Return of the Mac
March 29, 2005 @ 04:19 AMThis guy gets it. Some excerpts:
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know? ... So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?
Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world. ... The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. And yet Apple’s overall market share is still small.
Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary.
... YES. That’s what I’ve been SAYING. :)
There are a couple reasons for the reverse bell curve trend. 1) The “middle” is driven in large part by businesses, of which Apple has yet to penetrate. (This will change over the next 5 years or so). 2) The second largest driver of the middle market are PC hobbyists. These are the people that build cheap PCs for all their friends and family, and have no interest in switching to a platform that would instantly make them irrelevant. (This I don’t see changing that soon, but I don’t see them being as big of a factor in time.)