Bonum Certa Men Certa

Apple is a Tiny Niche on the Desktop

Ballmer's slide on Macs and GNU/Linux
Steve Ballmer's presentation slide
from 2009 shows GNU/Linux as bigger than Apple on the desktop



Summary: On a global scale, Apple remains just a perceptual luxury of very few and those who know better give GNU/Linux a try

APPLE claims to ship only about 3% of the world's computers, according to a reader/contributor of ours. This figure makes a lot of sense because only US-centric market share figures can show Apple having gained significant foothold. The US population is about one twentieth of the world's population and Apple is of course US-based, just like Xbox 360 is US-based so any real comparison to Japanese consoles must be global to become meaningful at all. Ghabuntu has just posted this rant which it titled "Dear Apple Fanatics, the World is Bigger than America!"



Last time I checked, Nokia, even with the current crappy SymbianOS, still has over 40% of the TOTAL smartphone market share around the WORLD. And then too Android has managed to displace the iPhone as the third place platform. So what are these writers telling us? That there is nothing better than the iPhone or what? Or is it some form of addiction to anything that falls off the table of Jobs?

To be honest, it is very funny and sometimes irritating at the same time when you get bombarded over and over with such crappy articles that always tend to think the world is America and America is the world. Please Apple fanatics, we all know Lord Jobs is good at producing very shiny and likable UI, but please spare us the mostly baseless and frantic effort you devote to tearing apart anything that looks the least bit like a decent phone compared to your hypeDevices.


Nice to see the hype* meme we got started spreading further. Apple is just targetting people who are willing to pay massive premiums for commodity PCs with an Apple brand (which sometimes comes in the form of an illuminated logo that projects to some crowd in a presentation, for example, an implicit message like "I am richer than you"). Certain people would mumble something about "Mac experience" (whatever that is), but the dumbed-down menus are too restrictive and "I don't think those UIs are likable," wrote MinceR because "they couldn't even get maximize to work correctly.

“[At Apple] they couldn't even get maximize to work correctly.”
      -- MinceR
"[N]ice article though," he wrote in IRC. Apple is neither more ubiquitous nor better than GNU/Linux. It is more commonly found in the United States (not BRIC, which stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China) where Apple marketing is obscenely pervasive. For a modern desktop experience, give KDE4 a try. It does a lot more than Mac OS X can do and it deserves a lot more exposure. When it comes to small computers, GNU/Linux has become almost a de facto standard. Below is a new video of LimeOS (specialised GNU/Linux distribution). ⬆

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Recent Techrights' Posts

Ethics in Perspective, Free Software and Morality
top clients of Jeffrey Epstein are one happy family
The Register MS Made Millions of Pounds by Participating in the Slop Hype Campaign (It's Still Doing It), Now It Admits That It's Just a Bubble
the slop frenzy played a role in the Microsoft meltdown
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXX - Pyramid Schemes (Planned Plunder) and Canceled/Botched Surgeries Aren't "Funny", They Cause Serious Harm and Distress
We were right about Microsoft
The Real Issue With The Register MS is Not the Politics of Some Staff's "Tweets", It's That The Register MS Publishes Fake Articles for Sponsors (50,000 Pounds Minimum)
AWS and Google each pay millions for fake articles which beget journalistic bias too (they literally pay the salaries of the 'reporters')
Microsoft Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): We Need Accountability Because Many People Die and It's Because of Microsoft Diehards or People Bribed by Microsoft to Deploy Microsoft Where Lives Are at Risk
They're trying to save face right now
What the Media Misses: It's Not an NVIDIA Issue, Super Micro Computer Inc Also Fell From $45 to $26 in the Period NVIDIA Lost 33% of Its Faked 'Value', NVIDIA is Collapsing Like Intel
History goes in circles
Waste of Money: Giving More Money to Toothless Regulators That Don't Even Examine Evidence
Shame in SRA
 
