40 percent of college students say their next computer purchase will be a Mac | Hacker News Reader

40 percent of college students say their next computer purchase will be a Mac

appleinsider.com

57 pointspg70 comments

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

As far as I can see, Apple is if anything even more tyrannical and monopolistic than Microsoft, the main difference being that Apple is sexier. Apple wants the computer to become like a household appliance, closed to outside modification.

Looking at how they've run iTunes, the restrictive iPhone SDK, etc ... M$ wanted to control all your software but they at least gave you some choice on hardware. If Apple becomes the new monopoly we won't even have any say on that.

That is a bit worrying, but at least it will be a monopoly they've earned one user at a time, like Google, rather than an existing monopoly they took over from the previous owner, like Microsoft.

That will tend to limit their misdeeds, because to do that a company has to have a different type of employee. If Google wanted to start being evil, they'd face an internal revolt. And Apple too, to some extent.

OS's have some network externalities, so "one user at a time" isn't entirely accurate. There's a tipping point in there some where.

Have you read "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 years of High Tech Marketing Disasters" ? He makes a convincing case that a lot of the MS monopoly comes not from brilliant products or evil genius, but by hitching a ride on a more open platform, and having had less disasters than the competition.

I'm not sure I agree with him 100%, because once they got that toehold, they sure exploited it to crush everyone else. I don't have many doubts that Jobs has some crushing tendencies himself - exhibit #1 is the look and feel lawsuit.

Oops: I downmodded you by mistake when I meant to downmod the lame South Park metaphor. Sorry!

Did you guys ever watch that South Park episode where one of the grade-school girls starts to grow tits? Suddenly all of the boys start thinking "she's so smart!" and "she's so funny!" and wanting to hang out with her, and they honestly have no idea that there is any connection between their new attitudes and her new tits.

There is no question in my mind that Macs are beautiful. The latest gadgets like the iPods and iPhones are real works of art.

Sometimes I wonder if Apple doesn't get cut a bit too much slack just because they are "cool". Just because someone is beautiful and smiling at you doesn't necessarily mean they do not have malicious intent. And especially it seems a lot of times, we are just so eager to believe in any credible opponent to M$ that we are willing to overlook any warning signs. I wonder if the peasants that supported the French and Russian revolutions felt the same way?

From what I've seen of the Apple community, they seem to have a fairly easy time swallowing the not-so-savory things Apple does, with reasoning like "they need to maintain the user experience" or "they're a corporation, tuey need to make money for their shareholders, expecting better would be naive" or "screw that, who cares, there's nothing we can do, look at my sexy Mac". Probably the last reason is the most honest, since the former is to some extent BS, and the second is a sort of "well done genius, you've spotted one of the major problems in Western society" moment.

I haven't seen anything of the culture inside Apple that would suggest its employees to be any less dismissive of Apple's forays into "asshole corporation" territory. Especially considering that they're largely recruited from exactly this pool of Apple users.

Well, make sure all your code, docs and media are portable. So, remind me, what exactly is the problem?

At least they contribute to open source, are more UNIX-like and seem more open in general, speaking of Internet standards.

I'd say the main difference is that MS has a monopoly and Apple only has a very small part of the market. Thus MS is held to a higher standard.

"Apple wants the computer to become like a household appliance, closed to outside modification:" i think you're putting the cart before the horse, there.

i'm not sure where i read it, might have been in one of pg's essays. the author pointed out that, in the early days of the car, you had to be a car expert to own and operate one. they would break down all the time, your only hope was to know what to do when that happened. eventually cars were refined to the point where any and everybody can have one.

computers are on that same trajectory.

I think it will be interesting to see how many of them are willing to put their money where their mouth is and plunk down $1000-2000 for an email/Internet research/word processing machine.

Are we in fact entering circumstances where it's believed you need a Core 2 Duo machine with 1-2 GB RAM to run Word, Excel, and a web browser? (I'm assuming most students aren't running or writing finite element codes, simulations, and other computationally intensive programs where more cores and more clock speed gives you huge gains.)

Games, tunes, videos. Though you could do these on much less hardware!

In the case of Apple products, looking cool in the quad or the food court factors in as well.

We've already been at that point. No one really needs more than a 300Mhz for email, word processing, etc. The OLPC is 433Mhz and it's good enough for that. My god, you could use a 5Mhz computer to do spreadsheet stuff. A graphing calculator has more power than some of the older computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Texas_Instruments...

The whole software industry is really messed up when we're forcing people to upgrade to do the same things they've always been doing.

I'm pretty glad to have the second core hanging around in my MBP. It didn't cost me much to have, but when I was working on this project:

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-my...

