Hi Dave,
Ref < I'll take a 500MHz G4 Mac any day over a 1.x GHz Wintel machine. It just gets the job done faster with far less effort. And by the way, Mac OS X is wonderful. I'll go out on a limb and predict that Apple will double their market share in less than 12 months, making them the single largest producer of personal computers (in terms of market share). >
Can you describe in a few statements how the Mac is superior to today's Wintel platform. What kind of applications can only be implemented on a Mac ?
Unless the superiority of the Mac, or its application software, is obvious to non-Mac users, it in extremely unlikely that your prediction will hold. Prior to Windows 3.0, the scenario you described was probable, but my perception is that to an average user, todays Mac and Wintel platforms are equivalent.
The larger installed base means that new software is developed first for Wintel, and more software is available for Wintel. The larger volumes and cutthroat margins ensures that the Wintel platform stays cheaper, and this further ensures that the Wintel platform becomes more pervasive.
I understand that the Mac faithful will never abandon their Macs. But today I think it will take a major paradigm change or a gross fumble by Wintel, for Apple to regain the high ground of the 80's.
IMHO it makes a lot of sense for Apple to port its environment to the x86 platform. This platform is a lot cheaper due to the economy of scale, and development cost of the PPC is a big drain on Motorola. |
