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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Grim Macintosh Market Share Forebodes Crisis

PC Magazine:

The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbers—not from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity. As of December 2004, the Mac share as measured by online activity is 2.7 percent (Linux is 3.1), with all the rest going to various flavors of Windows. I'm now convinced that this stems mostly from Apple's inability to make the Mac a commodity computer by pricing it to compete with PCs made inexpensively in China and selling with razor-thin margins.

The company figures it has certain market niches locked down. This includes computer users in advertising agencies, news bureaus, and various professional organizations as well as creative artists and writers. I also count an odd, die-hard faction of true believers, but these people are inconsequential except in online forums, where they make a fuss whenever anyone discusses the Mac. They probably hurt the Mac community more than anyone by creating an unfair crackpot image that gets associated with the machine.

CEO Steve Jobs' star persona makes the situation worse. His attention to the Apple flagship has been eroded by the success of Pixar, and more recently, by the iPod and iTunes initiatives. None of these has anything to do with the Macintosh. Keeping it on track is a full-time task—Jobs cannot be in the computer business, the movie business, and the music business and make them all successful. You see the results. Market share for the Mac is crap.

John Dvorak is a smart and experienced guy, so I know he's bunkered down right now with his asbestos suit, just waiting for the flames to start. Sadly, of course, he's right, which makes this all the more painful.

But what's really amazing is the way he cuts right to the heart of the matter. Check out this passage, which I'll relate to a very recent PC-buying experience:

The ease-of-use and simplicity of the [Mac] platform is killing it, because people cannot perceive that simplicity is ever worth MORE than complexity. Simpler should be cheaper ... Apple is the easy-to-use, less complex platform. Thus it should be cheaper, not more expensive.

And yet.

Just today, I purchased a laptop computer. I don't usually buy laptops, since I get to review so many of them, but the truth is I'm tired of switching from machine to machine and I want something small and light I can travel with.

Believe it or not, I had hoped that the Apple PowerBook G4 12-inch I bought 6 months ago would be it. However, the PowerBook has proven to be woefully inadequate for the task. Rather than bash the expensive and frail little piece of crap, however, let me explain why the machine I got--a recently-discontinued HP Pavillion dv1010us--is so much better. And no, I'm not talking about any Windows vs. Mac OS X baloney.

First, the Pavillion cost me just $899 after rebates ($1099 before), compared to almost $2000 for the PowerBook. It features a fairly low-end 1.4 GHz Celeron-M processor, 512 MB of RAM, a 60 GB hard drive, 802.11g wireless, and a DVD writer, much of which is vaguely comparable to the Mac. (My Powerbook has a 1.33 GHz G4, 256 MB of RAM upgraded to 768 MB.) It has an integrated 6-in-1 memory card reader, compatible with SD, Memory Stick, and other memory cards, which the Mac lacks. It has incredible (for a laptop) Harmon Kardon speakers, which blow away the sad little tins on the Mac. It includes QuickPlay, a cool BIOS/hidden Linux partition solution that lets you hibernate or shut off the PC and play DVD movies without being in Windows, giving you 2-3 times the normal battery life, a feature that the Mac is obviously missing. And it has a gorgeous 14-inch widescreen display (compared to the Mac's tiny 12-inch 4:3 display), all in a 5.5 pound package (the Mac weighs 4.6 pounds). It has three USB ports (two on the Mac), one small Firewire port (vs. one large port on the Mac), and so on.

Time will tell whether the HP is as road-hardy and durable as the Dells I prefer, but it's certainly going to be better than the PowerBook, which has developed a lovely and expensive-to-fix screen gap that is quickly threatening to destroy the lid; this happened despite my constant babying of the machine, and it's never been abused. Obviously, I need a Windows machine for 99 percent of my work, and because I travel a lot, small and light are preferable. The HP has a near-full-sized keyboard and ... that screen. God, I just love widescreen (I have a 23-inch Sony LCD at home).

Anyway. What separates this from the PowerBook, really, are the options. They're everywhere. Buttons that you can use to control playback of DVDs when you're not in Windows. Slots for memory cards and a cool little remote control nestled in the PC card slot for when you need it (there's no PC card slot on the Mac, naturally). What's really happening here, and this is the point that Dvorak is alluding to, is that Apple (Jobs, really) is choosing form over function. No bit of functionality will marr the PowerBook's smooth case, no matter how useful it would be. Hard drive light? Never! SD slot? Heresy! Switches to turn off the trackpad and wireless? No way!

And that's the point. The HP has all those things and more. Yeah, it's a bit busy looking compared to the PowerBook. But it's also more powerful and more full-featured. It does more of what I--and most people--want. Sure, the Spartan design thing is cute for a little while, but real people need to get work done. And in the end, more should cost more, not less. Conversely, less (the PowerBook) should cost less. But it doesn't. It costs a lot more.

And that, friends, is not a sustainable market. Dvorak is dead right on this one.

[ Posted at 3:28 PM | Permalink ]