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Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

"Apple reigns supreme over the computing landscape" Yeah, no. Not really. Maybe in Silicon Valley developer circles.

This is an incredibly silicon valley centered viewpoint. I'm sure the guy makes some good observations, but how can you take anyone seriously that starts with a comment like this? Apple is insignificant outside of the English speaking first world: North America, UK, Aus/NZ. I wish some of these people from those markets would get outside their bubble from time to time. There's a huge market out there that has never used nor wanted an iPhone or any other Apple product.

Not that they are bad, they just aren't all that special.

Thompson lives in Taiwan, I believe.

> Apple is insignificant outside of the English speaking first world

Japan has a higher share of iOS than the US or UK. Also China is ~20% iOS. Sounds small until you realize that percentage equates to more iOS devices than the US.

iOS is different from Mac right? There are a lot more phones than Macs in China I believe.

Grandparent post was speaking about Apple generally: "There's a huge market out there that has never used nor wanted an iPhone or any other Apple product."

Also Switzerland or Sweden have a lot of Apple users. All those countries have one thing in common: everything is very expensive there. So people have a lot of money and they can easily afford Apple products.

In Argentina for example an iPhone is around 2500 USD (100% import tax), an average citizen needs to save for a year to afford an iPhone.

A year?

A couple of years maybe, and you won't be getting the latest gen one.

An average Argentinian office worker should be able to put 2500$ per year aside. If he doesn't need a new washing machine or new furniture, he could get an iPhone. But he would need to spend all his savings just for one thing.

Yup. The starting price of an apple computer in India is almost 10 times the median salary of a young worker / executive.

You will not fine Macs in India, except in the 1%, or in movies.

I am sure that is true for most of South Asia.

It's Windows all the way down. There is a huge black market for pirated windows copies here and a decade back, the standard PC setup was a basic Intel based system, loaded with pirated windows os on a cd that costs about 2 USD.

I don't think you're using the word "executive" in the way that I usually understand it.

You realize the 1% of India is 15 million people, right?

Globally, about 270 million personal computers (including laptops) [1] and 1.5 billion smartphones [2] are sold per year. Apple makes up about 17% of global smartphone market share [3] and 55% of US market share [4].

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-01-1...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

[3] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

[4] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...

How can Apple "reign supreme" over the industry, to the point where they're facing significant anti-trust pressure, while also having negligible marketshare? Clearly there is more to this supremacy than raw marketshare.

US marketshare and mindshare among the (US) people who decide such things. If all the relevant politicians and judges and their friends and families (presumably all wealthy) have iPhones...

55% market share in the US, and the app store has like 70% mobile revenue is enough for US antitrust action.

>while also having negligible marketshare?

As well as having 55% US marketshare as other posters have mentioned, they account for 42% of global smartphone profits despite only having 17% marketshare.

https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2021/04/apples-...

In the consumer market, maybe. In reality you are only taking into account your country, in all other countries macs are rare, and are typically only used by creators (photographers, musicians, video makers, etc) or by someone that develops iOS applications (because you don't have an alternative, or legally you don't, a lot of people just have hackintosh VM to compile).

Nowadays a lot of people that used a mac went back to Windows, because let's face it, it's more stable, it's faster, and consumes less resources. I once was a macOS user, and the latest release was so slow on my 2015 macbook pro (that still is a pretty good hardware) that made me format everything and install Linux on it. Now it seems to me that I have a brand new computer...

In the professional market there is only Windows. In every big company everything is Microsoft, Windows, Office, Active Directory, Exchange, Windows server, Azure. Probably the reason is the IT department likes Windows more since it's easier to maintain than macs.

Regarding iPhone, they are not so diffuse as they are in the US. In my country you have a 19% iPhone, and it's one of the European countries where they are more prevalent, and still it's a minority. Most of the people uses Android phones, and doesn't want to spend more than 200 euros for a phone.

