Apple set to lead a PC renaissance

By Stan Beer
Monday, 19 June 2006 21:14

IT Industry - Strategy

If there is a computer company more perfectly positioned than Apple is in the marketplace right now, it is probably worth buying. Leaving iPod aside and focussing purely on the new Intel Macintosh platform, Apple seems to hold all the cards, while the Dells, HPs, Acers, Lenovos and others flounder desperately looking for a way to differentiate themselves in a flat market.

Think of it this way. Apple has just released a totally new product range that will not spur on sales from its own ultra-loyal constituency of Mac users but has opened up the possibility - in fact the probablility - of significant sales to an entirely new market many times the size of its own user base. However, whatever the chances were of making sales to Windows PC users before the arrival of a new piece of software called Parallels for Mac Desktop, they have increased even further.

The Bootcamp dual boot utility released by Apple is good but it has its disadvantages. Many PC and Macintosh users like to keep their machines running all day. Shutting down and rebooting is a time consuming nuisance. In addition, the limitation of not being able to run Macintosh applications and Windows applications during the same session could be annoying to some. However, all this has been solved thanks to the Parallels vitualisation program, which basically turns a Macintosh into a box that can run just about any PC operating system in its own virtual window with, from most reports, very little degradation in performance.

As a result, Apple now has personal computing platform that is comparable in cost to most of its competitors but is more functional, more inherently secure, has more plug and play features and, incredibly, more open. All the disadvantages that kept PC users away from the Macs of the past are gone. Both platforms share the same hardware and users can even share data between Mac and Windows applications running in different virtual Windows.

That then opens the possibility for the first time of PC users buying and using Mac applications in some areas and PC applications in others. There could even be a case for running some Linux applications in a third virtual window. Macintosh may become the first truly multi-platform computer platform, while PCs will never be able to run Mac OSX.

PC sales results from the current quarter should be interesting to see when they're released. At a guess, overall results will be flat. However, Macintosh sales will probably have spiked while others have dipped or stayed the same. Meanwhile, Windows PC manufacturers will probably be shaking their heads and hoping that Windows Vista arrives on time in 2007 to give their sales a much needed boost. What may worry them, however, is knowing that Macintoshes will also be perfectly capable of running Vista.