From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>
Date: November 22, 2006 2:19:00 PM MST
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: new firewire Italian camera
Jim;
On 22-Nov-06, at 1:28 PM, Jim Love wrote:
I'm also a die-hard Mac user. If it comes down to using Windows for anything, I'd rather
just not do it at all. For me it's Mac OS or nothing. We've been hearing prophecies of
Apple's doom for 20 years, always in reference to marketshare numbers.
Never said anything about Apple's doom. Apple is evolving and moving from a computer company to a consumer electronics company. At some point and time they have to make up their minds what they want to do and frankly, their growth areas are not in computers - it's in cell phones and multimedia devices.
And what I'm just pointing out that Apple's PC market share is basically stagnant. Without growth, it makes it very difficult to build Mac only products because there is no one to sell to. For example, if I had 10,000 sales of a product on windows, you can basically say that I will sell 200 to 300 units on the Mac and that is how you start working out the economics of what your going to charge for a product.
There have been
ups and downs, but Mac OS lives on and Mac development is still thriving.
If you talk to other developers, you would not be saying "thriving" at all. I know of several Scientific companies that are not going to be offering Mac products in the future, there going to tell you to either buy parallels or buy a windows with Boot camp to run their product.
And Apple is having a tough time convincing developers to write Mac software. With Parallel and Boot camp available now and no need to emulate x86, I can simply write for Windows and not have to worry about learning Cocoa or other API's.
Yes, Apple is
using Intel chips, who cares? I'll never run Windows on my Mac, so don't be so quick to
assume anyone is switching to Windows...
They aren't totally switching to windows, their running both Windows and OS X. The problem is that niche products (which are basically anything that isn't Music, Video, Graphic Arts related) support is going to go away. It makes ZERO economic sense to spend $50,000 to $100,000 to sell 200 units of a product on the Mac when they can buy Parallel and run it under Windows.
it's more likely that people will switch to Mac.
I know of quite a few people who bought Apple x86 MacBooks, wiped OSX off and are running Windows or Linux on them. Thy bought them because of the price of the hardware, not the OS. Apple cut a deal with Intel (who has been losing market share to AMD) and is getting their chips considerably cheaper and sooner than others are because of the implied PR.
Watch that marketshare percentage grow!
I've been watching since the mid 1980's as things continue to slide and I'm getting real tired of this "wait and it will come" stuff - it simply isn't happening. The only way to grow my user base is to switch to windows development - something I'm not keen on and not happy about - but what else are we going to do.
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.
Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5
1-(403)-229-9456
www.outcastsoft.com