[dasil003]

It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher. And that is not even considering the effect of smart phones and tables on peoples usage patterns. My in-laws who are small town folk from the midwest, as far as you can possibly imagine from an urban hipster, had been using Dells for years and switched to an iPad last year and are getting much more out of it than they ever did their last aircraft carrier of a Win 7 Dell that was ostensibly much more powerful.

[batoure]

There isn't really any useful information in your reply here. Apples "Consumer only" market share is still less than 20% and if you include Ipads..... as a PC replacement their market share is still only around 15% (though that data is a year old apple only had about 25% growth last year which makes it a wash in the over all market so those numbers are still pretty truthy-ish)

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-compute...

Part of the point of my post was to show how people assume statistics in their head without doing something as simple as a Google search. Saying that market share isn't a significant measure is silly because, well its a measure of how much of the market actually uses apple.

Which leads us back to the original point, the fact that you feel that the numbers must be significantly higher is only a representation of how apple has captured the minds and hearts of people around the world... Marketing

[malandrew]

I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.

[batoure]

My 80 year old grandmother actively uses VMware on her windows 8 machine, for real not making this up.

And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.

[malandrew]

What does she use VMware for?

[batoure]

she has been an avid user of

PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39)

since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

[insaneirish]

For the sake of everyone in your family, please back up everything in multiple places. That's awesome to have a snapshot of the culinary history of your family in digital format. When the time is right, share all the recipes!

[voltagex_]

Sorry for the multiple posts on this. You sent me on a bit of an adventure:

* Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried)

* Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows

* installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM

* shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows

* ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes

* printed from DOSBox and got [2]

1: http://www.cups-pdf.de/ (or apt-get install cups-pdf)

2: https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6...

[voltagex_]

Is there any way you can get a copy of the disk to me? I'm interested in old file formats.

[voltagex_]

Runs pretty well on DOSBox - found Big Blue Disk 93 on cd.textfiles.com.

[dasil003]

That's mostly all good and fair. I don't have any data to contribute. But the I think my fundamental point is good:

PC market share as defined by analysts is reflective of the market that Microsoft is pursuing, but it is a large superset of the market Apple is pursuing.

You say this is silly to point out, but you're leaning on circular logic. You take "the market" as a given a priori, but the truth is that the market is defined a certain way, and that way is very unfavorable to Apple (and that's without even getting into the whole profit share vs market share question).