Will the Mac end up becoming un-cool?

I’ve been talking to my daughter on the phone today and I happened to mention Apple and being cool (my daughter owns an iMac). She related a conversation she had at work last week. She said she was admiring a work colleagues MBP (this was a twenty something). She said to her colleague how gorgeous her MBP looked and her colleague replied that she loved it and took it everywhere with her. My daughter asked her what she used it for and was shocked at the reply. “Oh just surfing the web doing emails and downloading from iTunes”. My daughter said “is that it as you’ve got iWorks loaded etc”. The girl replied that she had been persuaded to buy it when she bought the MBP and the staff at PC World had loaded it up but that she had never used it. At this point another young girl in the office remarked that this was all she used her MBP for but it was worth it for the admiring glances she got.

I have to say that this doesn’t surprise me and I don’t doubt that’s all plenty of Windows users use their computers and Laptops for but what a grievous waste of money and a waste of a good Laptop. Personally I think the world has gone stark staring mad.

I think that either platform will do more or less the same things and to the same competence for the average user. I also think that they will probably both last the users the same amount of time or at least until the users get tired of them and upgrades. However, one is often about half the price of the other so at the end of the day what price for so called coolness?
 
PardonTheWait said:
What I mean is they're chasing market share, but not at the expense of quality. That's what they say anyway.
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Wrong. They are chasing market share, but not at the expense of profit.

I have heard a lot of people that either say:

"But it [Mac OS X or the Mac itelf] is so shiny and pretty" - People who want a Mac because it's cool, looks good, etc. etc.

"I prefer a Mac but it's too expensive" - People who have used a Mac either at work, school/college/Uni or a friends. And have actually tried it and decided it is better for them than Windows.


For the vast majority of people price is the kicker (especially now in the UK as they keep going up and up) when it comes to Macs and Apple know this. They could do two things to increase market share by crazy numbers:

Lower profit margins <--- big 'un

Create cheaper Macs - Not in the sense of quality but think an iPod Shuffle/Nano compared to an iPod Classic/touch.

But why should they? Heck Steve Jobs even said, out loud, that they had plenty of room to come down on price with the iPad. That takes a fraction of a brain cell to translate to "We'll see how many people buy it at this crazy-high profit margin price and then lower it if we need to". The lowering of the price makes Apple look good too. Yet people still buy them.

To bring this back around to Macs:

Do you think an Aluminium case, SD Card slot and 2GB RAM cost £150 (inc. R&D etc. etc.)? Which is the difference in price between the MacBook and 13" MacBook Pro. Of course not. It just looks like it does because it's all shiny and metal...
 
The limited range also helps.

And have you not noticed, in a conversation, when someone bought or has a macbook, they will say:

"I bought a Macbook"

"oh yeah? They are nice" Would be the expected, normal reply.

If they bought a windows machine, they are pretty much stuck with:

"I bought a laptop"

"Ok" would be the normal reply, mainly because chance are that the other person is not tech savvy and not going to come back with "What spec did you get?" They are not going to ask "Did you get the latest IMB T48 with the WUVGA screen with anti-glare and the anti shock HD that can survive drop up to 5ft?"

The term Laptop is too generic, you are also not going to say "I bought a Acer X with 4G RAM and with Nvidia GT6800"

Macbook, everyone know what that is

Laptop, too vague.

Hence Macs will always be cooler for that reason.
 
Macbook also covers quite a range of specifications, but I agree that laptop/pc manufacturers need to sort out their naming conventions.

IBM/Lenovo are almost there with their thinkpad range, but the rest with their random combination of letters and numbers mean nothing to anyone.
 
joey1211 said:
Macbook also covers quite a range of specifications, but I agree that laptop/pc manufacturers need to sort out their naming conventions.

IBM/Lenovo are almost there with their thinkpad range, but the rest with their random combination of letters and numbers mean nothing to anyone.
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i am not talking about spec, as you can spec it to whatever you want. I am saying people know its look from the name alone. They know its White/Aluminium with a black keyboard with a lit up Apple Logo.

Laptop, too generic. When i say HP laptop, what do you think of? When i say Toshiba Laptop, what do you think of? When I say Acer laptop what do you think of?

A piece of black plastic.

Enough said.
 
To clear thinks up, Win 7 runs on the NT Kernel 6.1 which is a tweak of 6.0, used in Vista. If I am not mistaken, most of the NT Kernel was re-written in 6.0 creating the infamous early Vista compatibility issues. 7 kept the 6.1 number to avert any compatibility issues arising from having a new kernel ver number. I'd say that from Vista onwards, this is a new OS in some ways so I don't know where people are getting the 'Windows runs on a a 10 year old 9x kernel blah blah blah that's why OSX is better'. I'm also sure that OSX runs on a Unix core, which by now is 30-40 years old but tweaked.
 