I was able to continue all my normal tasks while one core did all the processing work.

I'm assuming most students aren't running or writing finite element codes, simulations, and other computationally intensive programs where more cores and more clock speed gives you huge gains

That's what quad Opteron servers and screen sessions are for, anyhow. An iPhone would provide all the power I need for statistical methodology development (for genome-wide association studies) if I could use effectively use vim on it.

I'm thinking of moving up to an EC2 instance or 20 when the Opteron box gets too slow and I figure out how to use the parallel MLEM approach to missing data more effectively. Again, if I could just get a decent keyboard for an iPhone, I'd probably sell my ThinkPad and just use Putty from the windoze boxes at work, and my wife's iPhone (or buy one of my own, since she's always pecking on it now) at home.

(Aside: if you're looking to turn a mild-mannered, fashion-conscious, professional woman into a hardcore Internet addict, buy her an iPhone. Now she's complaining that she can't make videos on it and post them to YouTube)

The client-side OS is really kind of irrelevant, I don't care whether I'm in Linux or OS X or... well, I do hate Windows, but that's mostly because it gets in the way.

The customer pain for college students isn't just that they need a machine to crunch numbers or browse the Web... they also have the pain of wanting to be cool, hip, and trendy.

I think jwz's "How will this software get me laid?" question applies (albeit to hardware): http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

So, for $1,000 to $2,000 I get a really cool computer and an increased chance of getting laid. I'd like to see Dell fight that value proposition.

Future Apple commercial: A hot girl sitting in the grass in a park with a laptop, and guys going over and wanting to touch the laptop and ignoring the girl.

I thought only cars got you laid. And I believed even that so little that I bought an SUV.

The argument that buying Mac will help you get laid is flimsy. It is not based on anything worthy of the name "data".

The average college student is better off spending $150 for an old PC, putting Linux on it, and spending the other $850 to $1,850 on hookers if he is unsatisfied with his sex life.

This seems pretty obvious to me, and I would think would be obvious to anyone else who stopped watching TV (and hence TV commercials) and listening to the radio (and hence radio commercials) as long ago as I did (about 16 years ago).

I kinda get why people would like mac notebooks, they seem to be pretty nice, but I just can't get why techies/geeks/hackers like the iPhone. Yes the hardware is pretty, but due to Apple's political decisions, it is one of the most closed systems out there - restrictive API, restrictive distribution, remote bricking, no unlocking. Hackers buying iPhones seems a bit like Greenpeace donating money for Japanese whale "research" to me.

But unlocking is easy if you're a hacker. It's the non-hackers that apple is screwing the most.

The point of knowing how to hack stuff in this way is to get the most out of your soft/hardware, not to support the most hacker-friendly company with your completely insignificant amount of funds.

Unlocking my phone this time around (upgrading to the latest version) involved clicking 2 buttons and waiting 5 minutes.

Extremely non-hacker friendly. The first time around was much more command-line-ish.

I know you can jailbreak it, but you can ultimately hack anything to do anything (ie, people putting linux on every damn piece of electronics out there).

And yes, it matters a lot which company you support, since not only do a significant number of insignificant funds add up, but you're giving them mindshare and encouraging others to follow (which is kinda the point of pg's mac essay).

Just to give you an idea of why I'm so mad at Apple, the project that I'm working on right now needs a very good mobile component. Android is completely open and lets you do everything you need, so the first version is based on that. However, there can't be an iPhone app because Jobs is a control freak, he has decreed that I should not have the ability to write what I want to write.

So no, I just don't understand why people that supposedly value openness have such adulation for one of the most restrictive platforms out there. The eye-candy isn't worth it.

No significant percentage of people actually value this form of openness.

Really? Perhaps Apple should try selling their laptops with the same restrictions then?

People may not use the same specific terms, but whether it's computing or politics or anything else, they don't like to be arbitrarily told they can't do what they want to do.

I'm so bored of thisargument.

Jobs is not a control freak. You can put whatever you like on YOUR iPhone. What you can't do is put whatever you like on someone else's iPhone. In that case, Apple insists that you play by their rules, so that their customers can have confidence that the software they buy isn't going to break their wonderful new iPhone. Apple is essentially offering a service to people where Apple evaluates the technical qualities of software so that users don't have to.

If you can't get passed Apple's rules, why should you care? Write for another platform then. If your idea is so hot, you are going to have loads of users anyway. People may even buy the phone you support, just to have your software.

Of course, if what you really wanted was an easy ride on Apple's coattails, I have bad news for you - Apple never gives anyone an easy ride on their coattails... But I'm hardly going to cry a river for you.