Probably in the US iPhone are so diffuse because you usually get them with your mobile plan, while in my country no one buys a phone that way, since you will end up paying it like double the price and you loose the freedom to change the provider as you wish.

I find this baffling. I'm in Sweden and I do see a Mac every now and then, especially among artists and designers. But most people I know use nothing but Windows and every place I've ever worked used Windows. The only place I've seen a lot of non-Windows machines is the university. They had a fairly even split between Windows and Linux.

It's definitely a US-centric view, where 30% of internet-connected personal computers are running macOS.

As the parent mentioned, Macs are extremely popular in the SV development scene. Even large, stodgy 70,000 person companies like Cisco consider them the standard.

IBM, in a historic twist of fate, rolled out Macs to their entire fleet unless you opted out. They also said that using Mac, contrary to what you'd expect from the purchase price, saved them buckets of money.

I don't know why you wouldn't expect that.

People (consumers) see the Mac prices and balk because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300.

Businesses see the Mac prices (and, barring upgrades): they see that they're cost competitive with the contemporaries.

Dell XPS, HP Elitebook, Lenovo Thinkpad Txx (or Carbon X1) are all in spitting distance and in some cases even more expensive than Macbooks.

That's before you even talk support contracts or yearly licenses (the OEM license on the unit is rarely the one you'll use, usually you have a volume license and a KMS server which also costs a lot of money).

Exactly. From a business' perspective (and according to IBM's own study so this isn't conjecture), Macs are significantly cheaper in the long term, and only slightly more expensive in the short term if even.

Also, when it comes to management for a small or even medium sized business, look at Apple's approach to management: https://www.fleetsmith.com . Dead simple pricing, dead simple UI, and they provision your devices out of the box without any manual setup. You can just buy 50 MacBooks, Apple will automatically ship them set up to your employees for no charge, and you'll pay a several bucks a month per device for management.

Now compare that to how you manage a Windows deployment. By comparison, it's unintelligible. You need to upgrade every device to Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise as part of a contract to join a domain, set up a domain server with Active Directory to have a user store, add connects to connect the Directory to the Domain which may or may not require a Windows Server, which may or may not require the arbitrary Windows Server CALs, and then you have to manually set up and wipe each device out of the box unless you managed to get a special deal with the OEM...

> and only slightly more expensive in the short term if even

As I found with Lenovo and their bizarre continued use of 1080p as a baseline everywhere in CURRENT_YEAR, if you specifically go looking for laptops with even just 1440p displays the prices quickly inflate towards Apple levels.

maybe large enterprises see Macs are cheaper but all i see is Windows pc in small to mid size companies.

You’ll see it in large companies too; there is heavy inertia and quite a bit of lock-in on the windows ecosystem.

> because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300.

...it even has a bigger screen and hard drive!

I don't see how having to replace an entire computer for an hardware fault like a broken SSD can make you save a lot of money. Maybe in the old days where macs were still professional machines.

Nowadays macs are the nightmare of every IT department, the smallest that on a PC takes a couple of minutes, like changing an hard drive or a RAM module, it's a major surgery on a mac, where it's still possible and where you don't get all the things soldered on the main board.

You have an OS problem on a mac? Good luck wasting hours reinstalling the operating system manually and then installing all the software. On Windows? You have your custom install ISO with all the drivers and software you need and you install it automatically. Or just have a stack of cloned disks, and in case of a problem just swap the hard drive, in most enterprise computers that have everything tool less is basically the fastest way.

Also Windows machines are usually favorites by the IT departments because they work well with all the Active Directory stuff, meaning that you can manage everything centralized. Yes, you can even on a mac join an Active Directory domain, but you can do less things than with a Windows machine.

And surely you have to develop a lot of custom tooling to administer network made by macs, while on Windows you can do that with standard tooling.

Was that during the PowerPC era? Would have been natural for IBM to want their own chip powering their employee's machines.

