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How Apple is Training a Generation of Mac Users

14 points by NathanKP 17y ago

Zev 17y ago
In the early 80's to the early 90's Apple achieved fairly significant success at getting their computers into elementary and middle school computer labs. Ignoring the fact that these labs are now stocked with Dell's or other cheap machines bought in bulk? The MacBook is perfectly situated to grab the college student market. Not only does it have great battery life (perfect for taking notes in class) but it is also light enough to carry around in a backpack. So... make a product that does something that people want in a very good way and people will buy it. Who would have thought?
- sjs 17y ago
  I know you're being sarcastic but some notebook manufacturers can't even get the USB ports right side up. Most of them cut corners all over the place, and unless you spend an amount equivalent to the price of a MacBook ($1500+) you won't find a notebook that can equal it on the market. I hesitate to say this but from what I have seen personally no one puts as much thought or care into every last detail of a machine as Apple - from hardware to software they pore over little things that all add up to make me happy. Macs have long had 2 volume settings for headphones and speaker audio outputs (so you don't blast your ears by mistake, or play something out loud you meant to play quietly), and similarly iPods pause the audio when the headphones are unplugged. Simple details that most companies would never think of on their own, but that give you a warm fuzzy feeling when you discover them.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Interesting, in my M.S. classes the last few semesters, everybody had a laptop of some kind, only one or two people had macs, and all of them booted them into Windows. About 30-40% had netbooks for precisely the "easy to carry around long battery life" reason. Plus they are also dirt cheap.
smokey_the_bear 17y ago
My schools in the 80s and 90s had computer labs full of macs too. They were terrible. Way too little ram, loaded down with student repressing software, and they crashed all the time. At home, I had speedy packard bell, tandy, and dell computers. I thought I'd never buy a mac. But here I am, typing away on a macbook pro. Their computers have gotten a lot better.
- yesimahuman 17y ago
  Any chance that was At-Ease? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease Such fond memories :)
  - smokey_the_bear 17y ago
    It was At-Ease! At least in high school. I believe it could be overridden by holding down the shift key while booting. The most horrible memories are of making Hypercard presentations. It was required for projects for which it was totally inappropriate because the teachers wanted to incorporate computers in the class room. And the files always got corrupted and had to be totally redone.
    - yesimahuman 17y ago
      I was just going to ask about Hypercard but didn't want to push it. I think we used a newer version on OS 8 maybe, but I had pretty fond memories of that as well. Maybe that was my first "programming" experience. I remember making a Zelda kind of game where you clicked part of the screen and it went to the next card. Really fun, but I totally agree it was overused and forced.
      - smokey_the_bear 17y ago
        I remember using it to make the Earth revolve around the sun in a presentation about Copernicus. Good times.
martey 17y ago
I think that this article makes several points about why high school and college students (who are often spending their parents' money) gravitate toward Apple computers. However, it fails to explain how this will cause them to either purchase (generally more expensive) Apple computers after graduation or convince their companies' finance departments to pay for Apple machines.
icefox 17y ago
"Now half or better of the students have Mac ... I think that this gradual trend is not just a local fad, but rather the result of gradual and deliberate planning and work by Apple." Welcome to 2006. When more then half use mac it isn't a trend. The whole article is just a fluff piece.
drats 17y ago
Blogspot mac fanboys linking to other blogspot mac fanboys. I noticed macbooks everywhere at university a while back, now I just see zillions of netbooks. His comment on "frustrating Windows netbooks" doesn't gel with their popularity, everyone I know loves theirs , to say nothing of people like me who run linux with full hardware support now and love gnome-do/chome/terminals as a massively powerful combination. The only hardware I have that doesn't work properly is my iPhone which has never had 3G as it was in the first run of 3G iPhones and also attempted to lock down the ability to tether. Apple doesn't honor warranty agreements they sell you a phone which doesn't have a major feature working as advertised and then refuse to replace it. But then plenty of PC manufacturers have much lower rates of failure than Apple, I see Apple products as quite cheap and unreliable now (macbook casing cracked along with tons of other people, early hdd failure, iphone without promised 3G, iphone cable fraying and starting to fall to bits in the first month, headphone rubber coming off in a couple of months, heavy discoloration of headphones in a year of light use). And Windows7 and recent linux distributions are easily as powerful as OSX, I would argue more so with linux due to customization.
- sjs 17y ago
