{"id":326,"date":"2006-04-06T17:35:56","date_gmt":"2006-04-06T23:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=326"},"modified":"2006-04-06T17:35:56","modified_gmt":"2006-04-06T23:35:56","slug":"boot_camp_and_t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=326","title":{"rendered":"Boot Camp and the PC war"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Gruber, of the Macintosh site Daring Fireball, provides a trenchant, if not entirely unbiased, assessment<\/a> of Apple’s surprise move to allow its new Macs to run Windows as well as Mac OS X. He correctly points out that the ability to boot up a computer into two different operating systems is of no interest to the vast majority of PC users. Writes Gruber: “They use email, they use a web browser, they want something useful to happen when they plug a digital camera into their USB port. Whichever OS comes on their computer is good enough for this.” But the dual-boot capability provided by Apple’s free Boot Camp software “is inordinately appealing to the higher end of the market, the enthusiasts … It\u2019s a very specific self-selecting segment of the market: people who care about their computers, and who are willing to pay more for something better.”<\/p>\n

And because these elite users are far less price-sensitive than the average skinflint PC buyers, they likely account for a very large share of the industry’s profits. Indeed, at this point they may be the only customers that provide decent profits to computer makers. As I’ve said many times before (too many, in fact), the consumer PC market has, like other consumer markets before it, split into two basic segments: buyers of commodities, and buyers of premium goods. The money’s in serving the latter. That’s why, for instance, Dell just bought Alienware.<\/p>\n

With Boot Camp, Apple may be able to change the battle for the high-end buyer in a fundamental way. Gruber puts it succinctly:<\/p>\n

\n

The old equation – decades old – is that most computers ran Windows (or, if you go back far enough, DOS) and some other ones, the ones from Apple, ran Mac OS. As of today, the new equation is that all computers can run Windows, but some, the special ones from Apple, also run Mac OS X … The point is that it recasts Macs from being \u201cdifferent\u201d to being \u201cspecial\u201d. Instead of occupying a separate universe from that of PC hardware, it\u2019s now a superset of PC hardware. Instead of choosing between a Windows PC or a Mac … you now get to choose between a computer that can only run Windows or a computer that can run both Windows and Mac OS X.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that’s the reason the Apple’s stock price has shot up nearly 20% since the Boot Camp announcement yesterday. It’s not that Apple may be able to expand its general market share by a couple of percentage points; it’s that those percentage points are likely to represent many of the most attractive customers in the market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Gruber, of the Macintosh site Daring Fireball, provides a trenchant, if not entirely unbiased, assessment of Apple’s surprise move to allow its new Macs to run Windows as well as Mac OS X. He correctly points out that the ability to boot up a computer into two different operating systems is of no interest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}