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Peeve Farm
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Brian Tiemann
 Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

 btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
11:37 - Gee, think this guy's a Mac user?
http://www.syracuse.com/news/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1080648930207645.xm

 (top) link
Dak sends this rare gem: a journalist who "gets" that elusive kwyjibo that is the Mac's market share.

Your neighbor drives home with his new BMW and the first thing you say to him is a wisecrack about his car's low market share.

You'd never do it. Nobody would. Most people drive Toyotas or Hondas or Fords, but that means nothing to the people who own BMWs. Right?

Then why are we constantly hearing about the Mac's low market share from people who ought to know better? I spent an evening checking out the actual percentage of Mac users, and I found numbers that ranged from 1.7 percent to 12 percent. That's a huge range, and the imprecision of the numbers tells a story.

And he tells it well.

The news isn't that someone's using the "car metaphor" or noting reasons for the wild discrepancies in market-share estimates; the news is that this doesn't appear to be a tech writer doing it, or a tech-oriented story. People are "getting it" across the board.

It's hard not to, as time goes on, really. Who hasn't noticed that the Comcast ads feature some seven different Macs in various shots of cable customers enjoying the Internet? Who's blind to the Apple Stores opening up in every fashionable shopping spot, drawing crowds of well-wishers that wrap around the block? Just the other day, when I was driving my new TV home in a rented U-Haul pickup truck, the radio was tuned to a San Francisco station running a tech-news call-in show; the show's premise was general interest and technical Q&A, but fully a third of the callers were Mac users discussing things like hugely complex printing solutions or digital camera use, and they kept mentioning their new G5s and iMacs and eMacs. (I got the feeling that the show's host was getting a little bit fed up with all the Mac people who kept calling-- but it's telling, at that, that when he answered non-platform-specific computer questions, he felt compelled to preface his answer with, "Well, here's how you would do it on Windows".) If the Mac's market share is really 1.7%, then something's overrepresenting Macs to an unbelievable degree in the media and pop culture.

There's certainly some of that-- after all, Macs are photogenic, so movie producers love them; and Macs are upmarket, so they'll show up in the lives of the movers and shakers who tend to end up on the airwaves more than otherwise. But that can't account for all of the discrepancy.

Al Fasoldt, this article's author, notes a few other possibilities. There's the lower new-Mac turnover rate, for instance. But he's right to start it off with the BMW metaphor: like a BMW owner, we Mac users really don't care if the market share is 1.7% or 12%. It doesn't affect us one way or the other. Because these days, as long as Apple keeps cranking out the products and the software releases and making the platform do what we need it to do, it's immaterial how many of us there are.
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