If you consider iPhone to be part of the computing landscape, does that change anything?

iPhone has 54.56% marketshare in Sweden: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden

As mentioned by the sibling comment, there are a lot of iPhones here. Not enough that I would say Apple "reigns supreme" over the smartphone market and certainly not of computing as a whole. But including smartphones absolutely does make the claim less dubious.

Apple only reigns supreme over the niche it's carved out for itself, which has maybe grown a bit over the last years, but will still always be a minority (globally) if you compare it to Windows/Linux on desktop machines or Android on mobile. And that's ok for them, because they don't want to reduce their profit margins.

From what I observe in NL (EU) is: Mass market is moving away from home PC's to handheld devices, either iOS or Android (about 50/50) (for example my dad uses an iPhone and iPad, mom uses an Android phone and iPad) Lot's of students, devs/ start-ups are using or switching to a macbook.

I wonder if consumer desktops will be replaced by "phones" connected to a keyboard/mouse/screen at some point. It kind of would make sense. If you could run Windows11+Android apps on a new type of good phone this would be great imo. It would save lots of desk space too

I don't think he intended it to mean "general purpose computing" but "consumer computing," he mentioned iOS in the next line. If you include mobile devices, in the US at least, I can see the argument, although it still isn't a great one considering Android.

It doesn't "reign supreme" in consumer computing outside the US either. Rather, it's hilariously down - Apple has a mere ~2% market share in India (the largest smartphone market in the world after China).

Which is why I scoped it to the US.

ios is not general purpose computing

That's literally what I said.

Apple reigns supreme with people who have higher purchasing power than others. That’s the niche they want to maintain, not total market share.

Even that seems to be limited to, as another comment said, the English speaking first world. The reason why I don't have an Apple device is not that I can't afford one. I can easily afford their stuff, but I want a Linux computer and a phone that is cheap enough not to worry about. Plus, their smug, hyperbolic marketing is really off-putting.

I value my time which is where Apple seems to win ie it eats the least of it. That trumps the absolute cost in my mind.

If we're talking about phones, Android is very low maintenance as well.

If we're talking about Real Computers, Linux is more rough around the edges, sure. But it has Freedom. And it's a fantastic system for software development.

I can’t speak for android now but when I used it 4 years ago I actually suffered irrecoverable data loss due to buggy SD card handling and was constantly bugged by it every two minutes (Motorola handset) for various updates and issues. It did not respect my attention however hard I tried to configure it to.

So it went. I can’t trust it. Not only that with Google’s business model I can’t rationally invest in it. Oh and the handset was abandoned after 12 months. My backup iPhone 5s got an update on 14th June at 7 years old.

As for real computers, yes. The Mac I have is a nice terminal for Linux on a server but Linux on the desktop is not rough round the edges: it’s a nightmare for daily use.

Linux on desktop is very far from a nightmare. Sure, if you don't know what you're doing and you mess around with things, things will break.

If you use it as you would use Windows or Mac OS, then there are no more issues with Ubuntu from my experience.

I actually prefer Ubuntu over the other two as the web developer experience is much better than Windows and Mac OS. It's nice to use native tools. It's nice to be able to trust profiling. The same is also true for the other two where you would have to use replacement software on Linux.

I’ve been through this discussion a thousand times before. I bought an officially tested with Ubuntu T495 laptop and a kernel update broke it entirely due to bugs. X just craps itself and the whole thing hangs. I don’t have the time or inclination to deal with stuff I expect to work.

I do most of my dev work in linux but using the Mac as a terminal.

Like so many other things in economics, the top 20% of the market could very well be more lucrative than the bottom 80%. Hence Apple's perceived "supremacy".

lol

I think "reigns supreme" is a judgment based on $ value rather than number.

If I said ARM Cortex M cores dominate the microprocessor market you would rightly dispute that.

He may be thinking from a profit perspective, but it's certainly not true if you're measuring active users.

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