Where does Windows 7 leave Apple?

[xstep]

Windows 7 still leaves Apple in the lead.

 

[martyp]

Can't see Apple users switching back to Windows to be honest.

It's more likely Windows 7 will be the final straw for some people and Apple will get more customers!

 

[Lankysean]

Windows 7 may help to relieve the people who hated vista but that won't bring any mac converts back. A few new features and fancy OSXish enhancements won't make it worth switching back.

When I first installed it on my iMac i thought it was nifty but quickly dismissed it as "just a snazzed up version of windows", and booted back into OSX.

 

[XJ-linux]

I don't think it will matter much overall, regardless of how "good" W7 is. People, like my Mom and Sister for example, will adapt to whatever changes are made to Windows and stay with it because it's familiar and comes with the PC they buy. To many folks, like them, the computer is an appliance and not a lifestyle or whatever. Most folks I know wouldn't spend $1000 on a laptop anyways - the exception being the few folks I know who are photographers and CAD/CAM engineers who run Mac and Linux respectively. I think that MS has been around long enough that most folks will give W7 a "second chance" (or third or fourth chance) when it comes out. If the press is extremely bad a la Vista a few might defect to Mac OS and the rest will break out the old XP install CD's. Anyhow, no one knows at this point. I certainly don't.

 

[louishen]

Here's my pennies worth, how will it effect Apple?

Not much. Apple is riding high on the ipod, iphone and buddies recommending halo effect. Sure Apple's machines are more expensive but that is the whole point. Apple is happy to corner a large chunk of the high end of the market, and is content to see other manufactures scramble to fight for the low cost, low margin sector.

Apple does not need 90% market share, it is making very good money from its 10% market share (or 20% of the US market - depending on which market sector you want to quote).

The question should be, what does Windows 7 do for Microsoft.

I am pleased that Windows 7 is doing well, rivalry and competition are good for everybody. With the bad press that the sullied Vista brand has attracted, MS needs a good product. Certainty MS has at last learnt that it cannot just release a new Windows and expect its dominance to dictate that everybody upgrades.

I hope Windows 7 makes more PC users happy, but MS's main cash cow is business. No matter how many good reviews 7 gets, and no matter how many home users embrace it, it has to make serious inroads in the enterprise.

I don't know about you, but all corporate IT departments I have encountered and extremely conservative. At best they will start to migrate business desktops to Windows 7, at worst they will stick to XP, or most likely wait months to see how Windows 7 pans out.

Apple have mastered the art of selling cool stuff to consumers, Microsoft still only really excels at selling to business (the loss making Xbox aside. If the enterprise doesn't warm to Windows 7, then MS are in big trouble.

 

[gagnerants]

It's more likely Windows 7 will be the final straw for some people and Apple will get more customers!

So have you used windows 7? If not then you have no idea what you are missing out on, windows 7 as of thus far is a great OS. So I say unless you have used this operating system you can't comment on it.

 

[CrimsonRequiem]

...Apple have mastered the art of selling cool stuff to consumers, Microsoft still only really excels at selling to business (the loss making Xbox aside. If the enterprise doesn't warm to Windows 7, then MS are in big trouble.

I don't know if it's just me or what, but Microsoft is seriously out of date. They are really rigid and they are not doing anything to attract younger people. Jerry Signfield was a good try I guess...in like the 90s maybe...

 

[XJ-linux]

I think a previous poster's comments on W7's adoption by business hold true, at least for me. I run XP on my Parallels installation only to use proprietary software my employer uses for various things and for IE6 which is needed for my employer's web portal to work correctly. Barring my employer's adoption of another OS or iteration of Windows OS, I won't be switching anytime in the foreseeable future. When they do upgrade, I'll simply install their disk image an adapt to whatever they've decided to go with. Either way, for me their OS and applications are just tools I use from 9 to 5 on weekdays and I could really care less what they choose as long as I get paid every two weeks. I'd only switch from Mac OS to another OS if I couldn't do something I need or want to do - which isn't the case at this time.

 

[Dysfunction]

All this makes me very happy that my employer supports XP, multiple linux distros and OS X... note.. no vista.

