Apple 'switch' rates underestimated?

I know at least two people who plan to switch once leopard comes out.

the first is my brother. I kept convincing him, but that's not why he'll convert. I'm actually not sure why, but yea his laptop fan is broken and he intends a mac to replace it once leopard comes out

A PC friend who taugt me how do build PCs from scratch when I was a PC fan a while ago decided he wants a mac. He couldn't cuz he didn't have a job. When he finally got a job i asked him why didn't he get one already. His reason was he's waiting for leopard.

And a possible third guy: my cousin. Since he doens't care about games or even do homework intensively, I'm gonna sell him my mini after i get an imac once leopard comes out.

My brother went from Mac to PC for gaming but wants to buy a MacPro next year, there will be a big shift to the Mac. Going to 10% in the US next year is realistic and growth won't stop then, if the big switch is over i'm hoping for a real universal version of osX for PC and PS3 to kill off MS. Its war now and we need this to make the final kill.

There will never be a PC version of OSX. That would be suicide for Apple's hardware business. More than likely however more PC users will switch to Mac hardware and have the flexability to run OSX,Windows,linux all on the same box at full speed. Also you don't have to wait until next year for leopard as Bootcamp is available now to run Windows on a Mac. Also Parallels is also available virtual machine software which can run Windows within the OSX operating system. VMware is also coming online soon with there version for OSX.

You used to be able to overclock a mac, without too much trouble, such as the blue & white G3, I could clock that from 300mhz to 450mhz just by changing a jumper block.

As long as you can buy a $169 E6300 from frys and clock it up to 3.0ghz...on readily available motherboards....

and Mac hardware doesn't allow the option or worse, requires resoldering the motherboard... as long as this is the case, forget it, Mac's are expensive.

For that matter, not being able to upgrade the graphics card in anything but the mac pro's is expensive.

I know, not everyone feels the same as me...but in the pc world, everyone gets to find their spot. In the Mac world, take apple's view or forget it...and thats one reason why they won't have as many switchers as they might.

Jonathan - I've been round that loop (buy PC, extend life through graphics card, memory and CPU upgrades) but have stepped off for the world of Apple.

That's ALWAYS been the criticism of Apple from techheads.

What you have to realise is that it's also a selling point for a lot of consumers - look at sales of all-in-one hi-fi vs separates, or the increasing sale of laptops against desktops - upgradability is low on the majority of people's criteria - especially now that MS push the killer games over to XBox first.

"upgradability is low on the majority of people's criteria"

That is a very accurate statement. Peopple want to buy a machine that they dont have to do anything to.

Jonathan - I used to be on the PC upgrade cycle as well... dual booting between Windows and Linux. I bought a new $300 video card every 6 months, and added hard drives at an alarming rate.

But here's the rub -- after performing the surgery on the hardware, and recompiling the kernel (or downloading the driver for Windows), then launching the OS and tinkering some more with the desktop GUI, I realized one thing:

I just wanted my PC to act and look like Mac OSX.

So I bought a Mac and my PC hasn't been turned on for at least a year. I donated the 21" CRT to a friend.

Now I just get stuff done - no more tinkering, no more time sunk into recompiling and certainly no more digging screws out of the nether regions of the mobo-cave.

I've never been happier.

Less than 1% of users will even attempt anything but the most minor modifications. Most PC Users will not even upgrade their OS, they will simply buy a new PC at some point. Overclocking is somthing that less than 0.1% of PC owners would ever attempt. If you want to look at what Apple's market share will be, looking at the ability to buy a PC for $169 and overclock it is not the way to do it. 10% market share is certainly within Apple's reach.

A PC version but I do believe that Apple may licesne again to thrid party vendors... And obvious one being Sony. If Apple has a broad enough install base I can bet they'll try it again. Their relationship with Sony is a stronger one.

Apple could turn a tidy profit by selling licenses - I mean it just depends upon how much they charge, to compensate for a few fewer hardware sales. I could see that especially for the subnotebooks, if they decide to never enter that market. But it wouldn't be until they are well beyond 10% sustainably.