Generally speaking people are fickle, yours truly included. So I had one bad experience with an organ grinder’s monkey at a McDonald’s in Manhattan. Is that a good reason to switch to Burger King?
The truth of switching from this to that is simple. We go, and we leave. We leave whatever isn’t working for us now, and we go to wherever we think it will be better for us. Among digital gadgets– computers and smartphones– the past few years can be characterized as the Switcher Generation.
The One Way Street
Here’s a good example of what happened to the previous generation of so-called smartphone users. They switched to, almost en mass, iPhones and Android smartphones.
They switched from smartphones that were complicated and cumbersome to use to phones that did more and were easier, almost intuitive to use.
The switch from one generation of phones to another was made easier because the new generation of phones were more attractive. Switching from this to that is only easy if the new product provides a compelling reason to switch.
The same thing has occurred in the past 10 years and explains why the Mac has outgrown the PC industry’s sales rate. People are switching from Windows PCs to Macs and doing so in record numbers.
Why?
The Mac offers a familiar face, thanks to OS X’s mimicry of iOS on the hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads. The Mac offers a less complicated and more secure environment than a typical Windows PC, which is also associated with ‘cheap and plastic, vs. the Mac which is durable and aluminum.
Interestingly, the Mac and Windows PCs, as well as iPhone and Android smartphones, do much the same thing in much the same way; point and click, tap a button. The statistics may be arguable, but most in the technology industry know that Apple receives more switchers from Android and Windows than the other way around.
Why?
The key here is differentiation and perceived value. Android runs on hundreds of devices; mostly plastic, mostly cheap. Windows runs on hundreds of devices; mostly plastic, and mostly cheap. Apple’s products are different– no Windows, and no Android. And, Apple clothes their products in a distance aluminum skin, curates applications, and integrates the ecosystem between devices, which makes the total experience greater than the sum of the parts.
That is more difficult for Windows and Android device vendors. Apple is considered a premium brand, while anything Android or Windows is considered less, even though there are more similarities in performance and usage than differences.
People switch from one product to another because they’re leaving— moving away from cheap, or troublesome devices– and going to products that are more upscale, work better together, and have a perceived value that makes the price tag worthy.
Bill Maslen says
Wednesday, March 25, 2015 at 12:18 PMThis is reinforced by a peculiar but amusing fact. If you compare ultrabooks made by PC manufacturers and Apple, you will almost invariably find that equivalent models of PC are actually more expensive than Macs – in many cases considerably more expensive. Just yesterday I was gasping at the eye-watering prices charged by HP for their EliteBook range (but you can carry out similar comparisons across other manufacturers such as Asus, Samsung and Dell).
And yet these PCs continue to be perceived and described as the “cheaper” alternative (by journalists as well, who should in principle know better). Even now, comments on new Apple machines (e.g. the MacBook) are full of remarks like “Why buy an Apple when a WinPC is so much cheaper?”. Because Windows PCs = cheap. Even when they’re (really) not.
The moral of the story is: simply slapping a huge price tag on something isn’t enough to turn it into an Apple computer. Makes me smile, anyway.
AdamC says
Thursday, March 26, 2015 at 8:42 AMdan glimmer left because of this
“As I wrote recently on Medium, that’s the reason I no longer rely on anything Apple makes even though I was once an avid user, because I don’t want to support a company that has become so control-freakish with its customers and “partners,” so paranoid in its secrecy (and so hostile to journalism it can’t control)—and leads the vanguard of an industry movement to turn open computing systems into closed ones.”
Certainly not about simplicity but something fundamentally personal and paranoid.