  I'm not buying it. This is from Nov. 2009: > Shoppers and list-makers may be interested to learn that Asus and Toshiba notebooks had three-year failure rates below 16 percent. Sony placed third, with a 16.8 percent three-year failure rate, followed by Apple (17.4 percent), Dell (18.3 percent) and Lenovo (21.5). Acer and Gateway came in just under 24 percent, and Hewlett-Packard, which is the world’s largest producer of PCs, came in last, with a 25.6 percent failure rate over three years. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Asus-Toshiba-Have-Lowest-Failure-Rates-Says-Study-488979/ http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Asus-Toshiba... Apple may not be the best but I really want to know how you can stretch the phrases "plenty" and "much lower" to claim that "plenty of PC manufacturers have much lower rates of failure than Apple". 2.5% less failures at the absolute best, by 2 companies. Apple makes decent products and in many ways is leading the industry. It's not the same Apple we knew in the 90s. -- (personal experiences below, you may not care) My 2006 MacBook is going strong, and I managed to pour a glass of chocolate milk on it in 2007^. The 2005 Mac mini I owned before that is still going strong at my friend's house. My iPod 5G w/ video from 2005 and shuffle from 2007 are going strong. My 2006 AirPort express works flawlessly. ^ I had to replace my MacBook's keyboard which had sticky keys and battery which couldn't hold much charge, but the motherboard and CPU were fine after drying out and being cleaned. (I know I come off as a bit of an Apple fanatic but I've only been a customer for 5 years. Before that I had only used Windows and Linux. I still use Linux on servers of course. I'm not religious about Apple at all, they just make good products. iPhone/iPad are too locked down for my taste, but still good.)
pedalpete 17y ago
Due to the recognizable design of macs, and the macs vs. everything else paradigm, it can definitely appear that macs have a much larger market share than they actually do, leading people to believe they are more popular than they are. I was in a cafe and my father made a comment about how many people had macs, and maybe he should get one. there were about 10 people on computers. 3 had macs, but they all looked the same. of course the other 7 were all different brands (actually 2 dells and two lenovo), but they all looked so different that they didn't seem like the people using them were part of a team or movement. This can also be a way of 'training' people to consider mac...just look how many people have switched - though it may not be as much as you think. But how can it be 'a nice fashion piece that sets you apart from the other students', if as the author states, they are all using macs?
- elblanco 17y ago
  I've noticed that most of my friends that have switched to a mac either switch back on their next computer purchase ("it just doesn't do everything I wanted it to do"), or install linux... Win 7 is making it a lot easier to switch back.
  - pedalpete 17y ago
    I've actually noticed a similar trend. The few friends who switched to mac, say they love it and they'd never go back, then they find they can't get/afford the mac they want, and go back to Win. Positive comments all around about Win7.
    - elblanco 17y ago
      I've usually noticed it in the form of "Macs are awesome, but they definitely sandbox you in in terms of what you can do, and how you can do that. If you don't think in the Mac way, you'll find yourself frustrated." This realization seems to hit about 6-12 months into ownership of their first Mac. Then slowly, they start cracking, and they start booting into Windows, or they install Linux and never go back. At some point they find that they can do everything they want outside of OSX and never bother to boot back. And then they realize that Mac keyboards and mice are really designed for Macs, and start to complain about that. And then you hear things like "I don't even want to carry my Mac Book Pro around since it's so heavy." And they end up just using it at home. Some will try and use their iPhones as a temporary portable computing solution, but you can only do so much with that. By this time a couple of years has passed and its time to get a new computer. So they hit the Apple store and realize that nothing has really changed. The hardware is still "ok", but features they don't really care about are touted as differentiators worthy of an extra 40% "Apple Tax" -- like fancy acronyms for expensive screens that only appear marginally better for the casual user, or "unibody construction" or whatever. None of my friends know or care what a "bezel" is. But they think the chin on the new iMacs makes it look ridiculous compared to the HP they saw at Costco the other day for half the price (and better specs). So they go to a Best Buy or whatever, the Macs are out front on table with a little dedicated display and sales area, but by this time they are conditioned not to care about the shiny because frankly, the shiny hasn't really cared much for them the last couple of years and head back to Windows laptop land and....well we've all seen the Microsoft commercials where some a parent takes their teenager into a Best Buy and walk out with a new Windows 7 PC. Except now they bought the laptop and a netbook, fell in love with Windows 7 at first sight, and they basically have no real transition to make since they all already use some version of Windows at work anyway (and they'll just use an enterprise Office license for Office stuff). And they still have enough money left over to buy some movies and a few CDs. Of course there's always the one guy, the "Mac guy" who thinks we're all crazy and tells campfire ghost stories about problems Windows hasn't had since 1996. He drives a Dark Grey VW Golf, listens to Coldplay exclusively (and Paul Oakenfold), has his entire apartment furnished courtesy of Ikea, and wears stylish oxford shirts with cargo pants, refuses to wear sneakers and always has 2-3 days of stubble. Everybody still thinks he has a aura of "cool", just that his schtick is getting a little stale now that everybody is moving to the suburbs or into management. Nobody makes the connection that he was the one that got them all to switch in the first place it was so long ago, but they all remember the $2500 they could have used for their vacation to Switzerland.
sushi 17y ago
I have no problem with Mac and Apple products. I think they look cool and are works of art but I also hate the fact that Apple is trying to close down their system and throwing us back in time. The future lies or rather should lie in open systems and Apple should respect that. It's not for Apple to decide what a user can download on his iPhone after he has bought the damn phone. Again they make great products but they must lose some of their Big Brother control. kthxbye.

