As you're certainly aware, being a Mac user isn't all tummy rubs and lollipops. Sure, we get to enjoy the world's most intuitive and rewarding computing platform and all its attendant benefits (like lower stress, better posture, and half-naked girls/guys by the truckload), but the role carries with it certain balancing factors that keep us from getting too insufferably smug. It's some kind of karma deal or something; we're not up on all the details, but apparently using a Mac requires that we occasionally get whanged upside the head with a blunt force reality check or two. And, well, what with Apple's 3Q financial results being so positive, just in case you were actually walking around feeling good about things for a change, here comes the universe at large to even out your mood: the latest market share numbers are in.

Yes, Market Share, that bogeyman lurking under the beds and in the dark closets of Mac users everywhere-- although, truth be told, the news this time around isn't as bad as we might have expected. Faithful viewer David Poves dished us the IDC press release which reveals that, in the second calendar quarter of 2004, Apple shipped 495,000 Macs in the U.S., making the company's slice of the domestic computer sales pie a mere 3.7%. Now, granted, that's more of a sliver than a slice; only one of every twenty-seven personal computers shipped in this country last quarter was a Mac, which is a big-"e" Evil on par with the likes of Enron-style corporate shenanigans, the wholesale destruction of the rain forests, and people who strap those little antlers to their cats' heads for Christmas card photos. But Apple's share a year ago was only 3.8%, so at least Apple didn't lose much ground in the past twelve months.

Indeed, this measly 3.7% figure means that Apple currently ranks as the country's fifth-largest vendor of personal computers, behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard (as if anyone was going to beat them), Gateway, and IBM. And we know what you're thinking: "Gateway? Wasn't Apple outselling that has-been years ago?" Why, yes it was, folks, at least on a global scale, but you may be forgetting that little matter of Gateway's merger with eMachines, which effectively lumps both companies' sales together now-- which certainly explains Gateway's reported 58.5% market share increase from the year-ago quarter when, in this plane of reality, Gateway hasn't even been selling enough computers alongside its plasma TVs to keep its retail stores afloat. In fact, IDC specifically notes that if the merged Gateway's sales are compared to the combined sales of both Gateway and eMachines from a year ago, the two companies actually sold 9.6% fewer computers this past quarter than they did a year ago, and their market share fell from 6.9% to 5.6%. So without the merger muddying the picture, Apple would most likely have ranked fourth instead of fifth.

Not that we get bogged down in silly minutiae like relative sales rankings, mind you. No, what we get bogged down in is silly minutiae like that darn market share number that creeps ever earthward, ticking slowly down to zero-- at which point Evil will have triumphed once and for all. We're not usually the type to put much stock in the doomsday prognostications of prophets and soothsayers, but they say that Apple's market share will hit 0% at precisely the same moment at which every store on the planet's surface will be either a Wal-Mart or a Starbucks. How's that for an armload of angst to drag around behind you? Hey, like we said, it's all part of being a Mac user. Go play with Exposé for a while and you'll feel right as rain.

So you remember how Napster's plan was to blow the iTunes Music Store right off the map by virtue of the "strength of the Napster brand" alone? Kinda makes us want to get Roxio CEO Chris Gorog on the horn and ask, "so, uh, how's that all working out for you, then?" Not to gloat, of course (well, not much, anyway), but more to find out if Napster has any kind of "Plan B" now that the whole "brand awareness" thing seems to be about as effective a business strategy as, say, voodoo and lottery tickets. And if we could get Mr. "Brand Awareness" on the phone, and if he were just drunk enough to talk, we figure he'd admit that Napster's backup plan is simple: ethical blackmail of our nation's higher education institutions.

Now this is a strategy that might actually work. See, as the colleges and universities see it, they experience a near-constant influx of drunken young reprobates (yay drunken young reprobates!) who would download an illicit copy of some devil-rock anthem with as little hesitation and compunction as they would stab Mother Goose with a switchblade for a free candy cane. As such, these institutions are practically wetting themselves over the near-certainty that their high-speed networks will be pushed to capacity by unrepentant music thieves, and crippling RIAA litigation will no doubt ensue. So, what to do?

Napster to the rescue; lately the service has been pimping itself out to colleges in an ever-increasing capacity, extorting undisclosed sums to provide unlimited legal downloads to the aforementioned drunken young reprobates. The Washington Post reports that George Washington University is the latest such school to knuckle under to the pressure, having purchased Napster subscriptions for "all 7,100 on-campus students" this fall.

