12 thoughts on “Shorter Douglas McIntyre of 24/7 Wall St.”

  1. if everyone has to buy new computers, whos to say they won’t just consider a mac? I know of 4 potential mac sales right now when its time to upgrade.

  2. Huh? Nobody is *excited* for Vista except for Paul Thurott.

    Seriously, the average PC user won’t know about Vista until the next time they buy a PC and its on there as an OEM. Retail sales of Windows are always dismal – its the OEMing that gets new versions out there.

    Because the bottom line is, the vast majority of PC users don’t care about their PCs. Thats why they are PC users. And someone who doesn’t care about their PC doesn’t get excited for a 5-tiered, confusing, $200/$300/$400 upgrade.

  3. What these silly Microsoft pundits haven’t got through their heads is that if people are in the market for a new computer to run Vista, that’s an *opportunity* for the Mac, not a “hurdle.” Think about it–if you’re about to sink a coupla grand on a shiny new machine, why not get one that can run both Vista and the Mac OS, instead of just Vista?

  4. I think I get what he’s talking about. There’s two issues here. 1) PC vendors are going to cut prices to the bone to move product out the door for the end of the year. 2) Vista is going to generate a lot of hype.

    Neither one generates any excitement, but it could distract from the recent success the Macintosh has seen in the marketplace.

    I love the part where he talks about the “6% Market share” as if it is nothing to get excited about. I just want to jump up and shout! Six Percent! That’s way up from the 2-3% we saw just a year or two ago!

  5. The old Respectable TiBook can’t be touched while running and has a back-lamp that stays on for all of four seconds, but it will be able to run Leopard. If in January Steve decides to talk about something along these lines, I think whatever wind these columnists think is in Vista’s sails will probably diminish considerably. Imagine that: a computer that’s still useful years after you plunk down a grand or more for it!

  6. Even better, if you upgrade with the Mac OS X, at least for the last couple of iterations, your old computer actually ran better! I know my old iMac (first LCD version) did until Spotlight came along. Meanwhile at work we upgraded from Win2000 to XP and my computer has ground to a halt.

  7. douglas mcintyre wrote:

    “The answer is too make the machines so cheap that customers can’t resist.”

    When a so-called pundit can’t get the whole homonym thing down, I tend to discount whatever else they are saying.

  8. I think both arguments in themselves are pretty valid. Price cuts and Vista will both increase pc sales, I can agree with that. Still, those are mostly influences from the vendor’s side of things. I don’t really see why that would make it harder for Apple to keep their Mac sales up. I mean, these are really two seperate markets. PC vendors selling more pc’s because of Vista doesn’t automatically mean Apple should sell less systems does it? Maybe in percentage of the market but not in absolute numbers?

  9. “I love the part where he talks about the “6% Market share” as if it is nothing to get excited about. I just want to jump up and shout! Six Percent! That’s way up from the 2-3% we saw just a year or two ago! ”

    5.8% is only the market share in the U.S. for the latest quarter. Last year it was 4.3%.

    http://reports.idctracker.org/webdownloads/P0004/pressreleases/IDC_2006_Q3_PC_Press_Release_October2006.pdf

    Apple’s worldwide market share is still under 3 percent.

    http://www.systemshootouts.org/mac_sales.html

  10. DDA Said:
    ““The answer is too make the machines so cheap that customers can’t resist.”

    When a so-called pundit can’t get the whole homonym thing down, I tend to discount whatever else they are saying. ”

    When a reader mistakes a typo for a horrible grammatical mistake and discounts the whole article because of it, he probably didn’t want to agree with it in the first place.

    BTW – “they are saying” should have been “he is saying,” but I’m sure you knew that, moron.

  11. Joe-
    while we’re at it DDA should have also said “this so-called” instead of “a so-called”, since he was only talking about one person.

    or maybe DDA was making a comment about pundit’s in general, and did not want to limit his or her self to just one pundit. perhaps he/she felt this way about all pundits and wanted to treat them equally.

    in that case “they” would be correct.
    but what are the odds of that?

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