That's interesting. 20% of the laptops sold in the US are Macs.

According to this site: http://www.systemshootouts.org/mac_sales.html, Mac had a 3.3% share of all computers (not only laptops) shipped worldwide, in the 1st quarter of 2008.

The total shipped, was 2.3 million macs.

The total for PCs with Windows, is somewhere around 65 million.

Down from here, I assume the numbers stay the same in September as they did in July/August.

Now, for this article to have the same numbers as the site, it would mean that there was sold around 5 million, if not less, laptops in the U.S.

I think that the USA is likely to be at around 1/3 of the worldwide computers sold. This means that, there were sold around 20-25M computers there.

And to my point, this would mean that only 1/4 to 1/5 of all PC sales (in the US) are laptops.

the world wide sales were put at 5% this last quater from what i had been reading, while toatel us sales were 10% with laptops coming in higher on a strong educational market. on top of that the american market is actualy in a slow down of hardware sales, most growth (outside of apple) has come from other countries, in particular developing ones, which is why though dell marketshare remains high they are losing money because of terrible margines. from what i have been reading if dell does not manage to increase its margines, they may be foreced to sell of or merge

IMO: Apple Macs Laptops are not worth it.

I ran Windows XP on a non pro macbook and it was terrible...but it worked. Not sure about vista...considering that microsoft doesn't sell hardware, I don't see why they wouldn't push the fact Windows can run on both MAC and PC platforms.

In any case, mac laptops are pretty...but they have some serious issues considering the price. The one I had was really hot and things kept crashing a lot...and i spent almost 1000 dollars on it. Specs weren't that great either...for 1000 bucks you could get an aweosme PC laptop.

What is funny is how a lot of people just get caught up in spec wars. I mean that's great for a desktop, what matters then more or less is how much power it has, how good the graphics card is, ect. There are really not many other considerations other then does it overheat.

On the other hand is having a slightly better graphics card (say a 8800GT over a 8600M at 512 MB) worth having a laptop that is a superheated 12 pound brick? A lot of the time when many of you reference a laptop that has these "great specs!" for 1500 dollars or whatever it is, those specs come at a cost both in size, battery life and heat. I have a 15 inch macbook pro, it can run for about 6 hours of normal use (a mix between intensive and non intensive tasks) without having much of a heat problem and weighs about 5-6 pounds. It is also, literally, less then half the width of almost all Dell laptops I've come across.

Now some will say that stuff doesn't matter! I just care about specs! But do you really want to carry around a 10+ pound "super notebook" from one of the many companies that design these commodity machines? Maybe its one of those things people don't fully realize until they carry around their bag with a light mac and then with a heavy Dell.

Now I know you will say "OMG there are light Dells too!" but those aren't the cheap machines you are talking about. The standard high end mac is light and still has good specs. In fact the standard low end mac (macbook) is lighter then a lot of "mobility machines".

There is a lot more to a laptop then just specs, there is design, weight, material quality and a lot more.

Oh and if you are students go to your schools computer store, a lot of them sell them for WELL below retail (like a new macbook pro is 200 off, one of the previous models was 1400 new) since apple gives really solid education discounts. A lot of the time during this time of year they have promotions too such as the 300 dollar Ipod touch free with the purchase of any mac.


As to the OSX vs Vista thing it really is no contest if you have any idea how to use both. OSX crashes far less (almost 0), gets more performance with less (it is SO much less bloated), has a ton of free open source software made for it and has some really good mac only programs if you do video editing, photography, make presentations (keynote is VASTLY superior to powerpoint), make documents (pages is much more effective then word) or basically do anything but pure gaming.

For gaming windows is a little better but that's changing pretty quickly as more and more of the big releases head to OSX with the increased market share. Spore, Call of Duty 4, WoW, Xplane, Sims 2+expansions, Civ 4+expansions, NWN2 ect. I'm switching over less and less to windows even for gaming.


What makes an elitist anyway? Is it someone who makes good decisions or someone who thinks about things in a critical way? I've never really gotten that term, as far as I can tell its a critique stupid people use to make it seem as though other people being smarter then them is a negative instead of a positive (see John McCain being OK and Obama being "elitist" even though McCain has more houses then he can count and Obama never made anywhere near a million dollars as a law professor).

Again, quoted for irony's sake.  The fact that you consider someone who calls you an elitist to be stupid by default  automatically sends up a few red flags. 

