Ten years ago nobody expected a massive Apple revival, not even Steve Jobs, I suspect. Certainly, noone foresaw an Apple juggernaut that would roll over Microsoft. But a juggernaut is what we now see. It’s clear (to me at least) that Apple’s current trajectory is going to follow a reasonably reliable trend for at least the next 3 years. Why? Because Apple is far from saturating any of its primary markets (Mac, iPhone and iPad/iPod) and it is forging ahead in all these markets. In this article I’ll try to answer 3 questions about the Mac market (in isolation):

1. Why did the Mac become so successful?
2. What part does the Mac play in Apple’s overall success?
3. And what will the Mac market be worth over the medium term?

When is a Mac not a Mac?

Apple’s success is founded on the Mac; not the Mac that Apple startled the world with in 1984, but the reanimated Mac (with OS X) that first appeared in September 2000. Apple acquired Next Software and reacquired Steve Jobs in 1996. The turn-around clearly began then. But it took a further four years before Steve Jobs had the software platform Apple needed. OS X, a re-energized version of the Next OS, replaced the original “Classic” Mac OS. The migration to OS X wasn’t complete until the Mac jumped to Intel chips in 2005, and the Classic Mac OS ceased to be fully supported. Such migrations take time.

OS X is, at its foundation, Unix – a version of BSD Unix with the Mach microkernel. The important word there is microkernel. Technically a microkernel is the bare-bones component of the OS that manages addressing, threads and inter-process communication. There are advantages and disadvantages to having a microkernel. A microkernel is a little slower than its alternative, a full kernel. But it’s a lot simpler. With a microkernel it’s really unlikely that one app failing will bring down another app. The much despised Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) is rare indeed on OS X (and it’s grey not blue on the Mac). You can provoke one by removing the keyboard – it’s the only way I know how to force one. An app can’t cause one without getting really irresponsible. Additionally, with OS X, apps don’t need to get anywhere near the system internals. Everything they might want to do is available as an OS service.

That is why the Mac + OS X is so reliable and why Apple marketed it with the slogan “it just works.” Compar to Windows it does “just work.” Apps can and do fail, but OS X rarely fails and it doesn’t to degrade over time, as Windows seems to. The Mac rarely needs rebooting. If you run too many apps, just start quitting them and most of the system resources they were hogging will start freeing up.

Nowadays, OS X is the Mac. While Apple was busy getting OS X right, Microsoft was busy getting Windows wrong, with Longhorn/Vista. The success of the Mac over the last decade would have been much less, had Microsoft not dallied for so long on Longhorn. After a while, OS X had moved so far ahead of Windows that Microsoft was reduced (yet again) to copying the Mac rather than innovating.

The Touchy Feely Emporia

The Microsoft malaise helped, but what really gave the Mac escape velocity was the Apple Stores. Most financial commentators believed Apple was making an error when it opened its Apple Stores in 2001 – and they were unrepentantly wrong. Historically, the Mac market had failed to grow fast because few people outside marketing and design departments ever got their hands on a Mac

You rarely saw Macs. They weren’t on sale in office stores or even many computer stores. The Mac was missing from the PC consumer’s radar. So Steve Jobs invented the Apple Stores and changed the game. Those touchy-feely-emporia were showrooms as much as they were shops. Here are some stats: it takes an average of six visits to an Apple Store for a consumer to switch from Windows to the Mac. As a result, about half of the Mac buyers on any day in the typical Apple store are switching from Windows.

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