It’s obvious, isn’t it? People buy Macs because they’re hip, funky trendsetters for whom having a beige PC in the room is a definite interior design faux pas. Or they simply like the fact that by buying a Mac they join an elite minority, swimming against the PC tide.
That might be true for some Mac users, but a new survey has just found that for most of them their decision is made for far less fashionable reasons than simply what their computer looks like, or whether they prefer jeans and a T-shirt to a suit.
48% said they chose Macs over PCs for their ease of use, while 32% said they chose Macs because they view them to be more secure and have fewer viruses than PCs. Surprisingly only 8% buy them for their looks.
9% said Macs are ‘easier to configure and expand’ than PCs, though I’m not sure that’s true. They may be easier to configure, certainly, but is there quite the range of expansion and configuration capabilities with the Mac platform that there are with the PC? Answers on a postcard please…
Meanwhile 4% said they revel in their ‘independence from Bill Gates’, though to those people I would like to point out that it’s a little bit late to put a dent in Bill’s wallet (actually to put a meaningful dent in Bill’s wallet you would have to go almost all the way back to 1981 when IBM chose MS/DOS as the operating system for the first ever PC, because it hasn’t stopped bulging since. But that’s another story.)
The survey of 100 people was conducted by Konica Minolta Printing Solutions at this year’s MacExpo (the company also wanted to point out that most Mac users are still on inkjet printers when lasers cost less per page — and by the way Konica Minolta Printing Solutions can offer you a great deal if you are thinking of swapping — but that, too, is another story.)
Not all of the survey results were particularly surprising: “Just over half (53%) of workplaces run both Mac and Windows operating systems…and while a third (33%) of respondents’ work environments were exclusively Mac-based, only 8% were exclusively Windows-based,” the firm noted in a press release.
Stop me if I’m wrong, but that’s not exactly representative of broader desktop market share figures, since the survey sample was a group of 100 people who had all turned up at MacExpo. I challenge anyone to find 33% of delegates at a Microsoft Windows event exclusively running Macs in their workplace — you would be doing well if you found 3% fell into that category.
However, how many PC users would say they chose their PC over a Mac because they consider the PC more secure, or easier to use than a Mac?
