Opinion: Mine’s bigger than yours

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I’ll give you a minute to read that, before we continue.

Welcome back.

Various analysts are prepared to claim all sorts of things by manipulating the numbers in this survey, mostly around how jolly well Apple is doing these days. But in reality it’s another lesson in how to make any set of numbers say anything you like about anything you like…or dislike.

For starters, this survey didn’t look at online sales, so that’s the mighty Dell out of the picture. Probably didn’t count Apple’s online sales either, since it was only concerned with what happened on the retail shop floor. The analysts made great leaps in logic by claiming that Apple was doing really, really well selling to people with lots and lots of money. Okay, so what’s new? Apple has been charging way too much for its technology for at least, oh, let me see now, about twenty years. This stuff has never been cheap. That’s why it’s hardly ever plonked onto the desks of office workers.

Mind you, the NSW RTA once bought a huge shedload of iMacs to use on their front counters, but that was an utterly perverse order. The RTA techs turned the iMacs into Unix terminals to access the back-end in Sydney from all over the state. They even chucked the keyboards away and replaced them with some function key-riddled items. Guess they never heard of Wyse Technology. Anyway, ordinary office workers hardly ever get their hands on a Macintosh because of the price, and because of the cost of servicing. What was that? Oh yeah, I said servicing costs.

It’s not that an iMac is any less reliable than a Windoze PC, it’s just that if anything breaks you have to take it back to a workshop to open the sucker up and fix it. That means someone sitting staring into space without a computer. When something breaks in a Windoze PC you can mostly fix it on the spot at the desk, with a bag of spare parts. Anyway, back to the retail survey, which mostly proves my point – the boss isn’t going to spend over $1K on each worker, but maybe the upwardly mobile workers are happy to spend that amount on their home computers.

Besides, Apple always says it isn’t about market share, which is just as well, since they still don’t have any. Marketing manipulation of surveys notwithstanding.