 

[Mama Luigi]

The only fence-sitters who will be swayed by Windows 7 are the ones who are on the fence about moving from Windows XP to Vista. They'll likely skip Vista and go directly to 7.

There might be a few people who are so unhappy with Vista that they were considering moving to Mac but will decide not to now that 7 is on its way, but as others have said, the OS wars are over. People know what is available and they will use what they want.

 

[EGGO]

Where does Windows 7 leave Apple??

It all depends on what the people demand and how Microsoft advertises it. You know, basically what Apple and every company does.

 

[dtravis7]

I was bored last night so downloaded the latest Beta of Windows 7. I had been testing my netbook (1.6Ghz Intel Atom, 1.5GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive) with Vista and it was very draggy and slow. I did a clean install of Windows 7. It was hard to find a WiFi driver that worked with W7 but got it all working.

First impressions are, I am very impressed. It's WAY faster than Vista. I would say it has the snappiness of XP. It's actually the best my Netbook has ever worked. Looks like what I have heard is true and they really have improved Windows 7 a lot over Vista.

Would I switch? No. I love OSX and will continue to use it but on some of my Windows machines and for sure the Netbook, yes, I would use it over Vista for sure and probably XP unless Microsoft messes it up at the end before it's released. Very impressed though at this point.

And please, no flames from Mac users. I love OSX and the Mac. Just pointing out MS has improved it a lot over Vista.

 

[kahlil88]

I haven't heard anything particularly exciting about Windows 7. The new taskbar sounds like a strange idea, and I don't think it's going to be faster or lighter than Vista. They'll probably push the release date back another year like they did with Vista too! Give them until the end of time and they'll never release a good operating system (unless they pull an Apple and build their familiar interface on top of a BSD).

 

[Mama Luigi]

I haven't heard anything particularly exciting about Windows 7. The new taskbar sounds like a strange idea, and I don't think it's going to be faster or lighter than Vista. They'll probably push the release date back another year like they did with Vista too! Give them until the end of time and they'll never release a good operating system (unless they pull an Apple and build their familiar interface on top of a BSD).

Anything to back up these claims or are you just speculating?

IMO, Microsoft knows it screwed up with Vista. Hopefully they've learned their lesson and they will specifically address all the complaints people had with it. In particular, those were performance (especially on middle-aged hardware), the annoying UAC (can be disabled but some people don't know that), and the long release delay. With a tighter focus on fixing Vista's problems rather than trying to reinvent everything, they ought to do a decent job.

 

[gagnerants]

I haven't heard anything particularly exciting about Windows 7.... and I don't think it's going to be faster or lighter than Vista.

I was able to install it onto a laptop with a p4 2.4 ghz, 512 mb ram it runs as fast xp does, there is some great features that are built into. One of those features is that if your software crashes it will record that crash and take screen shots of what you did to cause the crash so you can get help easily. They improved there taskbar, it looks similar to the dock, the start menu is starting to remind me of the kde start menus.

 

[tjbackstage]

