Stephen's Personal Blog

This is a CNET report of Vista sales. There are some very interesting comments in here. Look at me. I seem to be a trend.

Standalone unit sales of Vista at U.S. retail stores were down 59.7 percent compared with Windows XP, during each product’s first six months on store shelves, according to NPD Group. In terms of revenue, sales are also down, but the drop has been less steep, at 41.5 percent.

Revenue is not down as much, because Vista costs more. Upgrade copies of XP were $90 and Vista HP is $130. Interesting how the article doesn’t mention this fact.

Microsoft noted in a regulatory filing that more than 80 percent of its Windows revenue comes from computer makers that install the operating system on new machines, with boxed copies accounting for only a fraction of total sales.

One of the big variables is how quickly businesses move to adopt Vista. Most businesses are not moving to the operating system in significant numbers yet..

While much of the sales were for the new Office 2007, Swenson said just over 20 percent of all boxed copies of Office were Office for Mac. Swenson credited the large number of people switching to Macs as part of the reason for the spike in Mac Office sales.

NPD’s data comes from its monthly sales reports of software sold at major retailers including Best Buy, CompUSA, Target and Apple’s retail stores. It also includes e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, Buy.com and BestBuy.com.

Ahh, the interminable accessories… Like getting the case and charger for the new cell phone.

I got the blue computer condom, the USB+Audio KVM (keyboard/mice/monitor splitter), and VMWare to run XP on the Mac. I did skip the car charger (not kidding).

Now if the new toy will just show up on Friday. crossed fingers

Today, I visited the local Mac shop. Or rather a downtown camera store that also has an iMac on display. Hey it’s Amarillo, the middle of the Great American technology desert. It was very insightful. The very helpful, but a little clueless salesperson showed me the Mac Pro he works on, an older demo iMac, and an older (I think) Mini Mac. Actually, I think he does photo scanning and retouching mostly. He answered many questions about what accessories will work and basics of the OS.

USB is a godsend here. Most anything that works on a PC with USB will work on a Mac; external DVD burners, mice, keyboards, hard drives, etc. The Macs he showed me were all connected to the network and Internet with a regular ethernet cable.

The interface has some strong differences from Windows. One of them is that the standard File, Edit, View, … buttons on just about every program in Windows is NOT attach the same window as the program. There is one bar, always in the same place on the screen, and it changes depending on which program you’re working with. There are one set of options for Firefox, another for Word, another for iPhoto, etc. The interface itself was very much more polished than Vista. There is a carousel on the bottom of the screen with pictures of the currently running programs. As you scroll your mouse over it the items get bigger and then smaller when you scroll off.

The Mac Mini had a few slowness issues loading Google Earth, but I’ve not seen this run on one of mine before. And it is heavily Internet dependent. Everything else was very snappy and very nice. I can’t wait till it comes in and I can see it run my applications. Being a demo computer I couldn’t open Hotmail, Firefox, Parallels, or configure the email program the Mac comes with.

I just placed an order for the low end MacBook with a mini-DVI to VGA adapter. Besides the slightly faster processor I can live with everything else. Long ago I shifted to external DVD burners for the Windows computers. If 1 gig of memory isn’t adequate I can order more. There are instructions on the Internet for upgrading the hard drive easily.

The specs are:
2 GHz Core 2 Duo
1 Gig mem
80 Gig Hdd
DVD player/CD burner
13.3″ screen
13″ X 9″ X 1″ white case
60 watt power brick

PS
The Mac Mini was truly amazing. I’ve never seen a smaller, quieter computer and I made Grandma’s very, very small. The mobility of a laptop made me buy the MacBook over the Mac Mini.

The comments I seen about MacBook vs MacBook Pro are concerned with playing games. I find it laughable to play games on a laptop and doubly so on a Mac, any Mac. Windows XP, Playstation, XBox are much better and far cheaper.

Ok, I’m about done with Vista. It has not_a_thing that I need and is a major hindrance to what I do need to do. The latest thing is virtualization. Since, an app compiled on Vista has a fubar UI on XP I need to compile on XP. MS Virtual PC doesn’t work so I thought VMWare might work. Officially, Virtual Machines aren’t supported on Home Premium edition, but sometimes you get lucky. I finally jumped through all the hurdles to install and setup a Win2K on VMWare Server. The OS is installed and the VM locks up half way through boot up. I’m not here to fix computer stupidity at home. It works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, I’m looking at you Epson scanner, it’s not purchased again.

Everything I want to do is on XP and Vista has thrown up many a roadblock. Maybe I need to buy a copy of XP or two while I can, because Vista is just about useless for me. In fact, if I could return this defective POS I would. The problem with XP is that it slowly grinds to a halt after a year of use.