Apple's computer business isn't so bad. But it's not the stuff of dreams, either. In the winter of 2004, Apple sold about a million Mac machines. This represented a 26 percent increase over sales from the same quarter in the previous year, but during the course of the year, Apple's numbers zig-zagged between increases in one quarter to declines in the next. Its share of the world's computer business remains dismal. The company now has about 2 percent of the worldwide computer market; its market share in the United States stands at just above 3 percent, a tenth of the share of the top Windows PC maker, Dell.

We won't pause long to chew on the paradox of the Mac -- the mystery over why, so far, the world's best desktop computers are also the world's least popular machines. That's an old chestnut among tech journalists, and it's a lame one, too, as the answers are pretty close at hand: Consider the Mac's (perceived) high prices, the curse of tech-industry network effects, the business missteps and strategic stumbles Apple has made over the years, and the savvy and sometimes criminal behavior of its competitors -- consider all this and it's no surprise that the Mac's not the main machine in town.

Now, many Mac lovers will argue that market share doesn't matter. BMW and Mercedes, they point out, have a small share of the auto market, and nobody frets about that. This may be so, but computing platforms are different from cars. Unlike automobiles, your computer improves as more people use systems like it -- as more developers become interested in your system, you get more and better software, for one thing. It's true that the Mac's not in danger of dying out as a platform, and that the Mac does benefit, in some ways, from its small market share (it's a lower-profile target for attackers, for instance). But do you remember the famous 1984 Mac commercial, the one that argued that this was not just another PC, that it was instead a revolutionary product? The Mac's current market share does not speak well of the fate of that revolution. If more people used the Mac, and if it became an actual threat to Windows, we'd see two gains: Mac users would benefit from a more vibrant platform, and, perhaps more important, all other systems would improve due to competition.

To tech industry observers, the Mac's tepid sales in 2004 were something of a surprise. During the same year, the iPod experienced phenomenal sales; Apple saw a 500 percent increase in sales of the music device in the winter quarter of 2004 compared to same quarter in 2003. In 2004, the company sold several times more iPods than it did Macs, meaning that the device was purchased by millions of people who didn't own Macs. Their only association with Apple came through the brilliant music player, and some analysts and Apple execs thought it was natural to expect some kind of "halo effect" from the iPod -- all those Windows people with favorable impressions of the iPod might consider switching to Macs.

But that halo didn't seem to work. For some reason, in 2004, vast numbers of Windows people didn't look at their iPods and decide to buy Macs. Why not? Perhaps the answer lies in what Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld magazine, says is the essential difference between Windows people and Mac people: Mac people love their computers on a personal, emotional level. Windows people, on the other hand, prefer to think of their machines as office tools, gadgets no more special than the stapler. Windows users don't expect much in the way of quality, beauty or elegance from their machines; if they did, they'd be Mac people. Instead, they expect their PCs to perform a great many tasks, and they've resigned themselves to having to labor over those tasks.

This is not at all how we think about our iPods. The iPod is a consumer electronics device; it does one thing, plays music, and it does that one thing extremely well. The device is also intensely personal: People buy the iPod as much for form, for the way you look when you carry it around town, as for function. Your Windows PC, by contrast, is all function, no personality. Computers are the workhorses of our lives, slaves to the routine and the mundane. You do your taxes on your PC. You pay homage to John Coltrane on your iPod. Thinking about it this way, it seems clear why Windows people didn't look at the iPod as a first step to the Mac: In the mind of the typical Windows user, there's no clear connection between a desktop computer like the Mac and the iPod. The two exist in separate product universes. The iPod is sublime. Your computer is a chore. Why would you ever associate the two?

But the Mac Mini, Snell says, eases the mental transition between the iPod and the desktop machine. Indeed, one way to think about the Mac Mini -- and the way that Apple may be thinking about it -- is as the iPod of computers. Yes, the Mac Mini can do everything that any other Mac can do; it's a full-fledged computer. But "there's a big part of Apple that wants to be a consumer electronics company," Snell says, and the Mac Mini has the look and feel of a consumer electronics device -- a friendly, personal thing that will be marketed mainly for its core functions, its facility with your pictures, movies and music.

"I was visiting some friends this weekend," Snell says, "and they're PC people, they don't own Macs. But one of them was describing going to a friend's house to use iPhoto so she could make a photo book for their daughter's birthday. They loved the Mac, and they were seriously talking about buying a Mac Mini." What's interesting, Snell points out, is that these people didn't want the Mini for its intrinsic computer power; they were going to keep their PC up and running. They wanted the Mini as a household digital hub, as an appliance, rather than a computer, that made it easier to play with their photos.

Windows users often think about the buying of a Mac as a terminal decision. Indeed, you don't just "buy" a Macintosh; in jargon that Apple has popularized, you "switch" to the Mac, you make a change to your life in order to reorient yourself to a whole new platform. Put that way, buying a Mac is a huge decision; it involves learning a new operating system, transferring files, and buying new, expensive software to replace the software on your Windows machine. But if you think of the Mac Mini as an appliance, as a device for photos and making movies, you can conceive of using the Mac without "switching," Snell notes. You can use the Mac alongside your Windows computer, in much the same way you can use an iPod in your Windows home. Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm, echoes this thought. "The whole 'switching' thing isn't the way to look at this," Baker says. "People who are buying these are not switching all their Windows PCs to Macs. As more and more households get more and more kinds of computers in the house, they have a range of PCs for different uses. It's reasonable to expect that the Mac will be part of that range," he says.

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