Where did AAPL come from? Only a short while ago I thought apples reeked of poo. But a few things have changed my mind:
- A few programmer friends who have switched or are switching
- Vista
- Leopard
- BSD
- Raw power of new machines
- VMWare
- They look cool
- Hard core hackers are using them.
The first is that other people with similar needs to me are happy with mac. This is pretty straight forward until you realize that some of those programmers are still programming for windows and will for the near or possibly distant future.
Next Vista blows chunks and probably always will. XP will soon not be sold and that blows. Basically after working well with windows for over a decade I just can’t do the Vista thing. XP works great but I doubt it will be able to hold out until Vista’s replacement assuming it works.
Leopard works. This is key as I found previous versions of OS X to be a bit jerky. This seems to be fixed now.
BSD. The mac OS is built on BSD. In summary it is a pretty Reader Rabbit interface on top of BSD. What, you might ask, is BSD. Well you have probably heard of Linux and probably know that it is for geeks. Well BSD is for really really hard core geeks. The take away message for BSD is that it is for hard core security and performance geeks. That is a good foundation to build an operating system on.
Power. Raw power. The newest processors coming out have power to spare while not eating batteries which have also got more power. Also some other improvements like LED back lighting translate to longer battery life. RAM is cheap as dirt as well. This all adds up to something that can compensate for some of the drawbacks of all the eye candy that apple uses. In the past it offended me that the OS would spend so much time flickering lights at a huge cost to my sanity that apple computers were out of the question. Well now a new Mac Book pro has power to spare and thus the eye candy comes will almost no real cost.
VMWare. One of my favorite undervalued companies. They are making the big bucks from the high end server people but they also sell a $79 product for apple people that will allow you to run windows. Now if you set this up correctly you can use an apple with the apple OS and still run those super critical windows apps that you might not be able to live without. A good example in the business world is Outlook. There is no real equivalent to many of the features and plugins that you will commonly find in a larger corporation. Thus using a mac would potentially cut you off from your work. But VMWare seamlessly integrates your windows apps so well you might not even remember that they are windows apps.
There is no denying that when you pay the bucks for an AAPL you get some sex appeal. (Both you and the laptop). Apple has always had the artist’s market and they want cool.
But lastly for me (a smaller market segment but a potentially very influential one) I am seeing the really hard core hackers all using apples. By hackers I mean those people who make computers do things that would frighten you and impress people like me. Why are they using apples and not windows machines. Well for nearly all of the above but the BSD part is very important to them. But people like hackers and people like me are the ones who influence buying for really big companies.
Where is this going? Well in the next while I will be doing this experiment on myself. I will switch all my development to a Mac environment. This will be costly but interesting. If the experiment fails my kids will get the coolest laptop in school. If it works I will probably never buy another windows based machine.
So what does this all mean financially? Well in short is means that AAPL will be a good buy over the next few years. Microsoft could be building the best operating system in the world but they won’t have it ready until 2010 or better which is eons in the computer world. What apple has now appears to be damn good. If they can sell me then they will sell more and more. This translates to Microsoft selling less and less far sooner than I ever thought they would. Microsoft is not the sort of company that can shrink well. Like many companies before it a small shrinkage caused near death. The stock stops going up and they start to bleed employees who were expecting stock awards. The remaining employees start various civil wars and it just gets worse. Lastly with a falling stock acquisitions that might save it will slip away. Apple on the other hand might not be able to take success. They have played the underdog while simultaneously being a bunch of arrogant bastards. Success might cause problems with AAPL too but for a while the stock should sing.
So my plan is to buy an apple and see how it goes. If it works then AAPL will get a big long term buy probably at the expense of MSFT. If not then MSFT will be held and AAPL ignored. I will report the results of this experiment.