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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

How to get your own fanboys? Get 'em while they're young. If you're any good, they won't switch.

Apple has targeted schools for 30 years. I'd say it's worked.

My grade school had Macs, and they sucked. We used Macs of the same vintage when I was a freshman in high school, because they ran some stupid graphing software my teacher liked. They sucked. When my little sister was in middle school, they started a program to give each kid a laptop (that they couldn't bring home). They were iBooks that ran 10.2 or 10.3. Sucked.

Never had an Apple, had nothing but bad/mediocre experiences with them, had no particular affinity for the company, don't own an iPod. But I bought a PowerBook G4 when I started college in ought-five. Why? Tiger. And it has a good keyboard, no blinking lights, and the hw/sw combo is just ridiculously stable. I've been running this same boot for, like, weeks. It weirds me out when I see someone booting up their laptop. Wait, let me open a new file in TextMate... Yeah, Untitled 135. If Windows 7 and any hardware vendor can top that, I'll switch.

Do you seriously have 135 un-saved text files going? Because if you do, you are my new idol.

I only have two unsaved files open right now -- Untitled 82 and Untitled 135. It's just that I've had TextMate running continuously since sometime in March.

How's 128 emacs buffers stack up? Granted, not all of them are files, but then again, my computer has only been up a week. And, naturally, they're all saved - you'd be insane to leave that many files unsaved, IMO.

Cool -- so your EmacsOS can do 128 things at the same time! My FreeBSD OS only has 104 open processes right now, according to ps. On the other hand, one of them is Firefox with more than 100 tabs open, so it's not like I'm slacking.

>Apple has targeted schools for 30 years. I'd say it's worked.

Good point, I've never seen any remark on that before.

You bring up an interesting point.

If you're in the target zone, do you know you're in the target zone?

I've read that adults are very loyal to brands they used when young; in the case of an article I'm thinking of, it was the manufacturer of a first car. So I have to agree.

McDonalds is doing the same thing - All the Ronald McDonald and kids stuff is not just for the families: It's a long-term strategy.

Do you know any adults who buy happy meals... for themselves?

which is why they have a small percentage of the market?

But isn't Apple's relatively small market share because most companies (big or small) tend toward Windows?

Cost is obviously an issue for the home user, too--why spend (at least) twice as much on a Mac when you can get a perfectly acceptable Windows machine?

No -- they have a small percentage of the market because brand loyalty doesn't overcome perceived savings for many people, and because Apple's falling down on the job when it comes to game support.

They have a small market share now because their market share shrank to tiny under the bumbling CEOs before Jobs returned. Their market share is growing fast, but tiny x fast growth = small. Wait a few more years.

understood , I just thought it was a very over-generalized comment by stating "they've targeted schools for 30 years and it's worked," when from all appearances, has been decently for the last 10

"which is why they have a small percentage of the market?"

Depends which market. They have a tiny share in one, dominant share in the other.

true, but as the comment was reffering to schools, all the schools I've been, from grade school through University, only had Apple's computer products, so I believe he inferred the computer market.

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