I would hazard a guess that peeps are cheesed off with how much RAM vista requires to be usable compared to OSX, never mind for aero support.

Probably starting to brush up on their OS X... There going to need it ;)

How many dell sales are ubuntu? How many PC sales wind up with vista being wiped out and replaced with linux.

This is happening everywhere I look now, vista is a dead donkey of an OS and Linux is killing the market share on PC.

Mac sales on the up, and Linux usage rising are the results of microsoft releasing vista before it was anywhere near ready for market, as an example of this Robert Love of Novell and Google fame wrote this http://blog.rlove.org/2007/08/those-dang-dpcs-clogging-mmcss.html yesterday.

The driving factors behind the user adoption are system resource usage, performance and compatibility. The same driving factors behind the death of OS/2 and the rise of windows 95. Heck even wine has better ABI compatibility with windows apps than vista now!

oh, Paul. You started off so well with the correct spelling of "their but fumbled and dropped the ball with the old school-boy classic "there" instead of "they're".

tut tut! :-)

Actually, I'd hazard a guess that a fair proportion of those MacBooks end up with Vista (or XP) installed on them. Most of those laptops will come with 2GB of RAM in them at high FSB speeds which will run Vista easily.

The truth of the matter is, the latest revision of the MacBooks and MacBook Pro's represent good hardware design at a price comparable to similar laptops from Sony et al.

I'm not particularly a fan of Apple or Microsoft, I just don't think you can tell much about the OS-related motivations from hardware sales figures.

Do they not have Sony laptops in the States? No mention of them on the list, surely they sell enough to get on the list?

For once, MS are the victim of deliberate FUD and of course, fanboy ignorance. Vista doesn't really need any more RAM to be "usable" than XP does. It just caches the stuff in advance so you'll rarely see less than 50% memory allocation.

As for Apple laptops (and indeed desktops), i would suspect that they're growing popularity owes an awful lot more to Bootcamp than it ever could to OSX.

>As for Apple laptops (and indeed desktops), i would suspect that they're growing

>popularity owes an awful lot more to Bootcamp than it ever could to OSX.

Maybe somewhat, but I doubt "more than it ever could" - OS X is still a big factor, according to the switchers I know.

My lobotomised state was largely due to the drinking of 9 pints last night. Anyway that's not the point. What I was trying to do was to invent a new nomenclature for the species of windows supporting rabid anti mac donk heads out there. I thought FUDboys was a good start but possibly a little old fashion. Maybe FUDboyz or even FUDboiz... (boiz I have on good authority is a term often used by teenagers and thus has a more contemporary ambience). Im sure readers can come up with other alternatives, though it has to be catchy and preferably of potential OED material. Let the insults fly.

So richard,

by your reckoning Microsoft just jacked up the Vista minimum specs in comparison with xp to achieve what...? scare of customers?

"Vista doesn't really need any more RAM to be "usable" than XP does..."

Running Vista on 256MB RAM, that'd be interesting... even without the Aqua, err, I mean Aero desktop interface.

"As for Apple laptops (and indeed desktops), i would suspect that they're growing popularity owes an awful lot more to Bootcamp than it ever could to OSX."

@Rich Bryant

Boot Camp, along with Parallels and VMWare Fusion, are just the safety blankets that make a Windows user feel 'safe' about their switch to a Mac. I'm not doubting that there aren't some misguided people who buy a Mac to use solely as a Windows machine, but I think anecdotal evidence indicates that this is extremely rare, otherwise Mac OS X would be losing market share, which it clearly isn't, as indicated by web usage reports.

Apple's switch to Intel processors has made buying a Mac a no-brainer of a decision. You can have it all. Mac OS X, sexy hardware, great performance, AND full compatibility with those pesky Windows apps you need for work, or the latest Windows only game. The best part is, when you're done work or playing games, you can shut down Windows and surf the web with impunity with no worries about your machine getting hosed by some virus or infested with spyware.

For most switchers to Mac however, I think the reliance on the safety blanket is short lived as users quickly realize they can get everything they need done in the much more satisfying Mac OS X. That Boot Camp partition or virtual machine disk image ends up getting wiped within a year to reclaim disk space for more important stuff, like your photos, music and home movies. ;-)

Rich

I have two identical laptops - one with XP and one with Vista and both with 1GB memory. Vista runs like a dog, XP sweet as a nut - go figure ;-}

I've put an extra 512MB in the Vista machine and it now runs OK but still not as zippy as the XP one!

On 1GB Vista runs like XP on 512K.

Usable but you end up waiting for allot of stuff.

Vista wants 2GB or if you like disable Aero.

I know loads of people that have switched. I switched last year and I'm damned if I'm going back to Windows. Whilst the Mac is not without its problems, I'm very happy to be out of the endless malware, security problems and other general malaise that affects Windows. And that bloody useless IE "browser".

