According to people who figure out this sort of stuff for a living, between twenty-five and fifty percent of those currently buying Macs are new users. This means they are probably refugees from Windows or very, very late adapters. Either way, the Mac is on its way to the mainstream - at the cost of new PC users. Awww.

Of course, a huge percentage of PC users will run out to get new PCs just as soon as they find out that Vista won’t run on their old cheap-ass Dell toys or when those same devices begin spewing lowest-bidder parts. I just spoke with a friend who originally couldn’t afford a Mac, who has now paid for one after having to replace half of the parts in her cheap PC. My heart goes out to her and many others who have fallen for that scam.

Staring in January, I’ll expect a progression of calls from new clients asking how to install MS Office or some anti-virus or AOL on their new Macs. They will have trouble with their printers because the all-in-one Brother/Lexmark/HP toys from Costco have bad software that doesn’t work with Macs or because they didn’t hold one hand in the air and spin around at the right time.

These new Mac users though, will just get back to work, not noticing anything until their friends start complaining about the Vista viruses and hardware problems that they have happily forgotten.

Apple’s number of ‘new-to-Mac’ buyers growing

A recent survey of twenty Apple Specialist retailers shows that approximately 25 percent of customers buying Macs are new to the platform and that the figure is likely to keep rising due to the iPod “halo effect” and Apple’s Boot Camp software…

More: LINK

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 7:17 am and is filed under Apple, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.