Is Apple planning to kill off Mac OS X?

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

As Gerald Ratner will testify, standing on stage and panning your own products isn’t a particularly effective sales strategy. Yet when Steve Jobs announced last night that he was “going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device”, it wasn’t a million miles away from the “total crap” quip that cost Ratner his job and, very nearly, his company.

Does Apple really want or even need full-fat Mac OS X? The evidence increasingly suggests not. In four short years, iOS has acquired a 16.8% share of the smartphone market, according to Gartner: almost double the 9.3% market share Apple’s spent 10 years building with Mac OS X.  On tablets, iOS and the iPad accounted for 80% of all sales in the first quarter of 2011, according to Context. iOS is mainstream: Mac OS X isn’t and likely never will be.

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Windows 7 overtakes Windows XP on PC Pro

Monday, March 14th, 2011

Here’s something that’s crept up on us at PC Pro towers: Windows 7 has overtaken Windows XP as the operating system most used by visitors to our website (click graph to enlarge).

The graph above runs from January 2008 until the end of last month – Windows 7 actually surpassed XP for the first time in December, we just hadn’t noticed it before (we’ve been busy, OK?).

The growth of Windows 7 has been quite extraordinary. In a little over 18 months, it’s gone from nowhere to the most used operating system. Compare that to Windows Vista, which didn’t even come close to toppling Windows XP, never getting any higher than 27% of the PC Pro audience.

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Mac OS X 10.6: a quick look at Snow Leopard

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

It wasn’t mentioned on the 10 o’clock news. It barely got a mention in the newspapers. Many non-Apple interest web sites didn’t mention it. When I went to the flagship Apple Store in Regents Street on Friday lunch time, there weren’t queues round the block (though there were a few inside). It seems that Apple have managed to launch a new product without all the usual fuss.

However, I am sure that everyone who reads this article will know that Snow Leopard is the update to Mac OS X that was released last week. Obviously as a keen Mac user, I did go and buy it on the day it launched and I did install it on my MacBook over the weekend but was it worth the £25 I paid for it?

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