I was at the local library today to do a couple hours programming in a quiet environment without the normal distractions of my home office. To my surprise when I looked around I saw a sea of Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. Sure, there were a few Toshiba or HP laptops too, but the majority of the machines in the room had shinning bright Apple logos on the screens.
My unscientific survey in the library today yielded the following numbers:
| System | Count |
|---|---|
| White MacBook | 2 |
| Unibody 13″ Macbook | 1 |
| 15″ MacBook Pro | 2 |
| 12″ PowerBook | 1 |
| Toshiba | 1 |
| HP | 2 |
| IBM | 1 |
That breaks down to 60% Apple, 40% Microsoft.
Now that’s what I like to see! Maybe the recent discussion on the macsb about Mac market share isn’t so far fetched after all. Here are a few interesting links:
Who knows if this is all true or not. With the recent announcement that Steve Jobs will be taking a six month leave of absense from Apple due to health concerns the future for Apple is less clear than it once was. I’m sure Apple will do just fine over the next 12-18 months since there are a number of products already in development. The big concern has to be about the sort of innovations that Apple can concieve of and execute on after the current pipeline runs dry. Will there be other folks at Apple with the same vision and forsight as Steve Jobs? Probably, but it is far from certain.
Atleast for now it seems like the market share for Apple will continue to climb. Microsoft will have to hit a home run with the new Windows 7 operating system if they want to fend off the onslaught of Mac OS X. Being a long time developer on both platforms I can say that from my point of view having more users on the Mac makes me happy! I look forward to developing, releasing and selling more applications on the Mac platform.