14 points by NathanKP 17y ago

Zev 17y ago

In the early 80's to the early 90's Apple achieved fairly significant success at getting their computers into elementary and middle school computer labs. Ignoring the fact that these labs are now stocked with Dell's or other cheap machines bought in bulk? The MacBook is perfectly situated to grab the college student market. Not only does it have great battery life (perfect for taking notes in class) but it is also light enough to carry around in a backpack. So... make a product that does something that people want in a very good way and people will buy it. Who would have thought?

sjs 17y ago
I know you're being sarcastic but some notebook manufacturers can't even get the USB ports right side up. Most of them cut corners all over the place, and unless you spend an amount equivalent to the price of a MacBook ($1500+) you won't find a notebook that can equal it on the market. I hesitate to say this but from what I have seen personally no one puts as much thought or care into every last detail of a machine as Apple - from hardware to software they pore over little things that all add up to make me happy. Macs have long had 2 volume settings for headphones and speaker audio outputs (so you don't blast your ears by mistake, or play something out loud you meant to play quietly), and similarly iPods pause the audio when the headphones are unplugged. Simple details that most companies would never think of on their own, but that give you a warm fuzzy feeling when you discover them.
elblanco 17y ago
Interesting, in my M.S. classes the last few semesters, everybody had a laptop of some kind, only one or two people had macs, and all of them booted them into Windows. About 30-40% had netbooks for precisely the "easy to carry around long battery life" reason. Plus they are also dirt cheap.

smokey_the_bear 17y ago

My schools in the 80s and 90s had computer labs full of macs too. They were terrible. Way too little ram, loaded down with student repressing software, and they crashed all the time. At home, I had speedy packard bell, tandy, and dell computers. I thought I'd never buy a mac. But here I am, typing away on a macbook pro. Their computers have gotten a lot better.