Maybe that's why hackers would buy an iPhone due to its "restrictiveness". That's the fun in being hacker isn't it? Breaking into the system and playing around with it.

I'm not saying closed architecture is a good thing and am not a fan of Apple.

This figure doesn't surprise me. Every day I see signs to suggest Apple will soon be leaving Microsoft in the dust. Yesterday, a professional acquaintance suddenly announced he was buying an iMac. If you knew this guy, who has praised PCs and MS for years, you would know how big a deal this is. I was almost speechless. Time to go long on Apple, Inc.

I should be personally getting paid by apple, or buy some stock.

3 of my friends have made the jump after playing with my Macbook.

It is taking a lot of willpower to not get an Air or MBP.

The solution to your will power problem is that Apple should start just selling subscriptions. You sign up for an iBuy subscription and send in $300 a month. Apple randomly sends you cool stuff.

I would be willing to pay 10x as much for such a service! :P

The problem with that service is I am far too cheap and picky to subscribe.

They need to stop releasing such great new products. You can't go play with a Macbook Air and not consider purchasing it.

Surveys where people say what they will do in the future, and an empty sack, are worth about the same as a sack.

Come on, you measure what people do, not what they claim they'll do. And if somebody came to YC with a piece like this in her quiver, you'd probably be the first one to grill them about it...

So we are in trouble... I like a lot Macs, and it is what I suggest to computer agnostic guys, but unless you plan to install a unix-like operating system there it is very hard to think that an hacker can use this kind if user interface.

Hackers are much smarter than the people apple have in mind when designing the user interface, so the mac user interface is an obstacle between the computer and the hacker.

89 percent of college students say their next paper will be finished on time. ;)

Mostly in the US. I dont see any evidence of Macs becoming more popular in India for example. Any observations from Europe?

Over here in Holland, Macs are definitely becoming more and more popular. Not sure about the rest of europe though, but my guess is that it's the same all over europe...

I've seen the most growth in Apple uptake among casual users, e.g. non-tech-savvy middle-aged or retired people, and recent graduates that suddenly have disposable income. The usability is a huge factor for the former demographic, cost not quite so much. The latter definitely the chic, although iLife is not to be underestimated.

Students here tend to be poor, so few have Apple gear and just have some worn-out 7-year-old grey box PC. The only people I knew at university who had macs were international students who were already paying 10x as much in tuition as EU students.

This is from anecdotal observation in the UK and Austria.

Just wondering - is anyone else seeing this as an entrepreneur opportunity?

This seems to me to be more of a sense of dissatisfaction with the current (aesthetic, quality, speed, you-name-it) of the PC/laptop. The current mindset of the Windows laptop industry (cutting quality of parts and shoving tons of unneeded software on you to cut costs and improve short term sales) is killing the industry from the inside out, and Macs, although much more costly than an average PC laptop, values the satisfaction of the customer more than the price point.

in my case i just don't like vista. its DRM crap, plus the interface that looks like it was designed by a committee of people checking things off a list rather than a single artist who actually knows how it must be done

it's not enough for me to get a mac though. i'll stick with my XP Media Center edition for the time being

As a college student I estimate that 3 of 10 students use Macs. When I walk through the cafeteria I like to see how many Macbooks there are, to see if PGs 10 year prediction will come true.

For those of us that haven't heard, what's the prediction?

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

I grab a cup of coffee every morning from a local indy coffee shop who offers free Wifi, and, over the past two years I have certainly noticed there are more and more little glowing apple icons to go along with all the white ear-bud cords.

I wish I could find the source where I read a comment about the ergonomics of apple products. It was something along the line of a cross between a kitchen appliance and a dildo. I still smile when I think of that.

I am probably going to get an Apple in a few days. I absolutely abhor windows and am comfortable in Linux. Any advice? Is the pro worth it/necessary for developing web apps? (I am comfortable using a smaller size laptop)

I got a macbook last year. The massive student discount contributed most to my decision. But, it does look really cool in my hemp messenger bag.

Running Ubuntu on it is a nightmare, so I am beginning to regret my decision. Now, I just do all of my work over ssh on my server or my labs' boxes.

And a pro definitely is not nearly worth it (and doesn't look nearly as cool).

how are you trying to run Ubuntu? Parallels, boot camp, VMware? I was hoping to be able to run Linux at least as running it through VMware on Windows.

Yes you can run Linux and Windows under OSX via VMware Fusion. I have a Macbook Pro 2.4Ghz with 2gb Ram and its great for all my needs.

I hear a lot of people saying that the Macbook Pro isn't worth it, but I think it is.

