Scoble, if you had been at BloggerCon the mix would have been different.
Robert, I grok your idea about corporate culture and the grey-hairs. But don't forget that according to a recent survey, Apple was one of the coolest brands among youth, too. Speaking of which, when are you going to get an iPod? 
Ian, if I had enough time to listen to music, I might.
I was there with my iBook. I can only guess about the other BloggerCon attendees, but here are three reasons I use a Mac rather than a PC.
1) The baby-bird effect: my first computer was an Apple ][+, and I learned networking, internet, and creative work on my high school's wonderful labs of SEs and PowerMacs. I never did use a single PC in the high-school or college environment.
2) As an academic who works with a lot of different languages in Unicode, OS X blows the competition out of the water. Have you seen the OS X Character Palette? It puts the Windows IME pad to shame in terms of aesthetics and functionality.
3) The BMW vs. Ford Taurus idea. When I decided to make my own investment in a computer, I thought hard about the savings vs. quality debate. I have many friends with PCs, and they spend a lot of time complaining about their experience. I've only had one friend complain about their Mac experience, and that's because she dropped her PowerBook G4 and cracked the case. I think MS still has a long way to go before they make an operating system that feels as welcoming and simple as OS X. It sounds trite, but in my Mac experience everything has simply worked. I've had my iBook for two years now and haven't had a single problem with it. So when my friends ask me why I blew over $2000 on my laptop, my retort is always, "Have you ever heard me complain about my experience? That's the reason."
So why all the macs among the grey-haired in the audience? I'd be tempted to venture that these are successful people. They have money to spend on their toys, and if you want to blow the money on a computer, it might as well be the Mac. Packaging counts. Aesthetics count. Simplicity and ease of use and beauty of the OS count. It might not be about Thinking Different, or Apple's various marketing schemes- it may well be that Microsoft has yet to offer a better product.
You're right that Apple users predominate in the creative design and academic markets. But don't forget to ask why that is. It's not simply baby-bird. It's not simply marketing and branding. We users aren't stupid-- a lot depends on the quality of your products. I've tried out Windows, and it simply won't let me do what I need to do academically. Same with Jonathon Delacour, who blogged about his experience with Mojikyo fonts (http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/2003/10/
not_a_bug_in_mojikyo_but_rather_a_feature_of_unico
de.php)
Of course, there is a chance that bloggers have objectively evaluated OS and Laptop choices and Macs have come on top. Or is that too simple a hypothesis?
How about something a bit more basic? Namely that Mac OS X is simply a better product than any version of Windows that is out there today?
Frankly I don't know. I don't own one. (I will admit to battling a desire to have the 'coolness' factor of owning one though.) But I'll say this: it is JUST as rare to find a 'Wintel' owner who publicly boasts of the advantages of their choice as it is rare to find a Mac iBook/PwerBook owner who doesn't publicly boast about theirs.
Robert, what you can't see is that I am sitting there (big guy on the right) with my NEC tablet, which drew a lot more attention than all the powerbooks...
The Apple laptops look nicer than anything available in the PC world. Get yourself Remote Desktop Client and you're connected back to your speedy Windows 2003 desktop back at work.
Werner, you're my hero!
I noticed a similar disproportionate representation at OSCOM, but there almost everybody I talked to were switchers. They may have used a Mac in their past (or more likely the Apple ][), but I was one of the few that installed new releases of Apple's OSes from 7.1 to 10.2 continuously.
If you look in the picture--how many pre-OS X laptops do you see? None that I can positively identify. They are all Titanium or Aluminum PowerBooks or late-model iBooks. In my experience, that's the first Mac of a switcher. Not that there aren't plenty of Mac users upgrading to the new PowerBooks, but I'd expect to see at least a couple of Lombards or Wall Streets or something.
May be they have special "Bloggers Rebate Coupons" 
)
The last few machines I've personally bought have been Macs, because of concerns about Microsoft's architectural decisions when it started getting into networking (accepting HTML and scripts in email, giving application extensions system-level abilities, tying the emailer and browser together, etc). I didn't feel safe with those choices, and feel much safer being out of the main target zone. Of course, I got killed by SoBig spoofing, so go figure....
People who blog don't necessarily suffer the same group-pressure to standardize on applications that you'd find in an office... they may be more able to make a choice. I suspect they may also have used computers longer and more extensively than average, and so are comfortable switching back and forth between operating systems.