yesimahuman 17y ago
Any chance that was At-Ease? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease Such fond memories :)
- smokey_the_bear 17y ago
  It was At-Ease! At least in high school. I believe it could be overridden by holding down the shift key while booting. The most horrible memories are of making Hypercard presentations. It was required for projects for which it was totally inappropriate because the teachers wanted to incorporate computers in the class room. And the files always got corrupted and had to be totally redone.
  - yesimahuman 17y ago
    I was just going to ask about Hypercard but didn't want to push it. I think we used a newer version on OS 8 maybe, but I had pretty fond memories of that as well. Maybe that was my first "programming" experience. I remember making a Zelda kind of game where you clicked part of the screen and it went to the next card. Really fun, but I totally agree it was overused and forced.
    - smokey_the_bear 17y ago
      I remember using it to make the Earth revolve around the sun in a presentation about Copernicus. Good times.

martey 17y ago

I think that this article makes several points about why high school and college students (who are often spending their parents' money) gravitate toward Apple computers. However, it fails to explain how this will cause them to either purchase (generally more expensive) Apple computers after graduation or convince their companies' finance departments to pay for Apple machines.

icefox 17y ago

"Now half or better of the students have Mac ... I think that this gradual trend is not just a local fad, but rather the result of gradual and deliberate planning and work by Apple." Welcome to 2006. When more then half use mac it isn't a trend. The whole article is just a fluff piece.

drats 17y ago

Blogspot mac fanboys linking to other blogspot mac fanboys. I noticed macbooks everywhere at university a while back, now I just see zillions of netbooks. His comment on "frustrating Windows netbooks" doesn't gel with their popularity, everyone I know loves theirs , to say nothing of people like me who run linux with full hardware support now and love gnome-do/chome/terminals as a massively powerful combination. The only hardware I have that doesn't work properly is my iPhone which has never had 3G as it was in the first run of 3G iPhones and also attempted to lock down the ability to tether. Apple doesn't honor warranty agreements they sell you a phone which doesn't have a major feature working as advertised and then refuse to replace it. But then plenty of PC manufacturers have much lower rates of failure than Apple, I see Apple products as quite cheap and unreliable now (macbook casing cracked along with tons of other people, early hdd failure, iphone without promised 3G, iphone cable fraying and starting to fall to bits in the first month, headphone rubber coming off in a couple of months, heavy discoloration of headphones in a year of light use). And Windows7 and recent linux distributions are easily as powerful as OSX, I would argue more so with linux due to customization.

sjs 17y ago
I'm not buying it. This is from Nov. 2009: > Shoppers and list-makers may be interested to learn that Asus and Toshiba notebooks had three-year failure rates below 16 percent. Sony placed third, with a 16.8 percent three-year failure rate, followed by Apple (17.4 percent), Dell (18.3 percent) and Lenovo (21.5). Acer and Gateway came in just under 24 percent, and Hewlett-Packard, which is the world’s largest producer of PCs, came in last, with a 25.6 percent failure rate over three years. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Asus-Toshiba-Have-Lowest-Failure-Rates-Says-Study-488979/ http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Asus-Toshiba... Apple may not be the best but I really want to know how you can stretch the phrases "plenty" and "much lower" to claim that "plenty of PC manufacturers have much lower rates of failure than Apple". 2.5% less failures at the absolute best, by 2 companies. Apple makes decent products and in many ways is leading the industry. It's not the same Apple we knew in the 90s. -- (personal experiences below, you may not care) My 2006 MacBook is going strong, and I managed to pour a glass of chocolate milk on it in 2007^. The 2005 Mac mini I owned before that is still going strong at my friend's house. My iPod 5G w/ video from 2005 and shuffle from 2007 are going strong. My 2006 AirPort express works flawlessly. ^ I had to replace my MacBook's keyboard which had sticky keys and battery which couldn't hold much charge, but the motherboard and CPU were fine after drying out and being cleaned. (I know I come off as a bit of an Apple fanatic but I've only been a customer for 5 years. Before that I had only used Windows and Linux. I still use Linux on servers of course. I'm not religious about Apple at all, they just make good products. iPhone/iPad are too locked down for my taste, but still good.)

