Microsoft welcomes its newest OEM ... Apple

Yep, I'd have to agree! I just bought my first Mac (a new Santa Rosa MacBook) in thirteen years. I've wanted to play with the iLife suite, as I haven't been particularly enthused about the various Windows-based alternatives. They're just clunky in comparison. Come on, Pinnacle Studio made my wife cry. But I'm most definitely using BootCamp and XP, and the MacBook is a faster Windows box than the PC it replaced (admittedly, a 3 year PC that just bit the bucket, so it should be.) I have it hooked up to a USB KVM, so I can still use my widescreen, PC keyboard & mouse. It's a desktop. It's a laptop. It runs Mac OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu if I ever get around to reinstalling that. It's geekdom nirvana, one machine that can run anything. Well, except for high-end games, of course. We're talking integrated Intel GMA x3100 graphics here. But I'm not a big game player so I don't care about that. And it's nice & quiet. I honestly don't know if I would've purchased a Mac if it didn't have this capability. Apple is using the same hardware platform as all the other PC OEMs, so they'd be foolish to not include such a feature. If it gets them more sales, why not?

Apple sells hardware, but you can't buy Windows from Apple, so no OME for Apple, nice Microsoft spin that, how about 30% year over year, with 50% new to the platform, not bad for that weird "us vs. them" thing? If 10% of all new Vista licenses are going to Mac users, then Microsoft can't be selling as many copies of Vista as it would like us to believe or Apple has sold a whole lot more Mac's that it thought, or maybe there is a whole lot of nonsense in them there figures? For someone who loves to pick sales figures apart at every chance, you sure seem lax when it comes to figures, Paul.

So here's the source of that 10% figure: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_applications/microsofts_... "Mac users account for 10 percent of retail Windows Vista Business and Ultimate sales." So the story Paul quotes, grossly misquoted the source. "10% of all new Vista licenses" is not even close to "10 percent of retail Windows Vista Business and Ultimate sales." Way to completely misrepresent the facts. We know that the bulk of Vista licenses are not sold at retail, but are OEM. And it is also probably safe to assume that the bulk of retail sales are not Business or Ultimate. I'm sure we could find an even narrower subset of sales figures to quote where Mac owners make up > 50% of purchasers.