News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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Technology journalists are used to giving out advice about which gadgets to buy, but a recent survey may provide all the answers many buyers need after revealing that Australia's technology journalists are nearly four times more likely to buy a Mac than the general public.
Online Australian journalism community MediaConnect, which mediates contacts between hundreds of Australian technology journalists and PR practitioners, recently surveyed the browser and operating system preferences of its visitors.
Amongst PR practitioners, Windows desktops accounted for 92% of the MediaConnect users, with eight percent on Mac. This mirrored real-world market share, where IDC and Gartner agree that despite Apple's strong sales numbers, Mac sales account for about 9% of desktop operating systems in use.
Amongst technology journalists, the numbers were significantly different. More than one-third of the journalists visiting the site were using Macs – nearly four times the market share that Macs enjoy in the general public. And, despite long-running philosophical support for the open-source Linux operating system amongst the journalism community, almost no journalists were using Linux.
When it came to browser preferences, journalists were skewed massively in favour of Firefox, with 64% of visitors running the operating system. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) has just 17% market share, while Chrome weighed in with 10% and Safari 9% market share, respectively.
PR practitioners, on the other hand, were far more likely to use IE, which weighed in evenly against Firefox at just over 42% each. Chrome accounted for 11% of visits, and Safari just 4%.
Globally, browser market share counts vary but one indicative median assessment ranked IE with 64.66%, Firefox with 26%, Safari with 3.7%, Chrome with 3.2%, and Opera with 1.5%.
"It's fair to say that technology journalists are far more likely than the typical user to experiment with browsers, and the fact that so many are Mac users also skews results away from IE," said MediaConnect CEO Phil Sim.
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Amit Singh thought something was missing from OS X. The Google engineer — and author of Mac OS X Internals — took a look at what the Mac operating system didn’t have that Linux and Solaris did. “One thing stood out,” Singh said. “There was no easy way to do file systems.” So Singh decided to create one, even though he worked for Google’s search team at the time and wasn’t part of the company’s Mac development efforts. The reaction of his bosses to this use of company time? Go for it.
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The media got a special sneak peek at the Sydney Apple Store this morning, ahead of its opening tomorrow afternoon at 5pm. The 215th Apple Store worldwide, it's the first in Australia with at least two more planned. And, according to visiting Apple executive Ron Johnson, it's the second-largest Apple Store in the world (after London's Regent Street store). So, now that the wraps are off, what can you expect when you stroll through the doors and under the floating logo? Read on.
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As I type these words, I am waiting for Apple's Developer Connection web site to ease up sufficiently for me to download the long-awaited Software Developer Kit for the iPhone (and iPod touch, just by the by). In a way, I hate developer-oriented announcements — "here's a really cool thing we're working on, and it's available now, and hoi polloi can have it in about six months". Actually, it's the six months I hate.
