I think given enough time and experience where people can discover rock bottom dollars isn’t working, they will gravitate towards higher perceived value per dollar.
Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
How did Apple "win"? They have always been a fraction of the market share of desktop/laptop computers, and they are only popular on mobile in the US, worldwide Android is dominant with 72% of the market. If you mean money===success, then sure, they have money, but do you compare their money to all the companies making PCs and all the companies making Android phones in the world combined? Apple fans have 1 single company to choose from, but PC/Android fans have hundreds of options - I can get a PC or Android in hundreds of form factors, whatever I need but Apple only sells what Apple makes. Sounds to me like PC/Android fans are the real "winners".
>Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.
This hasn't been a thing for a very long time. I hear about as much about the spinning beach ball of death as I do BSOD. Apple is by no means perfect, or did you forget "you're holding it wrong".
Apple has won for people who can afford quality. If a student has $400 for a laptop, it doesn’t matter how much they appreciate quality, they can’t afford the MacBook and will buy something cheaper.
Anecdotally, I work in a coworking space with lots of businesses in Australia, and I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
What quality? We had to sue Apple in a class action because the motherboard in our MBP (and many other people's) died 7 times and the 8th time it happened Apple wanted to charge us $1200 to replace it again. We had to sue them, but we won.
> I’d say about 85% of people in the office space have MacBooks.
That doesn't prove quality. All it proves is you are in an echo chamber. I've worked in lots of corporate environments that were all PC and some that were all Apple, and a few that were mixed. All it really depends on is if the company values appearances or functionality, and appearances are one of Apple's main value propositions.
That's a silly comparison: by that metric, Apple "won" against Saudi Aramco and Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft also "won" against them.
Except that they aren't in the same business.
On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.
I can't find the exact stat right now with some light google, but I recall there was a stat that while Apple doesn't have majority of user base, they essentially have an outsized share of the profit due to the average sales price & associated profit margins.
In Windows space, MSFT gets their license money, and then its a commodity race to the bottom by the hardware makers who need to pay AMD/Intel for chips, MSFT for a license, and compete with 100 no-names OEMs for every penny.
Arguably in the long run, Amazon is winning enterprise in ways Google never did. MSFT owns enterprise desktop / desktop collab use cases (and any virtualization / server side stuff to support it) only.
Sure I guess if you're still living in 2010. Nobody uses an "mp3 player" anymore. Get with the times grampa. Everyone has a cellphone that plays MP3s today.
> They won on music stores.
Spotify is at 36% market share compared to Apple's 30% of the music streaming market.
>They won on mobile.
And Apple did not "win on mobile" - only in the US are they popular, but globally Android has 72% market share. Apple lost the mobile market to Android a long time ago.
>They won on laptops.
No, Apple did not "win on laptops", they are still at about 9% market share.
"As of the third quarter of 2020, HP was cited as the leading vendor for notebook computers closely followed by Lenovo, both with a share of 23.6% each. They were followed by Dell (13.7%), Apple (9.7%) and Acer (7.9%)."
Nothing has really changed since 2020. Apple will always be a tiny portion of the personal computer and laptop market.
>They won on headphones.
huh? There are far better headphones than anything Apple makes. Are you talking about earbuds? There's a difference.
No, Apple has not "won" on anything but having overpriced hardware. $3600 for a VR headset? Yeah, I guess they "won" most ridiculously overpriced hardware ever.
Even so, the more Windows machines I had back in the day, the less real work I got done. Something was always not working, with no obvious pattern. Most problems took work to fix.
I learned not to install and uninstall things. Even if I needed to.
The more Mac’s I had, the more likely I ran into a problem as well. But it was usually just some glitch.
Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
>Some of us remember the 90s-00s era of debugging non-tech family & friends windows machines for various critical ailments with great frequency until they all switched to Macs.
I second this. My mom switched to a iMac G4 and never needed me again, except that time she plugged the power strip into itself.
It got to the point where I didn't want to tell people I worked with computers.
Mostly windows machines of comparable spec could be had for 10% less, but most importantly there were many OEMs willing to sell objectively bad underspecced machines that were 50-75% cheaper than the cheapest Mac. Remember the era when people had overheating laptops etc.
This is happening again now, with a new addition (well, resurgent) of insidious price cutting strategy: adware.
Ed Zitron goes into it in a recent article rant here[1] (skip to the "direct example" section if you're not interested in the rest of the read) where he reviews the best selling laptop on Amazon, which is ridiculously cheap... at a devil's bargain.
At this point it’s like the old story about boots - too poor to afford cheap ones.
Most people would be better served with a $600 Mac mini that will literally still be working & better in 5 years than in buying a $300 Amazon deal with 4GB ram which will run awful and die right outside warranty period. Maybe in a couple years apple will have prior year minis a little cheaper / refurbs available at $450-500ish too.
I just bought a $280 Acer laptop, still limited storage but better class, twice the ram, and with a CPU that actually has performance cores so it runs 2.5x-5x faster.
It came with chromeOS, which is a limiting factor, but in this particular comparison it sounds like it's more of an upside than a downside.
Price comparing Macs and PCs has rarely been accurate. The experts I remember would hammer the price difference and say Apple was dying so the investment isn’t worth it.
Apple won only after windows gave average home users a horrific bsod/virus/reboot hell of an existence for about 20 years.