Who is Boot Camp Bad For?
Posted on April 8, 2006
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 157 views |
Thinking more about Boot Camp it occurrs to me that the only folks for whom this is a Bad Thing are the PC makers and then, not so much.
Right now Apple’s share of the PC market is somewhere between 2% and 6% depending on who you ask and how much they love/hate Apple. Boot Camp may very well sway some PC users over to the Mac side, especially if they have a pre-existing Mac user handy to act as tech support and handle the migration (I know of a few people who are currently PC users who would switch to a Mac if they could still use Windows when necessary and only because they live with someone who’s already a hard-core Mac user).
But I don’t expect this swayage to be huge by any means, at least not as far as Sony or Dell or HP are concerned. For Apple it may make a huge difference. If Apple can pick up another 2% of the market maybe they cleave 1% from Dell and 1% from HP, who notice a little but not really. But for Apple another 2% is a either a 30% or 100% increase in sales (depending on the love/hate thing). That’s a huge jump.
You’ll notice that I don’t mention them taking any sales from the PC components/home brew market. That’s because they won’t. PC users savvy enough to be shopping around for parts and assembling their own machines likely either won’t be buying Macs or will buy a Mac and still create their own Linux/Windows PCs. The effect on them will effectively be zero.
However, if Dell suddenly announces a PC that can run both Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS and I were Apple or HP or Sony, I’d probably cry like a little girl and look for an exit strategy. That would be market-shaking indeed (and is also why Apple will never engineer and license (<- the important word) OS X such that it can be installed and run on stock Intel boxes easily (<- another important word).