7 Responses for "Linux Surpasses Mac as No. 2 Desktop"

1. Lewis Powell

   August 5th, 2004 at 1:48 pm

   1

   I love linux (I run it on my desktop machine), but I think this is a shame, Apple’s OSX (I have a powerbook as well) is a much more polished and consistent user interface, and I’m a little bit sad that they got surpassed by linux before linux is comparably well designed.

2. Scrivs

   August 5th, 2004 at 1:52 pm

   2

   Honestly the Macs never had a chance. Linux runs on both PC and Mac platforms and is free. They were gonna get passed up eventually.

3. Lewis Powell

   August 5th, 2004 at 2:12 pm

   3

   At least they are kickin’ it hardcore with the iPod market.

4. waylman

   August 5th, 2004 at 2:54 pm

   4

   Imagine what it would be like if Apple made OSX available for the PC. Of course, Apple is a hardware company that also happens to make software, not the other way around, so it’ll never happen. Even so you have to wonder: if people could install and run Apple software on the current machine, would they be more prone to buy Apple hardware next time? Maybe not. After all, for me it mostly comes down to price.

5. Scrivs

   August 5th, 2004 at 2:58 pm

   5

   Well if they started making the software for the PC then they could lower the price on their computers and therefore sell a lot more to make up for the drop in profit margins.

   Of course I don’t run any large-scale businesses so I could be completely off on this one.

6. Lewis Powell

   August 5th, 2004 at 4:17 pm

   6

   Yeah, moving mac to X86 would massacre Apple in at least two ways.
   1) Apple is able to excellently support its own hardware because they use like, two different video cards and only one type of processor. The amount of trouble to make sure OSX works with every piece of hardware you can toss into a box, and the fact that, unlike windows, not everyone is gonna make drivers for OS X and whatnot, combine to make that a bad plan.
   and
   2) They’d lost hardware sales to anyone who makes cheaper hardware, which is everyone. Since they make their real money on hardware, cannibalizing that for software sales seems like a bad plan.
   We not-quite-rich-enough-to-be-mac-geeks can always hope though.

7. Scrivs

   August 5th, 2004 at 4:27 pm

   7

   Only thing we can hope for is that Gratis does a freepowermacs.com deal where we have to get 30 referrals.