Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Mac sales: my curious lack of surprise

I've just seen that at this moment in time Macs are doing rather well: roaring ahead whilst PC sales are declining.

I normally build my own PC's, but recently decided that I want to change this pattern and actually buy one off the shelf.

My principle stumbling block is that I don't see why PC's have to come in big boxes: the last one I built runs dual monitors and fits in a shoe box.

However trying to buy a powerful compact PC seems to be inordinately difficult: the best that I have been able to come up with is either another Shuttle, pre-assembled, or the NRG Frost. Which now sadly seems to have been discontinued. Not helping in my quest is that I want to run some variant of Unix/Linux (Ubuntu preferably) on it, not Windows.

In short, here in Melbourne, Australia, I haven't found anything. Other than perhaps a new iMac. It's compact (beautiful), runs a Unix flavor, and comes with a "free" monitor: all for $1949, about the same as I was quoted for a headless NRG Frost.

The PC world seems to think that bigger = better, and that we all want to run Windows. With this broad stereotyping in play my next PC is most likely to be a Mac. So reports of Apples success don't surprise me in the slightest.

7 comments:

Daniel said...

Is there enough space in the Mac to add a couple of extra drives and internal PCI cards (or whatever the Macs use), slots for additional memory, etc?

martin-paulo said...

I think that the thunderbolt port is the great future hope for extra drives, monitors, PCI cards etc... Read about it here: http://www.maclife.com/article/features/everything_you_need_know_about_thunderbolt

The memory: I think that as you get offered (expensive, IMHO) upgrades at purchase time, that there should be enough slots in that slim case for extra memory.

Daniel said...

From what I read there, it looks like Thunderbolt is for external additions only - basically an alternative to USB. I would still want to have enough space to add internal components.

martin-paulo said...

You know, in my entire career as a software developer, I never plugged extra cards or drives into my home computer...

Work computers: now that's a different story :-)

Daniel said...

That's quite amazing. You're going to lose your Geek Badge. On my desktop PC I've added 2 extra hard drives a wifi card, more memory and a TV tuner (which is external but I'd prefer internal).

martin-paulo said...

I might just be specifying my needs a little better up front?

Daniel said...

What you mean is that you are spending too much upfront on things just in case you need them later.

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/06/what-futureproofing-your-pc-really-means