Why Microsoft Is Beating Apple At Its Own Game

ttom writes "OSWeekly.com looks at Microsoft's promotional strategy and concludes that Microsoft is beating Apple at its own game." From the article: "Apple is to blame for this, at least to some extent. They just had to go and release Boot Camp, didn't they? By the way, please don't take my sarcastic tone as an expression of my dissatisfaction for the product. I think it's great, and I really never expected to see something like Boot Camp come out of the Apple Camp. I know that users have bombarded them with requests for officially allowing Windows usage on a Mac, and the fact that they yielded to these requests is interesting because they've emphasized the OS X and Windows experiences as being completely separate for quite some time."

Re:Leading to fewer OS X apps?

[nine-times]

I wouldn't even be surprised to see a wrapper that installs Windows apps on Macs to run without a full version of Windows installed... As a Mac professional, this prospect scares the crap out of me.

Ahem... [codeweavers.com]

Re:Boot Camp

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing worse than a troll is a poorly informed one. A PC being unable to read Mac floppies has nothing to do with HFS -- it's the same reason that PC's can't (easily) read Apple II DOS or ProDOS floppies. Apple floppy drives are variable speed, the angular velocity of the disk is adjusted to keep the linear velocity of the material passing by constant as the head moves along the disk's radius. On a PC floppy drive, the angular velocity is constant so material at the edge is spinning by at a much faster (linear) velocity than material near the center. The practical benefit of the Apple approach is that you can fit slightly more onto the media, since you're taking advantage of all of the media's storage density. Leave it to Apple to make such practical use of PI.

Re:Boot Camp

[IamTheRealMike]

More secure actually has tangible benefits. It means less interruptions to update software .... I don't have a window that says "the computer will reboot in 10 minutes" unless you press the button. And I don't press it 10 times before I'm finally ready to reboot.

You realise that this nag-screen exists because there are lots of people in the world who [a] never switch off their computer and [b] completely ignore any and all online updates that are downloaded, right? If you think Microsoft does this simply because it's Evil then you clearly never did much tech support ... unless nagged to reboot these people will simply never have updates to core system services (kernel, display server etc) applied. One girl I knew was still dismissing the "please let me install service pack 2" balloon half a year after it had been downloaded!

Like others have said - it's all about market share ;)

Re:Not sure I understand

[DLG]

Hard to take seriously someone who gets confused by a "cel phone plan" but here is my apple experience. Wife has a 350mhz G4 tower she is using for whatever, 5 or 6 years. She goes back to school and as a gift I buy her the recently released and pretty quickly available 'mini'. Its pretty cheap. She moves all her stuff including her apps over to the new box. It runs. No problems. The old machine didn't die. We donated it to a theatre production company. In my basement is a working Apple ][+. Thats a 25 year old PC.

To me, that is Apple. Yes their computers aren't the cheapest, but in 3 years I had to replace my desktop Dell 3 times due to hardware problems. Yes Apple has had hardware problems too, but the quality of hardware IS high, and the Mini is a really nice bit of engineering, as is my Nano.

Basicly Apple does the same thing as most premium manufacturers. They charge more for a product that is better and sexier.

If you are confused with Apple's product lines you have never gone to Dell or HP for computers.

I call you troll:)

Re:The only people losing out...

[thammoud]

You hit it on the head. I wush I had mod points. My next laptop will not be a Dell but an Apple MBP for the same exact reasons that you mentioned. One other strike against Dell is the pathetic support for their consumer unit.

Re:You need to wipe the froth off of your chin.

[topham]

Actually you misunderstood. The upgrade which was performed was equivalent to buying a new computer; and doing so with an Apple is easier. On a PC if it were truely a new computer we would have had to re-install all the applications. We were able to skip that step for the most part. On a Mac you can just link the new and the old computers together and have it move everything over. Even if the old mac is dead, but the harddrive is ok It's still easier to deal with. (In which case I'd throw the hd in an enclosure and hook it up via firewire or usb.). Free bonus if you can boot the new mac off the old drive when connected via firewire.

Technically he is probably using X-Plane on his upgraded (WinXP) computer right at this minute. He should be happy with its performance, etc.