Links 14/11/2026: "The Claude Delusion" and "The Microsoft Outage is a Warning for the World"
Links for the day
Richard Stallman (RMS) at Universidad Central del Ecuador (Guayaquil), Cuenca, Campus Sur Universidad Politecnica Salesiana (Quito), and Ohio State University
Long live the message and mission of RMS
They Paid Workers in 'Shares' (That Lost Almost Half Their Value in One Month)
Welcome back 1999 or 2007
Links 14/11/2026: "OpenAI Is Sustaining Enormous Losses" and Slop "Loses the Popular Vote"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, November 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/11/2026: Code of Conduct, Back to Gemini, and Gemlog to Inbox
Links for the day
Slop Promotion, Including Paid-for Slop Promotion for So-called 'Linux' Foundation (Its Clients Are Slop Companies)
We've noticed a lot of this lately in "It's FOSS" and to a lesser degree in "FOSS Force"
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Productivity Metrics and Antenna Outage
Links for the day
It's Not About China or Sex, It's About Corruption at NVIDIA and a Pyramid Scheme Perpetrated Under the Guise of "Hey Hi Revolution" (That Wasn't, It's Manufactured and Hyped by Bribes, Subsidised by Multi-Trillion-Dollar Loans, People's Pension Funds and More)
What's at stake here is a lot bigger than the "Ponzi hub" of Jensen Huang
No, You're Not a "Most Valuable Company" When Everything is Down for Half a Day in the Entire Planet
Still down, still no explanation (maybe they too aren't sure)
"Techrights Statement on Phoronix" Still Valid Five Years Later
Our position as stated in early 2022 has not changed
Vista 11's 'Growth' Has Stalled, It's Measured at Only 17.9% in the US This Year
That helps put in perspective Microsoft's attempt to discard almost 30% of its remaining workforce
"NVIDIA is Enron" (Subsidising the Pyramid Scheme That It Profited From), Microsoft is Next to be Down for the Count
Microsoft increasingly looks like the "next NVIDIA"
Richard Stallman Travels to South America to Give Talks About Free Software in Spanish, FSF Raises Money
The FSF is raising money (goal is $400,000) and the FSF has just mentioned the upcoming talks by the FSF's founder
United States Adding ~300 Billion in Government Debt Per Month, Wall Street Shaves Off Trillions in 'Value' in Less Than One Week
cushioning "assets" by helping them fake "value"
Microsoft: Pay Us for the Stuff That's Offline and We Cannot Fix
Learn to take control of the technology that you rely on
Links 13/11/2026: "Copyright-Strike-for-Hire" and "Stevie Wonder Photo Lawsuit"
Links for the day
The Slop Bubble (or Pyramid Scheme) Relied on Trust and Patience (Being Patient as Losses Grow and Debt Explodes, Trusting the Roadmap of Cheaters and Frauds)
Remember that it all began with trust
Anthropic's IPO Depends on $895.4 Billion in Debt (Money It Doesn't Have, It Loses Over 100 Billion Dollars Per Reporting Period), NVIDIA Has Just Lost Almost 2 Trillion Dollars In Value and Its Debt Trebled in Three Months
This coming week will be very, very entertaining for slop critics/sceptics to watch
At Microsoft, "Buyouts" or "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" (GVSA) Not Much Different From Layoffs (Severance Shockingly Low)
From what we are able to gather, many people are leaving Microsoft 'voluntarily'
Is Microsoft the Next Fake-Valued Corporation to Lose 35% in "Market Value"? Is Slop Bringing Microsoft Down?
Will NDAs prevent people talking or journalists finding out the true cause?
Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) the Latest of Many to Quit Linux Development Over Linus Torvalds' Obsession With Slop (Linus Wants to Work With Bots, Not Humans Who Understand Whatever Code They Write)
Linus caught the 'brain virus'
Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Continue in November 2026
IBM's CEO is "a Palliative Care Doctor Who Slides [IBM] Gently Into the Night"
Microsoft Asks 60,000 Workers to Leave, Some Leave, Services Go Down
Microsoft laid off about 40,000-50,000 people in past years
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Roku Exits the Smart Home Market and Poor Reporting/Journalism Regarding Slop Plagiarism
Links for the day
Links 13/11/2026: "Apple Support Community Forums to Permanently Close" and "The Slop Market is Getting Nervous"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, November 12, 2026
Gemini Links 12/11/2026: A Firing of a Boss and Geminispace Growing Fast
Links for the day
Bill Epsteingate-Funded BBC "Totally Ignoring the $1.7 Trillion Wiped off NVIDIA Stocks"
Imagine how many pension funds are tied to this NVIDIA pyramid scheme
A Few Hours Before NVIDIA CEO Canned (and NVIDIA Shares Plunged) the NVIDIA-Funded The Register MS Published Paid Spam With "AI" 18 Times in It
Anything to inflate the bubble
Links 11/11/2026: NVIDIA Decapitated, "The Company That Published Fake Journalists in Sports Illustrated is Collapsing Dramatically"
Links for the day
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXIX - We Didn't Start the Fire
It started in 2012
Photo Ops Are Liabilities
NVIDIA is not a "family business" and its CEO isn't some modest genius
NVIDIA’s Total Debt Trebled in Three Months!
Not the hallmark of a rich company unless its accounting is fraudulent
NVIDIA Turns Out to be Serial Cheater, Stock Plunges 33% in 5 Weeks
The "slop bros" have long relied on patience and blind faith
Adopting LLM Slop is Still Suicide
Suicide (in the literal sense) is also linked to adoption of chatbots
On Laundering Licences and Code
A "Second SCO" waiting to happen
The Cyber Show on Slop and the Ministry Of Truth in "Nineteen Eighty Four"
"cultural erasure" by slop
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXVIII - Keeping Both Eyes on the Ball
One upside of these disputes is that they raise at least two very important issues concerning the law
Gemini Links 12/11/2026: Encryption is Easy, Human Emacs, and Legislation in Italy
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 11, 2026