I think Ryan's right about the money factor. What you see is a picture of folks who both spend a ton of time with their laptop and have the money to buy any machine they want. Apple laptops aren't price-competitive with Windows laptops. People have always paid a premium for Apple products and they still are: it's just that more people think the combo of good industrial design, some software, good implementations of wifi and multimedia (which many people at Bloggercon got firsthand experience of as a single user both fixed the room's network problems by sharing the Ethernet via his Mac *and* webcasting from his laptop) some stability, etc. is now worth the price premium that you will pay if you buy an Apple. This is the first time since I've been using computers that I thought what the price premium paid for was actually worth considering -- when I bought my last laptop, an IBM Thinkpad X20, which I do like a lot, two years ago, Apple wasn't anywhere near my shortlist. Next time, they'll be on the shortlist along with IBM and Sony. The only knock I can see today against a Powerbook is that I see some users complaining about manufacturing issues and physical fragility -- cases that crack, fragile connections to the screen, etc. I take those pretty seriously.
Another consideration is the ease of using Macs for blogging. What percent of the bloggers at the con were hosting their own blog versus using a service like blogger or typepad? You described how you wouldn't use blogger.
I installed OS X on a G3 mac in order to run Movable Type. Apache and Perl were already there. I was in business quickly. Of course you can install Activestate Perl and Apache for Windows and run MT, but MS might lose that customer to an experiment with Linux as well.
I don't know who, if anyone, has surveyed marketplace for the hobbyist webmaster, one domain, one server market. It's probably a lot easier to get help and thus up to speed on being a blogging guru if you're using a Unix or Mac OS X system. The playing field is probably tilted against MS in that market, as unusual as that may be. I imagine IIS/SQL 2000 is a hard sell in that niche.
And I think that niche, small as it is, generates BloggerCon attendees. Some of those users may well be using Remote Desktop Client to hook in to XP in the office and SSH to connect to their Linux Apache server with MySQL and PHP while sending out their resumes in MS Word via Entourage.
Hmm. I wonder if blogging isn't a niche that favors, at the high powered end, the heterogeneous *user*...
Most of the PC users I know use their machine at work, becuase it's what's on their desk, and very few use a computer "after hours" much at all. The Mac is a very personal machine. Blogging is a very personal exercise. I think we'll see a higher percentage of bloggers (esp. at bloggercon type events, ie bloggers passionate about blogging) using Macs because these a the type of that use Macs. The majority of PCs just sit around spitting old aweful powerpoints and getting viruii. People who USE computers use Macs.
"How does Microsoft win the hearts and minds of the blogger market? Easy: innovative product."
No, make a reliable, dependable, functional product. This is especially true for people who travel with a laptop. Nothing like having your office productivity suite lock you for a license validation because you installed some software on the plane.
Also, bloggers tend to be paying for their expenses out of their pocket, so open source/unix tools combined with a web host that also is using open source/unix tools tends to be a great value.
Powerbooks and OS X are hardly perfect, but the bullshit and aggravation factor tend to be lower.
Disclosure: I use both platforms.
I just don't get the tablet PC thing. As an Apple user at home, and someone who has to use Wintel machines at work, I can confidently say I am not jealous of those with tablet PCs.
The decision to make a computer's "ink awareness" function at any level other than within the OS itself strikes me as amazingly short-sighted.
So, whilst tablet Macs don't exist, the technology that enables their use does (Inkwell) and more importantly, it exists in the OS: no retro-fits required.
Ben, try using a computer while standing up and you'll suddenly get why the Tablet PC is so important.
Nah, got an Palm m100 if I need to stand up
Well, Robert, I will admit to a small amount of envy of the Tablets. On the other hand I can use my iBook whilst standing up very easily.
How? Easy: It opens to 180 degrees, I hold it JUST like a tablet. If I need something that I actually write on, I use my Newton 2100 MessagePad with 802.11 card to synch it.
So, there I am, with old Apple technology that you're finally able to replicate on your new Tablet. Good for you!
That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a tablet form-factor Mac laptop.
Hmm, I don't know, typing with one hand, while holding a Powerbook seems a very unnatural act to me. I guess it could be done, but it sure doesn't seem confortable to me the way a Tablet is.
Maybe people are finally getting the fact that Macs are really superior in all aspects of programming web applications.
It comes with Apache and PHP already installed.
Its not that hard to have a blog script installed and there are many at SourceForge.
and the fact that you can print your blogs in PDF form with the Quartz engine.
And now the description is wrong. http://order-games.fateback.com/
If not, what were all the witch trials about? http://www.phind.net/ecommerce/o...ding-
forum.html
die Reet is anders een gemene man... http://www.findspot.net/commerce...gn-
company.html
This was closely associated with the rebirth of http://www.findspot.net/commerce...gn-
company.html
Were there ever real witches? http://www.findspot.net/commerce...gn-
company.html
Telefonsex Fetisch - Telefonsex Anal - Telefonsex mit Bild
pu
Commenting by HaloScan
