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U.S. retail Windows notebook sales ended up falling 11% Y/Y during the holiday season (Nov....

  • Friday, January 4, 6:43 PM ET
    U.S. retail Windows notebook sales ended up falling 11% Y/Y during the holiday season (Nov. 18-Dec. 22), estimates NPD; that's just a little better than the 13% drop estimated for Windows PC sales from the time of the Win. 8 launch to the first week of December, and suggests the OS hasn't don't much yet to halt tablet cannibalization. Touchscreen notebooks accounted for just 4.5% of Win. 8 sales. MacBook sales fell 6%, but their ASP rose nearly $100 to $1,419. Flat-panel TV sales fell 1.5%, and their ASP more than 8% to $364.
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  • MSFT has touted their touchscreen laptops as innovation. Netbooks are a type of tweener that has been replaced by tablets with bluetooth keyboards. Win 8 was designed for touchscreen hardware. The surface isn't that useful relative to other tablets. I wish MSFT would massively improve office instead of putting out a marginally better OS on marginal hardware that sells only to users on the margin.
    4 Jan, 06:55 PM Reply Like
  • It's questionable whether Windows 8 is an improvement. I've read enough about Windows 8 that I'm not considering it. Maybe after the next major update I'll look again. But Windows has pretty well worn me out. I'm tired of doing maintenance on an OS. Defrag? I'm pretty fed up with defragging. Sure, it's in the background, no big deal .... but is this something beyond the capabilities of MSFT OS engineers to get rid of?
    4 Jan, 07:04 PM Reply Like
  • This is typical of the negative commentary from a person who has no experience with Windows 8. My experience is very positive. I have it running with a touch screen on an HP All-in-one running the Intel i5 chip processor. Its the best computer I've ever owned. Out of the box installation only required plugging in the power supply and putting the batteries inside the remote mouse. With no exaggeration, my daily time to complete my spreadsheets and charts has been cut to less than half. It sucks up downloads from the Internet more than twice as fast as my previous computer running Vista. I've never been idle waiting for a software update.

    Bad mouthing something you don't know about and getting left behind in the dust is just not the way to go my friend.
    5 Jan, 07:29 AM Reply Like
  • Actually, I do have some experience with it. Asked some questions of the MSFT at their little outlet store and they couldn't answer the question. I don't find having to operate in two different desktops to be desirable.

    Do you find defragging to be a feature? How about cleaning up your registry? When I buy a desktop, I put "periodically cleaning up my registry" to be a very high priority. What would I do with my life if I couldn't spend time cleaning my registry. Oh the joy! Apparently, you share that joy.

    But put our experiences aside, because that's anecdotal and your personal experience means as little as my personal experience.

    Are you finding rave technical reviews of Windows 8? I'm not.
    5 Jan, 09:31 AM Reply Like
  • You still had Vista? I don't think you should keep quiet about other people being left behind. You may not have noticed but Vista didn't receive wide acclaim either.

    Of course your time was cut in half with a new PC. Your dating your PC as having about 10% of the capability of an I5. You could have installed Vista on a new Intel PC and it would have been a lot faster. I'm not sure the we would have accepted your PC as a donation where I volunteer.

    I could have run some utilities on your Vista machine and more than likely doubled it's performance. In the future don't admit you're going from Vista to Windows 8. Either keep quiet about what you had or pretend you're going from Windows 7 to Windows 8.

    Download speed has virtually nothing to do with an OS. It's all about the hardware. Two identical [hardware configs] PCs with one running Vista and the other running Windows 8 will have the same download speeds.
    5 Jan, 09:38 AM Reply Like
  • @ shakenbake2011, that is pretty standard for MSFT. Here is a company that bought it's own own original operating system and then barrowed the AAPL GUI system. I for one am not surprised, Windows is a work in progress, it's hard to improve on a system MSFT doesn't really understand. Can hardly wait to see how they butcher cloud app's.
    5 Jan, 12:21 PM Reply Like
  • Note that despite the 6% drop in MacBook sales, the ASP actually increased by more than 7%!
    4 Jan, 07:00 PM Reply Like
  • Inelastic Demand!
    4 Jan, 07:19 PM Reply Like
  • That would assume that AAPL didn't want to sell more or couldn't make what the market demanded. I doubt either are true.
    4 Jan, 11:21 PM Reply Like
  • Actually Windows 8 is something that grows on you. It is like XP, in that many people decided to stick with Windows 2000 for a while.
    Its a good product that will sell in time.
    http://seekingalpha.co...
    5 Jan, 12:43 AM Reply Like
  • It will grow in time because if you're going to buy a new PC, it's going to come with Windows 8. In terms of the mass market. Not many people are going to switch from Windows to Linux or Macs. I'm not sure what businesses are going to do. They don't switch over to new OSs for 12-18 months typically.
    5 Jan, 09:49 AM Reply Like
  • Yeah, Sal, grows on you like a fungus! This may take forever!
    5 Jan, 12:24 PM Reply Like
  • Sal.... XP grew on me....like a disease! I spent twice the price of my spendy big box 3 monitor system just trying to keep it alive and functional for years, and when it finally totally failed, I purchased a 17" HP laptop that took 3 times its initial cost to recover from breakdowns over a period of 3 years!