That's without even considering the interface of the Mac which is just plain nicer than the gaudy Fisher-Price designed Windows machines.

However, if there's just one feature to illustrate the difference between a Mac and Windows it would be the lack of every damn application seizing the focus every time they need to tell you something bleeding obvious.

Ubantu - you can if you want to. Most won't bother.

As for Sony; they lost the plot years ago as they aimed their higher-end laptops at the child gaming market and left the professional business market in their wake.

"It just caches the stuff in advance so you'll rarely see less than 50% memory allocation."

Incidentally, Linux does that too.

Quote: Vista doesn't really need any more RAM to be "usable" than XP does.

Aaah, you've never had a Vista machine with 512MB in your hands, right? It runs like XP with 128MB - endless hard drive activity. Fully patched XP needs about 384MB to be usable (run OS and some apps).

On the other hand, Vista is OK with 2GB of RAM and a 15K RPM SCSI HDD.

What's revealing is that 2/3 of my early adopter friends have reverted to XP.

Mark H

Dell only sells online, so these guys put Dell in last place.

Duh, or should I say D'oh.

I don't get it ... You just give the numbers for the USA sales but some of the computer companies are international..Why don't you include the worldwide rankings also? Is it possible that the Mac has lost it's worldwide ranking? Lots of computers being sold in China...I have been using multiple highend Macs and PCs for video and graphics with high end hardware (HD) for years and I just don't get the Mac "Experience"... Don't get me wrong..it's a good system but it has it's own issues just like Vista. But I feel I have an advantage with cross platform that a single platform user does not have. K

"For once, MS are the victim of deliberate FUD and of course, fanboy ignorance. Vista doesn't really need any more RAM to be "usable" than XP does. It just caches the stuff in advance so you'll rarely see less than 50% memory allocation."

I'm sorry - I'm a geek, but not a techie, so I might be reading the above incorrectly, but doesn't "...you'll RARELY see LESS than 50% memory allocation," mean that you'll MOSTLY see the OS taking MORE THAN 50% of the memory...?

...And this is a good thing, how...?

Mike Moyle:

It's a good thing because unused memory is wasted memory.

Would you rather your RAM chips sat in your machine unused, or would you rather the operating system cached (or pre-cached) some data in them in case it was needed in a hurry? I presume the latter.

Vista will give back that memory if it looks like something is going to need it for other purposes.

I think the idea goes something along the lines of the OS uses a fair chunk of the available memory to cache stuff from the disk that it thinks you might be wanting to use in the near future.

If you decide to open some or other application or do something that actually needs the memory the OS can drop the stuff it thought you might want in a split second and use the memory it's just freed to hold the application you've decided to use.

Although it says 50% is in use it might not actually need all of that to function; the other whatever percent is there to save grabbing it from the disk later.

In any case I'm a Mac convert. I don't really play games so that's not a problem and otherwise it scratches all of the geeky itches I had for a few years - I have a 64 bit Dual Processor (ok core but it's the same difference as far as my itches are concerned) that runs UNIX.

I'd imagine a few of the new converts will install bootcamp as a safety net, but the whole OSX experience is bound to win most of them over. Most things (I've wanted to do) do 'just work' and the system doesn't sing and dance and tell you about it when they do (I know I'm connected to a network because I just plugged the f* cable in!).

I got one of the previous generation iMacs a few months ago. They do seem expensive but you'll be hard pressed to get a PC that sits behind the monitor and is nearly silent. Plus there's all that software that comes with it (most of which I don't use) which is just the stuff that people seem to buy computers for.

And the display (pre-that glossy crap) is crisp and wonderful to behold.

They're a good bit of kit them Macs (apart from when the power cables burst into flames and stuff) and these days you hear of people buying them.

Which is a shame because I won't be able to be as smug and superior when they become common. Oh well, I'll just have to content myself with enjoying using my computer.

I have no idea what Vista does, so this may be irrelevant... Anyway, in other operating systems, the ideal state is that the OS uses essentially all memory that is not used by applications as cache. Cache roughly equals to free memory because anything there can be easily discarded and the memory given to applications. But it's better than free memory -- if you need something that happens to be in the cache you don't have to read it from the (slow) disk.

New 64 bit home built AMD AM2 socket machine, instantly responds with one of the 64 bit Linux OSes. Mepis 6l5 -64bit is fine, here, since May.

Older Macs (iMac 700mhz w/512MB RAM) runs great with OS 10.3.9.

Fedora Core 7 and Simply Mepis 6.5 for 32bit systems work great on 32 bit PCs of 500 Mhz to the 2000mhz boxes, in schools.