Elitists are people who think they are better(smarter, more informed, etc...)  than other people, and that anyone with a differing opinion is automatically wrong because the elitist is always right. 

Just accept that not everyone loves the taste of Steve Job's Kool-Aid as much as you do.

Macs aren't expensive compared to other manufacturers as long as you buy at the right time.

Let me explain: apple doesn't change their prices, instead every X months revises the specs. Which means in the interval between revisions while other manufacturers slowly trickle down prices apple builds up a price difference. If you buy within 30-45 days of a revision, apple computers are competitively priced - several sites like Tom's Hardware have done the comparisons (mac pro vs cheapest newegg components, the "apple premium" was below 100$). For example: apple is about to release a new batch of laptops - so right now, comparing prices and specs will result in a huge difference. For that reason, foretelling apple's revision cycles is kind of a fetish amongst the apple community - that's when you upgrade; check this link: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

You must also remember that RAM is easily serviceable on all their products (besides the mini) - if you buy a RAM upgrade directly from apple expect to pay through the nose.

I don't agree with all Impulsivity's opinions (or the degree to which he takes others), but I like how he's an elitist because he calls people stupid for calling him elitist.

Take a look at these two links. the first is the laptop that i mentioned, the one with the "OMG SPECS" laptop that i requested a decently priced mac alternative for, that you failed to respond to.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220303&nm_mc=TEMC-Function-PriceAlert&cm_mmc=TEMC-Function-PriceAlert-_-Content-_-text-_-N82E16834220303

price: 1k

weight: 5.7 lbs

battery life - 2-3 hours

doesnt overheat (personal expirience)

15" screen, dimensions: 13.0" x 9.6" x 1.4-1.5"

now, the 1.5k macbook listed on Newegg

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834100035

weight: 5.0 lbs

battery life: assuming its the same as yours, thats 6 hours, and doesnt overheat

13.3" screen, dimensions: 12.78" x 8.92" x 1.08"

the interesting thing about that is that you mentione something about a superton laptop with the specs equivalent to a PC, yet my laptop listed is 500 dollars cheaper, has its own dedicated videocard, and the only two things the mac has above it is the 0.4 GHz more processing power and the double battery life - the latter isnt a problem if you simply decide to sit near a wall socket.

...doesnt that kind of get rid of that "superton laptop" argument you pose? anyways, moving on.

In regards to gaming - granted, bigger titles are coming out on dual platforms - most notable being starcraft 2, spore and diablo III (for my purposes atleast). The problem with this argument is the smaller games, from personal expirience, are Windows only (i.e. maplestory and titan's quest, many more). If all you're interested is in the big games, then so be it - you dont need any form of windows. I however enjoy said smaller games, and i have no need for the media-creating software that you mention - word and powerpoint 2003 are all i need for my purposes, and if thats not good enough for you then again - enjoy your mac, i wont.

lastly - the elitist comment is because you automatically resort to calling anyone with dissenting opinons than you stupid. Elitism by definition means that you assume that, in the case of this argument, your platform is the end all best, which is frankly not the case whatsoever. You fail to realize that people have different uses for their computers, they dont need any of these features that belong to OSX (and by the way, please explain what these are. because other than "media creating features" i dont see the point to macs. crashing and bloatware can be dealt with by any decently computer-literate person, so i dont count that).

p.s. - i need to take a look at that  "mac buyer guide" site to see if even the next set of revisions can compete against my build. i want to see if atleast the next revision makes their model more "price-worthy" compared to whats on the market...

edit: im not seeing anything worth noting on that mac site. meaning we'll just have to wait. Only thing i saw worthwhile was a rumor of the next set using an Nvidia chipset. but meh

That's another thing I don't understand....why pay for what is essentially a specialized *nix system + a few proprietary (and IMHO overpriced) programs, when you can get cheaper non-mac hardware and just run linux + hundreds of open source programs on it for free?  I suppose it may have something to do with the "it just works" thing....but at this point in time if you're really looking for that distros like ubuntu tend to "just work" out of the box as well.

My biggest problem with macs though is also the price.  I bought a Dell laptop about 8 months ago that has a slowish (but adequate) core 2 duo, a dedicated GPU, and 2 gigs of memory for about $650...the cheapest mac laptop at the time had a faster processor, but had no descreet gpu available....not to mention its base price was over $1k....why doesn't apple want to compete in that (my notebook's) segment?

(and no, my laptop is not over 10 pounds, does not overheat, and has decent build quality)