Apple Continues To Condemn The Mac To Niche Machine 3156
Why? Most regular users have no interest in upgrading. Anyway, laptops are taking over the consumer market more and more every year, and this distinction isn't relevant there.
Yea right. Apple is adding a new feature called Time Machine to Leopard. It will require an additional HD to function. This feature is a very good one and will work really well for...
Most regular users are not going to go out and buy a copy of OS X at retail and install it on their machines. Most users only even upgrade their existing operating systems when they get something new bundled with new hardware. The only real way Apple could make serious headway on generic x86 hardware would be to get other x86 vendors to pre-install OS X... but Microsoft's licensing scheme makes this very hard, and anyway, why would Apple be interested in getting $40 or something from a Dell sale when they can (evidently) sell you better hardware at a lower prices themselves?
Your recommendations sound like a way to make OS X more popular with tech-heads... who make up a tiny fraction of the market. The iMac and the Mac mini are, if one objectively evaluates the needs of the consumer market, much better choices that big, clunky towers.
Maybe Apple should introduce a cheaper, lower-end mini, but other than that, I'd say they're executing almost perfectly here.
In the Time Machine scenario, nothing is run directly from the external HD; data just gets pushed to it in the background as files are updated on the internal HD...
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-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005