Re: Learning from SJ

Daniel Barlow <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Mon, 16 Jul 2007:
Don Geddis wrote:
Rainer Joswig <joswig@xxxxxxx> wrote on Sat, 14 Jul 2007:
Lots of people now use laptops as their primary machines

Laptops are part of the PC market, by the way. Perhaps you didn't mean to
include them in your "grey boxes" label.

In "whole user experience" terms, laptops /done right/ are very different
beasts from desktop PCs. Suspend/resume, hotplugging, intermittent network
connectivity, often issues of synchronisation with a "base station" or "base
network", size, weight, battery life, heat output, robustness (how often do
you drop a desktop?), input devices (try doing freehand drawing with a nipple
mouse or touchpad), etc etc. There is some sense in which they're "part of
the PC market", but it's a bit like saying an iPod is "part of the audio
market": you can't replace it with a separates system.

I agree with you that they are an interesting segment of the overall global
PC market, and for many purposes cannot be directly replaced with some PC from
a different segment.

But the global PC market is full of such segments. Much the same argument
could be made about "1U rack-mounted 4-CPU PC server boxes" too. Or "high-end
overclocked liquid-cooled shuttle-box form factor gaming PCs".

Meanwhile, the big change in laptops in the last few years is that many of
them are becoming replacements for desktop machines. It used to be that a
user had a large tradeoff to make, between performance on a desktop, and
mobility on a laptop. But many high-end laptops have all the performance of
everything except the very best desktops. Now that it's no longer much of a
performance tradeoff, many users are buying laptops because "why not?" get
the mobility too. Even if they mostly use them plugged into power and a
docking station and a keyboard and a mouse and a large monitor.

So: while I agree that there is some argument to be made for examining
Apple's sales just in laptops, the market isn't so different that it is
meaningless to do the typical comparison, of Apple's Mac sales as a
percentage of the overall global PC market.

At least, no more absurd than comparing Lisp's penetration among developers,
with that of Perl or C# or Java or Haskell. Surely programming languages
could be described as belonging to a tiny niche as well, but it is still
reasonable to ask what percent of all software developers program in Lisp
vs. some other programming language.

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. -- Van Roy's Law
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: AMD writing down the ~$3.2 billion goodwill assumed in ATi purchase
    ... NVidia, because they sell an "enthusiast" product. ... Well, if the consumer desktop market dies completely, then PC gaming ... Intel has already made the synergy work. ... *shrug* They aren't playing PC games on laptops. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg)
  • Re: Is Apple Innovation Dead? (was "Pros & Cons of SR")
    ... The iMac, Apple's laptops, the iPhone, the iPods all stand ... How do you determine market share? ... Apple had 91% of the ... are the market leaders in higher education sales, ...
    (comp.sys.mac.system)
  • Re: Monitor question
    ... forcing the widescreen format allows the manufacturers to charge us the *same* amount of money for a *reduced* screen real estate. ... The widescreen fad allows a vendor to make a LCD panel having the overall area of a 15" classic panel, and market it as a 19" monitor. ... the usefulness of laptops for serious display-dependent work has arguably *decreased* over the last decade or so. ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Apple Sells 1 of every 6 new laptops
    ... laptops purchased in the U.S., ... most online and all direct sales, said Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro ... Baker attributed the jump in market share to refreshes that both laptop ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Market Updates 30 May11
    ... Market Updates 30 May11 ... Buy Amara Raja Batteries 213.45 target 225 ... JKTIL is the market leader in the radial truck and bus segment. ... The report is based upon information that we consider reliable, ...
    (soc.culture.indian)