I bought a Macbook and ended up upgrading to the Pro within a week. The Macbook felt sluggish for me. My typical usage pattern is several browser windows open with about 15 tabs open apiece, plus an IRC client, iTunes/VLC, a shell window, and Textmate (a text editor).

Upgrading to the Pro made things feel a lot faster for me.

Macs are known as gorgeous pieces of hardware and that seems to be their main functionality. As Neal Stephenson stated, they are polished and nice to look at, hence why the prices are jacked up but that is all that they have going for them. Nowadays, most things that are exuberantly expensive must be worth something and are therefore sought out and it becomes a trend.

If your best friend has a $3000 Mac monitor, why shouldn't you have one?

In my opinion, Dells are pretty sturdy machines though a bit hefty. I would like to get my hands on an HP computer though. That is a beaut.

Run Linux, OSX & XP on a single machine, without rebooting. That's bliss for web dev like me. Sure, those college students may be lured by the 'ooo, shiny ...' factor but they stay for the power & ease of use.

One of the keys to Apple's success is the marriage of open and closed systems: *NIX at the bottom with a well thought-out and (closed) UI on top. Good design (& designers) tend to be dictatorial because difficult decisions need to be made (which features to leave out). Hence the closed GUI system.

I know 5 students who bought new laptops in the last 2 years, 3 of them chose a Mac. Also, most laptops at a local Starbucks popular with students are Macs. PG was right.

why is everyone so smitten with Macs? the average college student does not need one and would be better served by buying an iPhone and a $400 dell

In some of my arts classes, if you sit in the back, all you see is a sea of white Macs.

Superiority and ease of use aside.

People's taste always change once in a while. We've been living in the world of Windows for 10-15 years. People got bored with Windows and Dell.

Mac gives them a new "toy" (not literally, but gadget wise).

I'd venture a guess that 15-20% of the entire population's next computer will be a mac. I know I'm making the switch.

if you aren't going to be running osx what is the point of buying a mac? especially now that they run on intel cores?

apple is the new (or soon to be) windows. the king is dead. long live the king.

This is great news. It's great to see people waking up. I've personally converted 7 people to Apple. I hate using a windows pc anymore. I switched to compose music. It's a huge difference. This bodes well for the taste of the upcoming generation.

The only time I have missed my PC was when I wanted to delete forward from the cursor. Then I learned that fn + del deletes forward and I have been a faithful convert ever since.

The concept of simplicity is the foundation of Mac's and Apple products and is why they are gaining ground. nix is for is for "Geeks" (Yes, I'm a Geek). It has always been about Geeks, it will always be about geeks. The additional benefit of OS X is that it still has the underlying Geekland that the nix crowd loves. For those that aren't at the Geek level of TechKnowledgy (Copyright 200-now), Macs will keep on purring with minimal fuss.

AAPL is probably a great stock to short now. Expensive discretionary consumer fluff. It'll tank in the year ahead.

our next computer will be a Mac as well, when our old Dell desktop finally dies. When you can run OSX and Windows on one machine, why ever buy a PC again unless you're a hard-core gamer?

To run Linux, of course!

I know you're probably joking, but in the limited experience I've had with Linux, I've never had a more negative experience with an operating system than I did with Linux. I'd run Windows XP way before I'd consider running Linux. At least XP works. OSX has tons of advantages over Linux, including a window interface that runs smoothly, OSX has way more software available and there is no discussion whatsoever to be had in this area, and OSX has a lot better tech support available to users. I could go on and on. Linux is a hobby OS at best.

"Hobby OS"? Is this some sort of April fool's troll?

No, there are actually people who think Linux sucks when compared to OSX.

Yes, but on a site labeled "hacker news", you'd hope to find people at least willing to consider that different OS's have different advantages, and that for hackers, Linux has a lot of them. Being able to hack the kernel is handy (yes, I have). Being able to debug pretty much any aspect of the system is handy. Not being in any way a second class citizen on your own computer is great. The freedom to take the whole thing and repurpose it if needs be, to create all kinds of interesting special purpose systems, from servers to Android type embedded devices is a huge business advantage.

But, being an observant guy, it's easy to see that Mac OS has its own strengths as well. My parents run it, for instance, and I'm sure it's better for them.

Comments like "hobby OS" and "linux sucks", though, are not indicative of serious thinking on the matter.

of course you are correct. I've been a Mac user since 1984 so I am horribly biased :-) In my three attempts to get Linux to run on a PC, I had three tremendous failures so I've given up. I can run most popular free apps like OpenOffice on OSX anyway (and I do) so I don't have a need for Linux. But for cheap hardware and the ultimate ability to tinker without big brother looking over your shoulder, Linux is fantastic.

Mac rock, I still don't own one, but I use them all the till. They super cool.

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