Do you remember the good old days, when there was virtually no Mac software at any local computer shop? Well, you’d think, what with Mac sales going through the roof, you’d find a rich selection at such dealers these days.

But expectations and realities are far, far apart these days.

Consider those hundreds of Best Buy electronics stores, where there are special areas for Apple products. You go there and you’ll be lucky if you find a few dozen common titles, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, Office for the Mac and, of course, Apple’s own applications.

But what about an Apple Store, you may ask?

Well, visit any of them, even the flagship stores, such as the ones in New York City, and you’d expect to see hundreds of products from which to select. True, the variety is much greater, but it doesn’t even begin to reflect the wide scope of Mac applications that are now available.

Continue Reading...

Related Articles:

• Mind Share Versus Market Share
• Is the iMac the First Apple High Definition TV?
• Is Your Computer Broken Again?
• The Microsoft Death Watch: A Microsoft Store?
• So Maybe Apple Didn’t Cave on Pricing

I don’t know whether you realize this or not, but whenever you buy a PC, you are also paying for a copy of Microsoft Windows. It doesn’t matter whether you use it or not, or whether you wipe the drive and install your favorite Linux distribution. It doesn’t matter what you want. You still have to pay the dreaded “Microsoft tax.”

How much? Well, that varies from PC maker to PC maker, depending on the quantities they buy and the particular configurations they choose. I’ve heard $40 for a basic OEM license, however. This may not seem like an awful lot of money, until you multiply that figure by tens of millions. Even forgetting the far-higher cost of buying a Windows upgrade kit at your local computer, it all ads up to billions of dollars.

In fact, Microsoft makes roughly 81% profit from Windows. What a racket!

Continue Reading...

Related Articles:

• They Hear But Do Not See
• Apple Fires Another Torpedo Across Microsoft’s Bow
• Another Reality Check: Tall Tales You Can Ignore!
• Assuming Facts Not in Evidence
• Memo to Apple: Ignore the Analysts

All through the years I’ve used Macs, I’ve been forced to endure taunts from people telling me that Windows was actually the way to go. You know the excuses, that the Mac was just a play thing and that the PC was the computer meant for “serious work.” Worse, there really wasn’t much Mac software. How did they know? Well, look at the paltry numbers catching dust on the back shelves at the local computer outlet?

Since I was involved in prepress work when I began to use a Mac, I knew how silly such superstitions were. By day, I worked long hours in QuarkXPress and Adobe Illustrator, and at night, I was writing books and magazine articles in Microsoft Word. So much for not doing serious work on my Macs.

I also learned that the best place to buy software in the days before the Internet counted for very much was via a mail order catalog. It was clear that, if you went to the right sources, there was plenty of Mac software to buy.

Continue Reading...

Related Articles:

• The WWDC Report: All Right, Apple Won’t Fight Microsoft’s Windows Vista Marketing Machine
• Newsletter #392 Preview: First Look: Parallels Desktop 3.0 Release Candidate
• MacIntel Apps: An Avalanche or a Sprinkle?
• The Ongoing, Never Ending WWDC Report: Intel Inside Edition
• Apple and the Cloners: Round Two