    I solemnly swore--after the loss of 8000 emails--that I will never again in my lifetime ever ever ever own another Microsoft product! And during that long interval of 10 years of ownership, I was a MSFT stock owner, and the stock did nothing. I sold yesterday! I'm really done!

    My Mac 2CI --from 1991--still fires up and runs just fine, as well as several other ancient Macs laying about the home, and nothing has ever happened to any of the 2 dozen other Apple computers and products that I have purchased as gifts for my family members.

    I made a bunch of money as a VERY early MSFT investor--got in at 4 and took a lot out at 60+, but the remainder went flat for a decade! And I am of the opinion that it did so because it made trashy, buggy and wretchedly-difficult-to use software, and grew into a sort of spybot/paranoid police presence on everybody's computers--a dreadful outcome for an initially successful company.

    User memory is very long, and diehard Windows users are reluctantly converting very slowly--but inevitably--to the Apple OS. They are bitter about the bucks and time wasted struggling under the dominance and "imperial attitude" of Microsoft. That is precisely why the Surface is dead-in-the-water since launch--why go there when AAPL already has the superior product and ecosystem?

    My cousin is a very high ranking engineer at Microsoft--his entire family is hooked on Apple products....and according to him, the cognoscenti at Microsoft all use Apple products "in private". Besides, the PC is dying--my sons and grandkids never use theirs anymore!

    If I sound bitter about Microsoft--it is because I am! But I'm sure not unhappy with the APPL I've owned since 2005, but I'm REALLY bitter about the APPL that I sold in 1999!!
    5 Jan, 02:28 AM Reply Like
  • In my printing co, the workflow is trough 18 Mac with IOS. The administration & sales trough 12 MS Windows PC (Desktop or laptop). The Workflow represents 80% of our computer needs & 10% of maintenance cost. The Administration & sales account for 20% of our computer needs & 80% of the maintenance cost.
    Macs life is +/- double the PC life & the investment - resell value is equivalent.
    Do the math.
    5 Jan, 04:22 AM Reply Like
  • As a die hard windows user who has bought a very expensive top of the range iMac 27 and Mac Book. I'll tell you that I won't be buying Mac's again for a very long time. The Hardware is great, OS X is fine but so is Windows 7 and Windows 8... but the bonus of Windows is that it has a much wider range of software that I want to use personally at home and at work.

    As to why windows purchases are lower, well this is a direct result of Microsoft requiring it. Windows 7 actually had slightly lower real world requirements vs. Vista and the same applies to Windows 8 vs. Windows 7.

    I have Windows 8 running great on a High-End PC constructed in 2007. I haven't had the need to purchase a new PC in nearly 6 years. I have simply upgraded the OS.

    [[ As side note is that my 2007 High end PC still outperforms my US$ 4000 iMac 27 (due to better graphics and drive speed) ]]
    5 Jan, 07:40 AM Reply Like
  • And I have a high end Athlon PC that I built in 2002 and it's running Windows 7. ....So there. ;o)

    "but the bonus of Windows is that it has a much wider range of software that I want to use personally at home and at work."

    And that's a key point. If you have a need or desire for software that runs on only one platform then that settles it. If the s/w you wanted only ran on a Mac, you should buy a Mac; if the s/w you wanted only ran in a Windows environment then you buy one with Windows [ignoring Bootcamp].

    People get their underwear so twisted in a knot over computing choices. It's not THAT big a deal.

    Tell us the make, model, year of the car you drive and we can evalutate whether you made the BEST choice. Of course we wouldn't do that because who cares? It's your money and you get to decide what your set of priorities are. Why people do this with computing devices, PCs, smartphones, tablets escapes me.

    Try to tell me what my weighted priorities are in buying a tablet. If you don't know them you should be at a loss to tell me which tablet would best suit my needs. The same is true for desktops or smartphones or any other computing device.

    I knew a person who bought a Mac and then had he Mac OS overwritten and used it as purely a Windows PC. She liked the aesthetic design and footprint of a Mac but wanted to run in a Windows environment. It was such an odd request, the sales person made sure she understood what she was doing. It's her money and she spent it the way she wanted. It's no skin off my back.
    5 Jan, 10:08 AM Reply Like
  • When is the board of MSFT going to wake up and replace Steve Ballmer?
    6 Jan, 07:02 AM Reply Like
  • @nat e, don't own it don't care
    6 Jan, 01:35 PM Reply Like
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