Deja vu on another Apple migration?

The consensus since Apple announced their migration to Intel hardware has been that this is going to be a very positive move for Apple.  I've been one of the people who has bought into this view of the future.  Yet now I'm beginning to have my doubts.  When you look back on past Apple migrations, mostly it's been very positive for the people that moved forward with the company.  They may have ended up with peripherals or software that didn't work, but in general they've ended up more productive with faster and better hardware and software.

Yet almost every migration previously has cost Apple customers.  This one was not only supposed to keep current customers but also to bring more new customers to Apple.

I'm starting to wonder why this one should be any different than the previous ones?   At some point, my dual G5 will likely join my Blue & White G3 and my 8600 in the closet by my Apple IIe. Will I be better off with another Dell or another Apple?  Some of this is the just the nature of technology, but there are some questions that I've started to ask myself.

I really believe that OS X is a superior OS if you look at it from a productivity and security standpoint.  However, I have come to realize that there are plenty of people who are very productive in the Windows XP world and their moving to the OS X world would not necessarily make them immediately or ever more productive.  The things about OS X that I love so much apparently don't mean very much to them because I have yet to hear any of my colleagues in the heavily Windows XP world where I work comment on how great my OS X user interface looks.  These are all very computer literate people and some who are talented enough to agree with my son who says the only thing you really need to be productive is VI.

Fortunately for software companies I need productivity applications, they have provided them to me on the current versions of Mac hardware and software.  Microsoft Office, Dreamweaver, Filemaker, and even Photoshop are important to me along with what has become my mission critical application, email.  Since e-mail is my go to application, the good news is that I work at a company Webmail.us which takes email and email hosting seriously since it is our only business. In that light we test to make certain that what we develop works on Macs running Safair and Firefox.

I don't care a lot about iTunes or my iPod whereas many of my younger Windows XP using colleagues have iPods.  When Apple first rolled out its Macintosh Intel hardware there was a little flurry of talk among some who said they would be interested in a Mac if it ran XP.  When it became clear that XP on these new Macs was unlikely to happen, the talk died down to just a couple who seem to have thought about buying a Mac in the past but didn't.

I don't think this lack of interest in switching just relates to the Mac because I've also been surprised by the lack of interest among these very same savvy users in Linux as a desktop.  When they find out that I have also used Linux, the comment always comes down to "too much stuff in the Linux desktop breaks with updates on a regular basis."  While Linux is the heart of our back end, almost everyone uses XP on the desktop. I think the general opinion is, "why bother" with Linux when XP is good enough?

I have yet to hear anyone complain about Microsoft XP. It is just accepted as a fact of life and a tool to get your job done, not something to get religious about like Mac OS X. More specifically I haven't heard anyone wish for XP to look more like OS X.  So now I'm questioning my first assumption that moving to Intel hardware is going bring Apple more users.  First off Apple certainly  seems intent on continuing to extract a high premium for its products.  That brings me to another point.

I'm amazed that there is still hostility to Apple hardware and software.  Now I'm not fond of Steve Jobs and think Apple will never again rank in the top one hundred places to work, but I do find that the hardware and software (with a few exceptions like iWeb and Pages) is very good.  I've run into a couple of people that have made it clear from their attitudes that they believe using Apple stuff is a complete mistake and that Apple would have disappeared without the iPod.

Now the iPod has made a huge difference in the fortunes of Apple, but in its own small and uncoordinated way Apple was growing its hardware installed base even before the iPod came along.  While the measure of success that Apple was achieving didn't really make a dent in Windows market share, Apple was a very profitable computer company well before the iPod. In the commodity computer business that an accomplishment.  Of course maybe I'm just one of those folks who foolishly feels that only card carrying Mac users have paid enough for the privilege of criticizing Apple.

So there is still resentment of Apple, and Apple by maintaining high prices for its new systems is reinforcing some stereotypes from the past.  Winning over the Wintel users to the Mactel world isn't going to be very simple unless Microsoft slips very badly with Vista.

If the movement to Intel isn't going to bring new users in droves what about the old users?  There are conflicting reports out there down, and unfortunately Apple has resumed its practice of shooting itself in the foot on availability. So It's hard to tell how the new sales are going.  I've only talked to one user. Just this week got an Intel iMac.  The comment was, "It's pretty zippy."  However, knowing the person who made the comment well, leads me to believe that it may not have blown him away.  There are already questions about Apple's benchmarks so these may be less than impressive generation one products.  The reality is that Apple choose to harvest as much money as possible with this shipment of products and once again didn't go for the gold ring of increased market share.

Now there might have been lots of reason why this was done, especially since so few applications are now native. Perhaps the price was set so that only Mac users who are used to the pain of an Apple migration will help the company with the migration. All this just brings me back to the memories of the original PowerPC migration which everyone now remembers as a flawless one, but which in reality cost Apple many users who just got tired of waiting for their favorite applications or finally said they had seen enough in one lifetime of the flaming hoops that Apple requires its users to jump through on a regular basis.

Right now this looks like the same old Apple to me.  Developers weren't in the loop enough to be really sure that the hardware was going to ship at MacWorld so little native software is available. Some companies are saying that you'll have to buy new versions of software to get MacIntel compatibility.  How many times to do you go through transitions like this with Apple until you get to the point of saying enough already.  Just maybe when you go though pain it's easier when you're able to get some minor consolation from everyone else on your street having to endure the same pain instead of being one of Steve's chosen few people who through their own free will subject themselves to the pain, aggravation, and price premium of dealing with Apple to have benefits that most people can't appreciate.

