Apple leads the pack once again

I think this proves my theory that Vista is the best thing to happen to Apple in awhile.

 

I'd never go back to Bill. However, I don't like finger-tapping the touchpad. I have a laptop whose default configuration was that if you tapped the pad it counted as a mouse click. Problem was, in the course of moving my finger around the pad, if I inadvertently touched the pad wrong, it registered a mouse click when I didn't want it to. That was humongously frustrating!!! I finally found the way to turn that off. I would not buy a laptop that did not have a pair of physical "mouse" buttons and a way to shut off pad tapping. It may be a great feature for some, but it's bad if it's the only way to register a click.

 

I have to try the touchpad before I make up my mind. It is one of those things you have to use a few days before reaching a conclusion. Apparently it does not work like previous attempts at trackpad tapping.

And as an iPhone user I look forward to the gestures.

 

Yawn.

 

The drawn vs welded Al case is a neat idea. You mentioned the change in the graphics, I found this article, that perhaps explains it. I completely agree with Daniel regarding the touchpad, the tap to click is a PITA to say the least.

 

At one spot they seem to be pressing the entire pad, but at another point they seem to just tap the center of the pad lightly. Hard to tell really.

My biggest concern, though, is weight. I don't take my laptop around town. I just need a travel computer. A full-function Mac would be much nicer than my Nokia N800. But they'd have to get down awfully darn close to a pound before it would justify the switch for me. Three pounds is too much when I'm already carrying in my backpack all the stuff that I want to have when my bags fail to arrive with me. And that happens a lot.

 

I'm still trying to figure out how they are claiming 17.6% market share. IDC data is showing 9.1% market share (U.S.).

Or, looking at it another way, they shipped 1.65 million Macs over the past 3 months. Microsoft sells more Vista licenses than that in 3 days.

 

I enjoy the new MacBook Pros, I think I might buy one to replace my Powerbook G4. I went by an apple store yesterday, but unfortunately they didn't have any to play with.

 

I will wager that the vast majority of Vista sales are new, not upgrades. I doesn't make sense for most people to upgrade an old, slow machine to Vista for a couple hundred bucks when you can buy a new, faster machine with Vista pre-installed for a few hundred more.

In fact, I'd be surprised if anything less than 80% of Vista sales are "new". So at 20 million licenses per month, then 16 million would be "new". That makes roughly 530,000 "new" Vista sales per day. So over 3 days, that's 1.6 million "new" Vista sales. Again, that's about the same number of new Macs shipped in the last 3 months.

 

A while ago, people were purchasing new PCs with Vista and a free XP "downgrade". I always wondered if those counted as sales of Vista, XP, or both.

BJJB

 

Either way, it still counts on Microsoft's bottom line.

 

If you retain a license for both, it definitely counts as both. Of course, MS benefits from people who need their home machine to be compatible with their office, and people who just don't know anything about computers, and want to have what everyone else has. Bill Gates's genius was in convincing the entire world to buy the worst OS on the market.

 

Steve Jobs genius was in creating a cult of uncritical fanboys who continually pay large premiums for every idea that spews forth from appledom, who fork over good money year after year for unnecessary OS upgrades and who upgrade their Asus - er Apple - PCs over things like one piece aluminum cases and "gesturable" touchpads. True genius!

 

Actually Daniel, I've been using Vista for nearly a year now and I'm quite happy with it. It has never crashed on me at all, is quite responsive. I only had one software application that didn't work with Vista (Broderbund's Printshop, an older version though), and they had a free patch that made it work just fine. There was a lot of talk about driver issues, but my experience is it's far better than previous versions from that aspect. The one thing IMO that bothers a lot of Vista newcomers is the fact that they intentionally made it difficult to use the administrator account for your normal environment (this is the same as root in UNIX/Linux, not sure what it's called in Mac OS). Much to Apple's credit, they had this policy much earlier on.
But as I've said in several other threads, it comes down to personal preferences and needs.

 

I have my reservations, too. I think electrostatic touchpads in general are the devil. I'm always accidentally scraping them or clicking where I meant to just move the mouse.

Apple does a great job with human interfaces, though, so maybe they got it right. I'm not going to pass judgement till I try it.

I work with Microsoft employees, I spoke at Microsoft events, and I don't own a Mac. I can say objectively that Vista has been a pain for me. Many programs didn't work with Vista for awhile (including Norton Antivirus, iTunes and even Microsoft SQL Server and Visual Studio 2005), the driver support was very poor and still is to some degree (I had a wireless N adapter that blue-screened my computer all the time and a WiFi printer that broke my internet connection every few minutes), you're constantly nagged by dialogs every time you want to run a program by default and it really doesn't add much to the user experience, in my opinion.

They tried to do a little bit of a 3D interface like Apple has, but it's it lacks Leopord's style and practicality most of the time and the cool features like instant search don't really present that much of a compelling reason to switch.

I mean, Vista is okay, but I really can see why it's unpopular. The driver and program support aren't perfect and it's not that much better than XP.

My next laptop may be a Mac. I'm really impressed with the innovation coming out of Apple and as a developer, I think there may be a growing job market for making programs on the platform.