Well, it’s no surprise to those of us that have recently switched to the Mac that Apple blew past its forecasts yesterday. Sales of the Mac have nearly doubled in the last year. Pundits appear mystified by this phenomenon and are trying to come up with all sorts of convoluted explanations like in this post on CNET.
To me, it’s plain and simple – frustration with Windows has reached the proverbial tipping point and the best alternative on the market is the Mac …
About three months ago, after going through yet another uphill battle with Windows on my laptop – I finally decided to call it quits and switch to a Mac with OS X. Since then, I have been surprised to hear I am not alone. Several people have told me they have switched to the Mac recently because of increasing flakiness with Windows.
It seems like the very reasons which have made Windows and the PC platform such a runaway success are now haunting them. The vast ecosystem that exists around them have clearly led to a lot of innovative stuff being developed, but there is a huge combinatorial explosion that causes pretty much every machine to have its own unique configuration of software and hardware similar to an individual’s fingerprint or DNA. The trouble is that most of these configurations have never been tested and are therefore highly fragile and failure prone.
It seems like Linux on the desktop will likely suffer the same fate.
At least in the short term, the Mac being a somewhat closed system seems to help. In the three months I’ve owned mine, I’ve had to do one update and subsequent reboot which is pretty amazing given I was at about two reboots a day with Windows!
I hope for my own sake that the Mac does not become too successful – shhhh, don’t tell anyone you saw this 