Safe, secure, and fast fun for all the students, with no service calls in the past year of 48 deployed in a local private academy that lives online with research and discovery!

http://livecdlist.com has ~300 choices in Linux Live CDroms, each complete with thousands of suites of applications!

Too bad Vista was such a pig in a poke, but, it isn't missed by intelligent teachers and students who simply want efficient tools with which to learn.

We'll spend our money on beefing up some of our older computers, and sales reflect this.

If the got rid of all the DRM rubbish from vista it would probably run half decently and i might even consider 'upgrading' from XP.

As someone who's recommends Laptops to people for a living, and is currently looking for a Power User laptop personally, Apple is a serious Contender for one simple reason:

They have one of the Best specced laptops going at the moment.

Taking the 15" Macbook Pro, you can get:

2.4Ghz Core 2

2GB RAM

160GB 7200rpm Hard Disk

DVD SuperMulti Drive

nVidia DirectX 10 Graphics.

Giving those specs to my Dell account manager, the only thing she could get with those specs was a desktop. I've also looked at HP, Samsung, Falcon......

Add to that the fact it's a great looking piece of kit, and will happily run OSX, Vista, and XP, it becomes a viable option

Seriously, if someone can find a pure PC based equalivient specced notebook, I'd love to know about it.

Because my sources tell me otherwise:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

@Anonymous: You can disable the application cache and Aero. If you think it looks ugly and makes your computer circa 1999 run poorly, turn them off.

@Paul: Okay, well Safari is insecure. There, I made a barely substantiated statement. Happy?

@Matthew: Blaming Microsoft for including the protected video path in Vista simply isn't fair. It's not like they had any other choice if users wanted to watch Bluray or HD-DVD movies legally, something that Linux and OS X users will be missing out on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista#Digital_Rights_Management

@David Austin: Your Dell account manager is a total moron. The only snag here is the processor, which if you really feel is absolutely necessary, you can select the cheapest processor and then purchase the 2.4GHz processor from a third party and have an official Dell technician install it for you (though if you're intelligent, you can install it yourself because as long as you don't botch it, it doesn't violate your warranty).

Here's the specs of a similar machine I just picked out for you:

2.2GHz Core 2 Duo

Same amount of memory

Same hard disk

Same optical drive capabilities

Same size display, with a 2 megapixel webcam

Same graphics chipset

Microsoft Windows Vista Business edition

Microsoft Office Professional 2007

Dell Wireless-N card

- and -

3 year warranty with accidental damage protection. Yes, you can intentionally drop this thing on concrete from 4 feet and Dell will fully cover it for 3 years from the shipping date.

Guess how much it cost? $2493. For reference, with only a 90 day support and 1 year warranty, your 2.4GHz Macbook Pro costs $2649. For a more direct comparison, a 2.2GHz Macbook Pro with the extended warranty costs $2573, but doesn't cover accidental damage.

And if you do what I suggested as far as buying the 2.4GHz separately, it'd be around $2770 with the processor from Newegg.com -- still a great deal if you consider that your 2.4GHz Macbook Pro with the extended warranty costs $2998 and doesn't cover accidental damage. Don't believe me on that? Directly from the fine print:

"b. Limitations The Plan does not cover: ... (ii) Damage to the Covered Equipment caused by accident, abuse, neglect, misuse"

Oh yeah, and you can install XP or Linux on it, or if you're adventurous, you could probably even install OS X, but why on earth would you want to do that?

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Installation_Guides

DirectX 10 card... maybe, But a card that will run oblivion at full specs.. no, and thats the problem.

Many will take comfort in the fact that Windoze can be installed on a Mac via Bootcamp/Parallels/Fusion etc and may start of using it relatively heavily (i did when i switched) but over time and further use with OS X most appreciate what it does better (sure there are some issues, some apps missing that would be really helpful, but that's more software developers rather than Apple) and will switch completely

I now only use Parallels to run SAP on it, and in Coherence mode it doesn't even appear as though i've booted into Windoze....

I'm a fully blooded Mac convert, and that's from the IT Manager in a pretty much totally Windoze environment. Many people ask me for recommendations and there have been very, very few occasions when i haven't suggested a Mac, for "normal" computer usage for your average home user (Web, Word Processing, Email) then a Mac is perfect, no spyware, adware, virii to contend with etc.. makes for a much more pleasing user experience.

That does sound interesting - have you got the model number? Hoping it's available in the UK....

"NPD only measures sales through retailers sales, so Apple's likely to have fared less well if the wider resale and direct-to-buyer channels are taken into account."

Dell still ECLIPSES Apple because 99% of Dell's sales are direct and online. They only operate a sliver of retail stores. This may swing huge now that Dell is selling the bargain basement computers at Wal-Mart.