But honestly if he didn't have as much money tied up in software for Windows as he does I would have readily pushed him to buy a Mac.

The key software he uses is available for the Mac and runs, in general, as well or better on the Mac than under XP. The only issue with him using a Mac is the performance in X-Plane is much better with a good video card and the iMacs aren't upgradable in that respect. Although they perform quite well anyway.

My dad listens to music, does some photo editing and plays a few games. The most important of which, X-Plane is dual platform anyway.

Re:Not sure I understand

[Tacvek]

The parent was not a troll. The parent was describing Vista, and asking: "Since when has Apple's plan been to release something like Vista?" (late, with many feature missing, unreasonable specs, a large number of options, and a fairly hefty price.) It was a little hard to notice it, but the parent does have a point. Apple has a very different business model than Microsoft.

Now as for vista's versions. Vista actually has fewer versions than XP. The simple fact is that many of XP's versions were rarely heard of. For home users in the US there will be only really three choices. The italic options are the ones home consumers will see.

• Vista Starter: Stripped down version to be sold only in developing countries. (Cheap but very crippled).
• Windows Vista Home Basic: This is roughly equivlent to XP Home.
• Windows Vista Home Premium: This is roughly equivlent to buying XP MCE.
• Windows Vista Business: Roughly equivlent to XP pro for normal businesses.
• Windows Vista Enterprise: Roughly equivlent to XP pro for Enterprise businesses
• Windows Vista Ultimate: Includes all features of all versions. Roughly equivlent for home users of buying XP Pro, except that it will include the Media Center features.

And new to Vista is Windows Anytime Upgrade [wikipedia.org] which means if you buy Home Basic and realize you really wanted Home Premium or even Ultimate, you can use a control panel applet to upgrade. You may need your CD for this. The anytime upgrade pricing will hopefully only be slightly higher than the price differential between versions.

Re:Summary headline is incorrect.

[Phroggy]

I do find it interesting that Mac fans always point to Dell as their preferred price comparision. I mean....Dell? Is that really the space Apple is competing?

Dell is the #1 PC manufacturer, and they advertise pretty heavily. HP is #2, but fewer people think of HP when they think of buying a PC.

Also, Michael Dell and Steve Jobs have some history.

Re:Boot Camp

[Lepton68]

To just type the path into a file dialog box, type Shift-Command-G and a diaog will drop down for typing it.

Re:Boot Camp

[Peganthyrus]

Dock: So turn the zoom factor down.

Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in

Type a path? That takes forever! Hit the Finder in the dock and drag the folder you want into the file selector. Or drag the exact file you want. Most of the time I have the folder I'm working in open in the Finder anyway.
If you have frequently-visited folders, drop them into the Finder's sidebar. They show up in the file dialogues too, then. If you must type, you could switch to the Finder and do apple-shift-g to type in the precise path and drag the folder in - OSX still has the 'drag the folder icon from a window's title bar to drag the folder' behavior that 9 did. Or you could pop up Quicksilver and navigate to the folder by the keyboard, then drag it in.

I still haven't managed to teach one aging Mac fanatic friend the difference between closing a document window and closing an application

Except in the case of a very few apps that suck up CPU, why does this matter? Stop using it and it'll get swapped out to disc. Most of the time I'll have had Illustrator and Photoshop running for days on end. They swap in when I ask for them, they swap back out when I go do something else. Why do I explicitly need to "run" an application that's an essential part of my toolkit? I'll need it again in a few hours, and it'll be there in a matter of seconds instead of the several minutes it takes to start up. Hell, if it's running, it might make it easier to get back to something in progress: some apps expose their recent documents list in their dock menu!

I'll agree that brushed metal/normal finder is stupid. I use Shapeshifter and the 'Good Grey' scheme to get rid of that. And the 'give us $25 more to unlock Quicktime Pro' is stupid, too.

Quicktime Pro

[Yvan256]

And the 'give us $25 more to unlock Quicktime Pro' is stupid, too.

To be fair, Quicktime Pro allows to export, re-encode, etc. I'm glad I paid for it because I import/convert things all the time.

The "stupid" thing about Quicktime is that you need the Pro version to view videos in full-screen. That feature is something that regular users need, not professionals.