I finally broke down and brought my Dell laptop to work this week.  It was easier to hook up to the Dell 1600N printer that way, and it solved the problems I was having with MS Word on the Mac.  I actually did figure out the Word problems last night.  Somehow my Word preferences got reset and nothing fixed them until I figured out how to manually reset them.

I'll be like many of you, who will likely keep buying Macs until they stop selling them, but I'm no longer sure that this migration is going to be the big deal that I once thought it was going to be either for current Mac users or Windows users whose interest in Mac OS X advantages I believe that I grossly over-estimated.

We'll have to watch and see if my guess of an average of 1.5M Macs per quarter for FY06 is still possible.

Comments

[blue][erring]

you've sort of described why i think your conclusion is off base. for one, you say that there are and have been an unusual number of people that ask "can it run XP?". if it could, natively, easily, you would expect these people to jump up and say, "i might get one". but of course, OS X on intel cannot 'run xp'. but the point is, a lot of people would be interested if apple could run the current Windows OS.
then you say, the only way that apple will benefit from people switching from windows, is if they totally blow vista... the thing is, at that time, vista will be "the" windows OS, and the reason why mac OS X on intel CANT run XP is because it CAN run vista. so at the time vista ships, apple will be able to launch and run XP. if windows messes it all up, then people will switch to mac i think you're trying to say, but the simple fact is, that if Mac OS X can run the current windows OS on the box, then apple's going to switch a fat chunk of windows users, period. the only question is how many more can apple get if microsoft f's it up badly.

all those software cognizant experienced users know that a mac rocks and if it comes with the current flavor of windows, then you get the mac OS free, and isn't that the only way to compete with a monopoly OS? free?

-][

[ocracokewaves]

However, timing is everything. The market is moving and Apple window of opptunity is short. Perhaps Apple figured MS might actually have Vista out by now, but I doubt that.

The only other problem is that being interested and buying are two different things especially if Apple continues to maintain a huge price premium.

[Steven Luce]

Who gives a rip about whether or not a vast number of Windows users jump ship to the new Intel Macs or even Linux? Apple is still profitable...more so than any PC hardware company, and its marketshare has not only stabalized since Jobs return, but is even gaining a few new users on the way. As long as Apple's quarterly revenues are fairly stable there will be new Macs, and I will continue to outperform my nitwit Windows-using colleagues. And frankly, I couldn't care less if they see the light. All of the Adobe apps perform better on a Mac than they do on a PC. Keynote kicks the crap out of Power Point. Garage Band, Motion, Final Cut Pro, Shake, and DVD Studio Pro are pretty much unequalled on the PC side of things (even Adobe's video suite and Combustion are sloppy seconds). And I have yet to meet a musician who would pass up Logic Pro for anything on a PC. So...who cares if Windows users are happy in their little virus-infested, word-processing, game-playing world. Godbless their ignorant little hearts. Its their loss, not mine. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to designing my wedding invitations in InDesign and editing my first feature film in FCP.

And I still disgaree with you on Pages. (It must be the old graphic designer in me.)

[John C. Randolph]

Microsoft has committed to shipping Virtual PC on the intel macs, so anyone who needs to run Windows apps can do so in the near future. In fact, running in an emulated machine like VPC or VMWare allows is the only safe way to run Windows. Your virtual machines will still get infected, but you can revert to previous images when they do.

-jcr

[Damian]

I'm not convinced by this:

"I really believe that OS X is a superior OS if you look at it from a productivity and security standpoint."

Now, people will say that the current relative safety of OS X is purely down to market share. And the response has often been made that rather it is secure because of its Unix foundations and security policies.

I used to be taken in by this myself. But you have to ask yourself just how familiar with all the different Unixes are most of the people making this statement? And while OS X has its attractions on the desktop, I bet you wouldn't get many people to swap a Linux or Free BSD server for a Mac machine.

As for Unix/Windows comparisons, even some *nix users will say that Windows can be secure if set up correctly:

http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/security/uw.html

OK, there's a lot of dodgy legacy code in windows (c.f. the .wmf stupidity), but the main security problem on Windows is that most users run as administrative users all the time. Avoid doing that, and avoid using programs (such as the egregious Norton Internet Security) that won't run properly on limited user accounts, and you should be all right:

http://nonadmin.editme.com/

And OS X is not without its security problems - take, for example, the 13-flaw patch:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/

Some talk gliby about OS X's Unix base (although what should one make of a "Unix" whose filesystem isn't POSIX-compliant?) but it's not as if it is on a par with Open BSD, which can boast "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!":

http://www.openbsd.org/

Most damningly, Suresec have pointed to Apple's failure to properly audit its code:

"But the bottom line, say Suresec, is that Apple are not yet professional enough to audit their code - something even Microsoft do today. Many of the flaws found are the kind other Unix distros isolated and fixed years ago."

http://www.rixstep.com/1/20060126,00.shtml

In fact, Suresec actually said *ten to fifteen* years ago. That's bad.

When security expert Bill Cheswick left the Windows world he didn't leave it for the Mac but for Free BSD:

http://www.cheswick.com/ches/talks/index.html

I think that if Apple really does get some market share the bad guys will look for, and find, numerous vulnerabilities in OS X and, in that event, Linux or Free BSD are going to look like the better non-Microsoft option on the desktop. Cheaper, too.

Moreover, on those platforms, it will also be possible to exchange files with Windows users without a load of junk files hitching a ride. Apple, regrettably, stuffed a lot of the old Mac OS into their version of "Unix" and the result is that cross-platform compatibility is not as good as it should be. Heck, they can't even decide whether their stupid HFS/HFS+/HSFX filesystem should be case-sensitive or not:

http://aplawrence.com/MacOSX/case_sensitivity.html