Let's see, 7,100 students times nine months in the school year times $9.95 per month... that comes out to a market value price of $635,805. Now, we strongly doubt that Napster's charging the school full price (The Register once reported that Napster had quoted Ohio University $3 per student per month, while Penn State and Rochester have both "admitted to getting steep discounts"), and the school says the program's first year "will be underwritten by a gift from a donor who wished to remain anonymous," but it's clear that deals like this represent a substantial chunk of revenue for Napster, who has finally found somebody willing to pay for a music download subscription.

Meanwhile, you can bet that whatever the school will end up paying Napster on top of the "anonymous donation" (what are the odds it's Gorog himself, desperate to sign up the first few schools to get the ball rolling?) is coming out of student's pockets in the form of an increased "student entertainment fee" or something like that. Now, given that Napster is a Windows-only service, what's the deal with the Mac-using contingent of GWU's student body? Are those particular drunken young reprobates expected to help foot the bill for a service they can't use? Here's hoping that they investigate the situation and make sure that their (or their parents') hard-earned dollars aren't being blown on something they had no say in choosing and which they can't use anyway.

Not that a cross-platform alternative is necessarily much preferable, mind you; whereas GWU students are being given free unlimited-song Napster subscriptions, Virginia Tech "will provide students with software for Apple's iTunes, which allows for the lawful downloading of online music." Gosh, VT will give students software that they can download for free? Whoa there, Big Spender, you don't want to break the bank. That said, we can't help wondering if Apple isn't missing out on something by not offering some sort of unlimited-download service, even if it's only to educational institutions. You know, just to make Napster sweat a little more.

We know, we know-- this is traditionally Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, and you're jonesing for your anti-Redmond fix. But we're hankering for a little something different today, so just for a change of pace, are there any objections to us celebrating Mildly On-Topic Microsoft User-Bashing Day instead? No? We thought not.

We should probably clarify, though: it's not us doing the bashing, it's Paul Murphy over at LinuxInsider (as pointed out by faithful viewer Sleeper)-- and actually, he's not doing any explicit bashing, either. But before you give up on this whole thing as a waste of time and resort to looking up ways to insult your Windows-user cohorts in Icelandic at Swearsaurus, check out what Paul did: in an attempt to quantify whether Windows users were any less intelligent than Mac users, he fed a bunch of text from Windows- and Mac-centric web sites into a UNIX-based text-processing utility called "style," which allegedly "produces readability metrics on text."

Now, assuming that you accept the premise that someone's "ability to read and write his or her native language" is a reasonable criterion by which to judge his or her intelligence, then the results are, at the very least, interesting if not necessarily conclusive. The highest set of readings Murphy provides as an example come from Henry James's The Golden Bowl and include something called a "Kincaid" score of 18.2 and a "Lix" mark of "64.4 = higher than school year 11." Another set of readings comes from articles in the respected publication The Christian Science Monitor (Kincaid: 10.4, Lix: 48.8 = school year 9). Now, compare those to a sample of Windows user text-- the scores of "reader comments hosted by PC Magazine" (Kincaid: 5.9, Lix: 32.3 = below school year 5) and "an MSN forum host" (Kincaid: 2.9, Lix: 21.5 = below school year 5).

That looks like a pretty wide gulf to us-- but why wouldn't it be? After all, readers posting to web sites aren't generally expected to hold themselves to the same standards as professional news publications and novelists writing for publication. But now consider the scores from "reader comments hosted by the MacInTouch site": Kincaid: 8.9, Lix: 40.5 = school year 6-- and the other five metrics given (ARI, Coleman-Liau, etc.) are generally much higher for the Mac sample versus the Windows samples. Granted, most MacInTouch readers probably aren't going to be writing for the Monitor or publishing psychological novels with themes of intense alienation anytime soon, but the difference between the Mac and Windows samples is clearly noticeable.

We should stress that we know absolutely nothing about what these metrics generated by the "style" utility are in the first place ("Fox Index"? "SMOG-grading"? Is this text-processing or some sort of meteorological app?) or what validity they possess; indeed, Murphy himself suggests that "you don't take any of it too seriously" because plenty of smart people claim that these readability scores are "meaningless." Then again, plenty of other smart people disagree, so it's up to you how you'd like to interpret the results-- especially since, as Mac users, you're obviously smart people yourselves. Right?