A few days back I checked the market cap on both Microsoft and Apple, their market cap as around 205B and 143.42B respectively. Now I know that a difference of 60B is a lot, however it just proves your point that even though the margin is high the money is not there cos nobody buys them wrong. With such a small market share and so many fewer employees, their market cap is very impressive.

I’m from Singapore, and here, I have to say that Apple is extremely extremely popular. In my hall in a boarding school here, there are at least 8 mac books, 2 of them being a pro out of 48 people. Now this might seem extremely little, but when I first came here (last year), there were only 3 ppl who had MacBooks.

In my class in school (admittedly it’s a school with very rich people), 70% of the class of 30 ppl have some form of Apple product, be it the ipod nano or iphone or ipod touch or ipod classic. Some of them even have multiple items such as an ipod touch and an ipod classic. Now these are their own items and not something they “share” with their family. Some of the classmates I know say that in their family everyone has at least one ipod. I think we can all agree that Apple products are slightly more expensive than competitors, but not all of us agree that they are better products. But what I can say that these “premiums” are not a barrier at all to people buying them.

My family has an Imac and a unibody MacBook and a second hand ipod nano I bought from my classmate who just got a Iphone. We also have 2 Windows laptop. One of them being a Toshiba tablet running XP. The Toshiba cost me SGD2800, while the Unibody MacBook cost SGD1.5k (bought during one of apple’s one day sale online). The time I bought the tablet to the time I bought the MacBook was less than a year so price drops are extremely little. The tablet had all sorts of stuff like a touchscreen and fingerprint stuff and a drop resistant enclosure and all sorts of other stuff, so naturally I was very excited to be getting it. I was extremely disappointed when I got it has it was junk. The fingerprint gimmick was useless, instead of making my authenticating process before I logged into Windows faster, it just took more time for my computer to load the FingerPrint sensor. I couldn’t even stop the FingerPrint software from opening up everytime I typed a password even though I had settled it in the settings. In the end I had to uninstall the fingerprint software. I took my computer 3 minutes to start up and quite a long time to shutdown too. Within the first 8 months I had 2 bluescreens of death from doing utterly nothing. The first time while copying Movies from an extrenal hard disk, the other while just starting up my computer. Windows also had so many other small errors that I won’t even bother describing here.

The only experience I had of Windows Vista was running in a Parallels on my MacBook. I can say that I know Windows Vista is a resource hog because my Imac (1gb) could run Windows XP in parallels quite reasonably. On my MacBook which had a faster processor and 2 Gb of DDR3 ram, Windows Vista was unbearably slow. And those authenticating dialogs that constantly popped up for the smallest of reasons whenever I wanted to install anything drove me to hate Vista quite easily.

Last time my family computer at home used to be a Windows computer. We changed that every year by buying a new one. However, once we got our Imac, we haven’t had the need to buy a new main desktop computer for 3 years. Yes, it is getting slow now, but I just intend to upgrade the ram from 1 gb to 2 gb and I’m sure it can last for a few more years.

At my dad’s office, he runs Windows on some of the cheapest machines there are (except for the more senior people in the company who obviously get better computers). Not because they are good, but just because they are cheap. He has Windows XP to Windows 98 in the office. Do the computers give him headaches? Yes certainly. Even the new dell computers bought at the end of last year are extremely slow compared to our 3 year old imac, even though it has more ram, more hard disk and everything.

The only things really stopping the office from converting is because, firstly the price, secondly because all other offices that they do business with uses Microsoft office, and their own suite is not very compatible with their windows and mac versions.

With all that said, I think that Windows 7 is shaping up quite nicely. My roommate who uses a beta copy of it says its much faster than XP. If it is really as fast as he says, I’ll be extremely happy to run it in parallels in my macBook so I can run applications like MetaTrader for my forex trading which is Windows only, thus solving my problems of some software not supporting my Mac =)

The reality is year over year sales on desktops is significantly down for Apple (-16%) I would think that is a trend, not an anomaly. I am sure they know it too.