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by arvinsim 1153 days ago
As much as I am impressed by Apple Silicon, I haven't seen the buying habits of people I know change.

Windows laptop owners still continue to buy windows laptops.

1 comments

Maybe I am in a bubble, but in my family I was the only Apple user 5 years ago. Today we have got not a single Windows device left anymore. My wife has a MBA now, my mum has a MBA now, my sister has a MBA now.

Same goes for the .NET community. So many developers who some time ago would have only developed on a Windows machine all switched to Apple over the last few years and most people don't ever look back.

I appreciate that those personal anecdotes don't mean anything, but let's put it this way, I was not surprised to see a 30% drop in Windows sells in Microsoft's last financial statement.

Definitely a bubble. Comparable and accurate numbers are hard to get, but wikipedia reports [1] Apple having 9.8% of personal computer units shipped globally. It's certainly a different number if we could get a breakdown by country.

In my bubble view, I don't see a lot of switching. Apple people like their M1/M2 mostly, other people aren't as excited about cpus, but seem to be doing ok. I'm definitely not an Apple person, and am feeling pushed away from Windows as well, but I haven't landed on FreeBSD for desktop yet.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_com...

The trend is also reversing in some segments Apple owned which masked that there may be quite a trend occurring for home purchases, but the data doesn't show it because the extra purchases and hidden by losses.

For example University libraries in the UK - at least those in the higher ranked universities - used to typically buy Macs/MacBooks somewhat as a status symbol, over Microsoft PCs. Today, there are few and far computers with the set up of a computer lab now almost entirely dead to laptops. I don't think this had an insubstantial impact on Apple, but it was probably masked by the rise of mac-based startups and other trends in Mac.