“Sales of devices based on Apple’s Mac OS and iOS will overtake those of products running all flavors of Windows in 2015, a Gartner analyst predicted Monday,” Martyn Williams reports for IDG News Service. “The switch in leadership would come roughly 13 years after Steve Jobs reinvented Apple, launching the iPod and plotting the company on a new path that has seen it conquer and define new markets, beginning with music players and continuing through cellphones and tablet computers.”
“ast year, shipments of products running Windows still handily outnumbered those running Mac OS and iOS, by 347 million to 213 million, according to figures from Gartner published Monday. The lead will be slashed to 23 million in 2014, and the Apple OSes will likely outnumber Windows devices in 2015, said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner,” Williams reports. “‘When you break down the numbers, Apple is already leading the consumer market. They are selling more than Windows today,’ said Milanesi in a phone interview.”
Williams reports, “The shift mirrors the changing computer landscape, where desktops and laptops are increasingly being replaced by smartphones and tablets. Microsoft has struggled to gain mass adoption for Windows Phone 8, and the duelling Windows 8 and Windows RT have confused some tablet buyers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Some people laughed when, over eight and a half years ago, we wrote the following:
As we have always said, even as many short-sightedly waved (and continue to wave) the white flag, the war is not over. And, yes, we shall prevail… No company is invincible. Not even Microsoft. – MacDailyNews Take, January 10, 2005
Who’s laughing now?
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Apple Macintosh on the rise as Windows PC market plummets – April 11, 2013
Gartner: PC Market posts 11.2 percent decline in Q113; Apple Mac sales up 7.4 percent in U.S. – April 10, 2013
IDC: PC shipments post the steepest decline ever in a single quarter, down 13.9% in Q113 – April 10, 2013
I tried to explain this to a friend a few weeks ago. The biggest mistake MS made was to ignore the iPhone and iPad. They could have dominated with a version of Office if they had done it a few years ago. Windows itself is basically dead…
They did not ignore the iPhone and iPad. They just lacked the ability to do anything effective. The way Microsoft is constructed, it was inevitable. You can only live in the past for so long.
Yes, there is no excuse for what Microsoft has not done. To have that established base of users to sell to is as good as it gets. Unbelievable!
The problem with Microsoft is that they need to have “backwards compatibility”–they could never do something like what Apple did when they moved from OS 9 to OS X and told their customers that it was time for a completely new approach, and the old software can’t come along for the ride.
I don’t think that Microsoft made a specific mistake, it made a general one: it relies on products which can’t move into the future because they are carrying too much of the past.
They could have done something like what Apple did. They could have come up with a totally new OS, and run old apps in an emulation mode just like Apple did with Rosetta. They just didn’t, and now they’re gonna wither and die.
Well said.
…METRO
You are wrong about that.
Microsoft have “Metro” or Modern UI as they now call it, which is more than just their tablet OS mixed with their desktop — please don’t merge iOS and OSX Apple — Metro is their new OS.
Microsoft are in the process of dumping ‘desktop’ and moving to Metro, which uses a platform called WinRT to work (not to be confused with Windows RT, stupid naming system they have).
The killer point about Metro is it copies Apple iOS in that software is only available from one place: the Microsoft Store. Working on the same principle as iOS, where Microsoft get 30% of revenue for every oiece of software sold, Microsoft are closing Windows.
“Metro” is not backwardly compatible, that’s why you now see two versions of apps like Skype: the regular ‘desktop’ one, plus the “Windows 8” version.
Gabe Newell of Valve called it a ‘catastrophe’ a while ago, and it’s looking that way so far.
The biggest mistake Microsoft made was to make the Company reliant on the enterprise. Microsft saw the enterprise as the holy grail: the consumer will use at home, what they use at work was the theory. That worked fairly well, if you were computer literate.
The problem was that corporations have a larger investment in their databases, and proprietary software systems, than they do in hardware. The hardware got changed out, but the OS was held back because it would have forced the enterprise to make massively expensive changes to its systems. When that happens they examine alternatives, and Microsoft didn’t want the enterprise doing that. So legitimate innovation came to a halt.
Still those ignorance parasites blood sucker analysts don’t think Apple good enough in term of innovation. Parasites have the power to set price on AAPL.
As Long As It Takes, MDN.
“When you break down the numbers, Apple is already leading the consumer market. They are selling more than Windows today.”
What part of that non-metaphorical sentence does a non-brain-dead analyst fail to grasp?
There is nothing really annoy is that a brain-dead, parasites-blood-sucker analysts have the power over smart-talented engineers who working hard day and night for a great products to simple our lives.
Relax, M$ isn’t going anywhere, alas. They’ll be around for generations, not relevant outside of corp and govt IT, but still here,
HA! The best revenge is success!
I honestly don’t understand this constant talk about who’s selling the most product. Unit sales numbers don’t necessarily represent anything relating one product to another. It’s like comparing Kia sales to BMW sales. Obviously, Kia will be able to sell more cars and have the highest sales numbers. Might as well compare unit sales of refrigerators to unit sales of toasters. Both products are important and each have their own purpose. Unit costs are vastly different due to size differences and complexity, but that’s just how it is. Unit sales are meaningless out of context.
“It’s like comparing Kia sales to BMW sales”
Well, maybe so, but comparing OS sales between two competitors .. it’s not like OS X and Windows are SOOOO different, as your strawman seems to suggest. Yes, we know, Apple makes money on the hardware, but it’s still a pretty awesome feat, considering, you know, history~
MS gave it all away, just like Apple did. It is justice that they, the inferior copiers, lose out in the end.
Well, that sounds like good news. Unfortunately this will be perceived as bad news by the market and Wall Street.