Mac User Groups Fade in Number and Influence, but Devotees Press On | Hacker News Reader

Mac User Groups Fade in Number and Influence, but Devotees Press On

nytimes.com

There's no doubt it felt cool to be into Macs in the very early 90s because they were the underdog. You were in an avant garde club that had a lovely ui, a lot of character and personality (the systen crash bomb, the wild eep), and it was a secret that only people in the club really knew about .

Thats not the case anymore, and Mac forums are stull full of people hating on Microsoft, but that's not fun to do anymore, nor does it make sense. Apple is now the titan.

I still use Macs but now my Mac is just my computer. And that's fine.

> Mac forums are stull full of people hating on Microsoft

Which is odd because Bill Gates appeared at the Mac launch and Microsoft was the biggest and keenest early supplier of Mac software. Microsoft even offered to help promote the adoption of Mac OS by other companies to make it an industry standard. Thirty years later, it's still supplying Office and more than a dozen iOS apps.

The extra irony is that, through its draconian control of patented technologies and huge revenue streams from the iPhone, Apple may now be more of an Evil Empire than Microsoft was ;-)

How are Macs the titans?

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

According to a few sites, Apple has between 5 and 10% market share.

Windows still absolutely dominates the desktop market, with Mac, Linux, and other *nixes picking up maybe 15% in aggregate.

Macs aren't the titans, although it's worth noting that the Macintosh's market share has crept up over the last few years from a low of 2.5 percent to a current value of about 12 percent (stats like Netmarketshare measure installed base, which is not quite the same thing)

But I believe the poster was saying that Apple is now a titan, which is true when you look at mobile devices (which now dwarf PC sales in terms of raw numbers). Microsoft has been failing in mobile for years, which makes the old Apple-Microsoft rivalries seem quaint.

Yes, sorry I meant Apple in general rather than Mac. They have become a juggernaut, financially and culturally.

The Mac itself, though, has become more aspirational in society in general. It doesn't have the market penetration because Apple prices itself out of the the lower end of the market, not because its OS, hardware (hello one button mouse) or software range is sneered at, which used to be the case.

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