A Window of Opportunity for Macs, Soon to Close

Funny thing is, I'm not sure if the windows market is where mac's are really making a dent. (yet)

From what I can tell, it seems more that users who would be ready to make the jump from windows to linux are opting for macs instead.

A rails conference I was at last year was 99% mac. I'd assume most of the web languages are the same. This is especially true in the laptop segment, which seems to be growing as well.

If I were apple, I'd stay the course. Looking at market shares when a vast majority of people aren't even replacing their xp boxes is kinda useless. Give it a year and those boxes will be a year older. Most of them won't be moving to vista.

He believes that Apple is not growing even faster because they do not sell as much in retail. He mentions HP. But not DELL, who is #1 and also sells (mostly) through their web site and have very limited in-store presence.

Am I missing something? What's the point of an article like that if his only argument is so weak? I, personally, see exponential growth of apple hardware among my friends and peers.

And I just did not get his "flywheel" paragraph about Vista. Is it going to suck less because of... of what?

I'm not sure that I agree with the article. Perhaps Apple would have higher market share if the Macs were sold in more retail locations but I think this might drive customer satisfaction down. IMO Apple wants to control the distribution channel in order to create the right customer experience. I was amazed for example at how easy it was to purchase an iPhone and sign up for the service compared to the usual hassle of buying and activating a phone.

What I'd like to see (if anyone has any links, please do share) is the percent market share between licensed copies of Windows and licensed copies of OS X.

I need a new laptop, I really don't want a Vista, but it is hard for me to justify spending $2500 on a MacBook Pro. Apple needs to do something about their pricing if they want a bigger market share.