Newsletter #359 Preview: They Still Don’t Know a Mac Can Do That
October 16th, 2006During a presentation this past weekend before Apple Corp of Dallas, one of oldest Mac user groups around, I was asked several questions about whether certain applications were available on Macs.
One of the applications, Intuit’s personal finance product, Quicken, has been a mainstay on the Mac for years, as most of you know. But not everyone knows that.
The other request mentioned something more obscure. It seems the questioner was tethered to the Classic Mac OS because he used an aging credit card processing application that was no longer being developed. He wondered if there were any modern equivalents.
With my 17-inch MacBook Pro and a projector at hand, I called up Apple’s Made4Mac pages with a bit of a flourish. Without knowing what the results might be, I did a fast search for some alternatives to handle financial transactions, and came up with nearly two dozen choices.
Now it’s the conventional wisdom that there really isn’t a lot of software available for Macs. This is the argument some deliver to explain why they stick with Windows, despite the agonies of erratic performance and massive malware outbreaks.
However, the simple truth is that there over 23,000 Mac products available these days, and the listing of Universal applications, which run native on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs, is fast approaching 4,000.
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.
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I have a T-shirt that says “ WWDR 10K Run”. I’m not a long-distance runner.
I got that shirt because I was one of the WWDR staffers who counted up the number of Mac OS X apps before MacWorld 2003, so that Steve could announce over 10K apps on the platform. Apple doesn’t just make those figures up, or estimate them. We actually checked.
Since then, Apple crossed the mark of half a million ADC registrations, and over 5K WWDC attendees. The number of active developers on the platform is somehwere between those limits, and I’d guess it’s about 50K people based on the number of Mac developers I know, and how many of them make it to WWDC.
There’s a migration going on, and I can’t wait to see what else Apple and the third-party developers come up with in the next year.
-jcr