep an open mind as there are far less serious problems affecting the platform and has been pretty consistent with ‘just working’.

A nice source of reference would be here.