I had the chance to try Windows 7 today on a friend's Mac with it installed (not in a partition, but as a virtual OS). Here's what I've found: It's much more stable than Vista. It seems to be a mix of XP and Vista with XP's reliability but Vista's GUI with a few simple added things. Vista's been great for program compatibility for me, but it seems as if many more programs are not compatible with Windows 7. It also seems that yet more features are copied from the Mac OS, which seems like neither a good or bad thing to me, more or less neutral. Microsoft's goals with Vista were a newer GUI while retaining program compatibility. They accomplished this very well, but it's not all that stable, which is it's worst point. It seems as if Windows 7 is to improve this, but don't expect great program compatibility even though it'll be offered even in a 32-bit OS as well as a 64-bit version which they've seemed to try to push since the release of Vista. They may improve program compatibility, but they also may not. They're going to now have 5 editions, the new one being one lower than Home Basic! I'd put a good bet that it'll be released in January of 2011, and a new version of Office for Windows will be released some months prior. In my opinion, I think Microsoft should have just improved XP since they really had a good thing going with it, and it's been EVERYBODY'S favorite release of Windows for just about every reason. I use a 32GB partition with Vista (32-bit Home Premium) on my MacBook, and I chose to do this to run my Windows-only programs that are 1-12 years old and Vista was compatible with all of them and I wanted to give Vista a try as well. It's kind of slow even with 3GB of RAM and it just does not like my nVidea GPU, but it does what I NEED it to do. So where does this leave Apple? I think that will have the same affect on Apple as Vista did, not much but probably some new customers because of it. Windows 7 seems to just be a better Vista but with less compatibility. The compatibility issue may spark people to switch to the Mac, however OS X doesn't have any better compatibility as it forces you to use only newer (and in a lot of cases, the newest) products (software and hardware being referred to here). Its speed though may make some people choose not to switch from their PC environment. Microsoft may change program and hardware compatibility, but I wouldn't count on it much. It is only in its beta stages though, so you won't know until an official version is released. Should you download the beta? If you're curious and can use it in a virtual machine, then I'd say yes. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend installing it on any computer you need or that you use regularly. It also will be quite a hassle to install Windows 7 beta and reinstall your computer's previous OS, so running it as a virtual machine would be the best. And if you can boot your computer into that virtual machine, even better! Overall, I'm expecting Windows 7 to be more or less a neutral OS with its equal ups and downs. I'm sure plenty of others have their reasons for why they do and don't like the beta based on their hopes for each of the ups and downs I've listed.

 

[dtravis7]

Do remember Windows 7 that you installed on that Mac is a BETA OS. Things will change a before it's released. The program compatibility issue might improve with the final release. Do remember though that many applications that ran on Tiger no longer worked in Leopard including Photoshop 7 for one.

Sometimes a newer OS will break some apps.

 

[tjbackstage]

dtravis7, I didn't install Windows 7 on my MacBook, and I right now I don't plan to. I know there's time for many changes to be made to the beta before it's finally released. Its 32-bit edition has enough applications that don't work on it that I don't plan to purchase Windows 7 when it does come out, little reason for me to waste my time downloading a beta of it when I wouldn't use it for anything but I have access to a computer with it installed every other day at least for now. That's my worry though about the OS being too new to take older apps. This made me worried with Vista, but all of my programs over 5 years old work on it but not on Windows 7. This may really turn off some Windows users who like to stay up to date with Windows software but also need to run older programs right in their OS and not on another or a virtual machine. Typically speaking, Mac users in general usually update their software much more than Windows users, and every Mac OS really sort of does sound like Windows 7. Some new updates, a few new features and redesigns to some things, less compatible older software, but new software created to run on it. With this in mind, the average Mac user usually sees no problem with this as so many tasks can be accomplished in so few programs that can be updated for really cheap. This isn't the case with Windows though and may make Windows 7 not so great for PC users. And for Mac users? It'll be what you want to run newer Windows programs at a fast speed in a virtual machine.

 

[dtravis7]

I downloaded the Beta not to waste time but to try it on my Netbook like I said in my other post as Vista is a DOG on the netbook. Windows 7 flys. I also got so tired of people saying things about an OS they never tried, I wanted to try it so I could know the truth about it's performance.

 

[gagnerants]

As it was said before tjback that windows 7 is still in the beta, so program problems are to be the norm for awhile Windows has been pretty good on being able to support older apps. Also unless you have installed the os onto a computer of yours then you have no reason to be claiming or speaking against something that is still in the development process. And I would be willing to bet that every person on this form that HAS used windows 7 would have to agree that it is the best verison of windows that we have seen thus far, and we are looking forward to the final product if the beta is this good.
The other point to complaining about the different verison of windows, that is part of what they do they develop more application that are better suited towards those who would need and use them. They have a verison of vista that is lower than home basic, but for the most part that is for developing nations and such. With windows 7 being this good this early, if they keep up at the rate they are going and keep it light they have the chance to regain some of the market, for example netbooks. I do think if windows 7 does keep a light load it will start to take the place of the netbooks that have a disto of linux installed on it.