Vinni3 @H|H said:
To clear thinks up, Win 7 runs on the NT Kernel 6.1 which is a tweak of 6.0, used in Vista. If I am not mistaken, most of the NT Kernel was re-written in 6.0 creating the infamous early Vista compatibility issues. 7 kept the 6.1 number to avert any compatibility issues arising from having a new kernel ver number. I'd say that from Vista onwards, this is a new OS in some ways so I don't know where people are getting the 'Windows runs on a a 10 year old 9x kernel blah blah blah that's why OSX is better'. I'm also sure that OSX runs on a Unix core, which by now is 30-40 years old but tweaked.
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Case in point why Windows Laptop isn't cool. Who gives a damn about all that anyway?
 
a.hay said:
If you bought the Toshiba you'd spend half the day uninstalling all the rubbish they put on their machines. Tray center this, help center that, Toshiba messenger hmmm?, Toshiba media accelerator wha?!!? Still doesn't justify the price difference mind.
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First thing i do when i get any new PC/Laptop is blast the harddrive completely and install my version of Win7. If there is an option to leave the disk blank at purchase then i take it, as i have all my own software
 
joey1211 said:
Macbook also covers quite a range of specifications, but I agree that laptop/pc manufacturers need to sort out their naming conventions.

IBM/Lenovo are almost there with their thinkpad range, but the rest with their random combination of letters and numbers mean nothing to anyone.
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Sony Vaio?

They are the closest thing to Apple in the Windows world and a lot of people seem to know what you're talking about when you mention it

Vinni3 @H|H said:
To clear thinks up, Win 7 runs on the NT Kernel 6.1 which is a tweak of 6.0, used in Vista. If I am not mistaken, most of the NT Kernel was re-written in 6.0 creating the infamous early Vista compatibility issues. 7 kept the 6.1 number to avert any compatibility issues arising from having a new kernel ver number. I'd say that from Vista onwards, this is a new OS in some ways so I don't know where people are getting the 'Windows runs on a a 10 year old 9x kernel blah blah blah that's why OSX is better'. I'm also sure that OSX runs on a Unix core, which by now is 30-40 years old but tweaked.
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a lot of people were saying at the Win7 launch that huge chunks of of the OS has been completely re-written hence the improvement in speed and compatbility. Also, the biggest problem i recall at the Vista lunch is that 3rd party compaines were seriously dragging there heels on releasing bug free drivers for the 64-bit version. But it much better now as it's some years down the line.
 
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Faustus said:
People who care about what they are using and how what they are using performs, not the pretentious.
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which make up about 10 % of the laptop buying public.

Have you seen the iditos getting conned into buying £80 antivirus in PC world ? Most have no clue what an operating system is, let alone why the one that comes on their laptop is better than the one on a macbook (or not)

Its these sort of people's opinion that needs to be considered when deciding what most consider cool.
 
I really don't like the fact that absolutely *everyone* seems to have an iphone now. It makes it less appealing in general to me and i hope some serious competition shows up soon. So i can see how apple will eventually become uncool.
 
I fancy boys said:
I really don't like the fact that absolutely *everyone* seems to have an iphone now. It makes it less appealing in general to me and i hope some serious competition shows up soon. So i can see how apple will eventually become uncool.
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See I'm like that with cars and stuff, I wouldn't want to get a Fiesta because they're too ubiquitous, but with phones and so on, the more the merrier.

More users = more money in the market = more apps = better

Same with Macs. As they've become more popular they've become more usable - there's more money in writing apps for Macs than there was say four years ago, so more companies are doing it. More apps, more choice, better.

By the same token it's creeping towards the point where writing virususesesii for Macs is going to become worthwhile, and the first big one is going to put us all on our arses.

Aside from that one concern, I want more people to have Macs. I don't feel special because I use a Mac, and it doesn't annoy me that more people are getting them. If I did, I'd be pretty **** at my job.

I think a lot of computer users who consider themselves 'power users' or whatever have this weird elitist thing where they want to make everything hard for themselves, to reinforce their POWER USER status in their own mind.

They don't want to use what everyone else uses, because that would mean they're just a pleb like everyone else, they want to be special and clever, so they make everything difficult for themselves.
 
That picture says it all really, if i had the latest Sony Vaio F Series amongst all that, I would be the one feeling quite cool right there. And still have money to take out half the girls in the class ;)
 
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