pedalpete 17y ago

Due to the recognizable design of macs, and the macs vs. everything else paradigm, it can definitely appear that macs have a much larger market share than they actually do, leading people to believe they are more popular than they are. I was in a cafe and my father made a comment about how many people had macs, and maybe he should get one. there were about 10 people on computers. 3 had macs, but they all looked the same. of course the other 7 were all different brands (actually 2 dells and two lenovo), but they all looked so different that they didn't seem like the people using them were part of a team or movement. This can also be a way of 'training' people to consider mac...just look how many people have switched - though it may not be as much as you think. But how can it be 'a nice fashion piece that sets you apart from the other students', if as the author states, they are all using macs?

elblanco 17y ago
I've noticed that most of my friends that have switched to a mac either switch back on their next computer purchase ("it just doesn't do everything I wanted it to do"), or install linux... Win 7 is making it a lot easier to switch back.
- pedalpete 17y ago
  I've actually noticed a similar trend. The few friends who switched to mac, say they love it and they'd never go back, then they find they can't get/afford the mac they want, and go back to Win. Positive comments all around about Win7.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    I've usually noticed it in the form of "Macs are awesome, but they definitely sandbox you in in terms of what you can do, and how you can do that. If you don't think in the Mac way, you'll find yourself frustrated." This realization seems to hit about 6-12 months into ownership of their first Mac. Then slowly, they start cracking, and they start booting into Windows, or they install Linux and never go back. At some point they find that they can do everything they want outside of OSX and never bother to boot back. And then they realize that Mac keyboards and mice are really designed for Macs, and start to complain about that. And then you hear things like "I don't even want to carry my Mac Book Pro around since it's so heavy." And they end up just using it at home. Some will try and use their iPhones as a temporary portable computing solution, but you can only do so much with that. By this time a couple of years has passed and its time to get a new computer. So they hit the Apple store and realize that nothing has really changed. The hardware is still "ok", but features they don't really care about are touted as differentiators worthy of an extra 40% "Apple Tax" -- like fancy acronyms for expensive screens that only appear marginally better for the casual user, or "unibody construction" or whatever. None of my friends know or care what a "bezel" is. But they think the chin on the new iMacs makes it look ridiculous compared to the HP they saw at Costco the other day for half the price (and better specs). So they go to a Best Buy or whatever, the Macs are out front on table with a little dedicated display and sales area, but by this time they are conditioned not to care about the shiny because frankly, the shiny hasn't really cared much for them the last couple of years and head back to Windows laptop land and....well we've all seen the Microsoft commercials where some a parent takes their teenager into a Best Buy and walk out with a new Windows 7 PC. Except now they bought the laptop and a netbook, fell in love with Windows 7 at first sight, and they basically have no real transition to make since they all already use some version of Windows at work anyway (and they'll just use an enterprise Office license for Office stuff). And they still have enough money left over to buy some movies and a few CDs. Of course there's always the one guy, the "Mac guy" who thinks we're all crazy and tells campfire ghost stories about problems Windows hasn't had since 1996. He drives a Dark Grey VW Golf, listens to Coldplay exclusively (and Paul Oakenfold), has his entire apartment furnished courtesy of Ikea, and wears stylish oxford shirts with cargo pants, refuses to wear sneakers and always has 2-3 days of stubble. Everybody still thinks he has a aura of "cool", just that his schtick is getting a little stale now that everybody is moving to the suburbs or into management. Nobody makes the connection that he was the one that got them all to switch in the first place it was so long ago, but they all remember the $2500 they could have used for their vacation to Switzerland.

sushi 17y ago

I have no problem with Mac and Apple products. I think they look cool and are works of art but I also hate the fact that Apple is trying to close down their system and throwing us back in time. The future lies or rather should lie in open systems and Apple should respect that. It's not for Apple to decide what a user can download on his iPhone after he has bought the damn phone. Again they make great products but they must lose some of their Big Brother control. kthxbye.