2010 may be the year of the Apple Mac

It's almost a pathetic assertion: This year, the Mac will break out of its ghetto and become a mainstream computer for individuals and businesses alike. That unfulfilled desire is foretold every year and has been since the mid-1980s, when Apple's then-groundbreaking computer was quickly sidelined by the IBM PC and, later, Microsoft Windows.

The strong growth of the iPhone and the big buzz around the recently announced iPad could give the Mac an extra boost, giving happy customers reason to consider switching to a Mac for the same levels of delight, sophistication, and quality.

So will 2010 be any different? A few days before the annual Macworld Expo celebratory confab begins, it's a natural time to ask whether it is just Mac fans pining for validation who will claim that this year is the year of the Mac. Maybe, but there are signs that this time they may be right. However, there are also signs that they're wrong, again.

Let me be clear: I've long had a love/hate relationship with Apple and the Mac. I use a Mac as my preferred PC, but only after I first tried Windows Vista. For most of the decade, I was an XP user, and in the 1990s I was bi-platform, a Macworld editor whose history had been on the PC side and who had issues with Apple's extreme arrogance (a flaw that endures undiminished today), as well as the mediocre quality of its 1990s-era Macs. But even in the dark times, I embraced the Mac's more human design quality, and when Apple resurrected itself in the 2000s, I cheered it on.

So I was happy to see that sales of Apple's pricey MacBooks grew in 2009 despite the recession. In fact, with the exception of one fiscal quarter, Apple's Mac sales have grown faster than PC sales for five consecutive years.

And I was pleased by the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this past summer, with its built-in support for Microsoft Exchange servers and VPNs, two features clearly aimed at satisfying IT's needs.

Yet despite new-PC sales share estimates between 6 and 12 percent, the Mac's total installed base hovers around 4 percent, a fact that could, as AppleInsider wisely argues, be cause for optimism, indicating plenty of room for growth, or pessimism, suggesting the Mac has too small a base to gain much traction, especially in businesses where exceptions are frowned on.

Perhaps that ambivalence is why some market data suggest Apple's sales have peaked. After all, Apple has done nothing to bolster the support infrastructure for the Mac, and its bungling of ActiveSync support in the iPhone, where businesses get serious demand from users for adoption, further calls into question the company's business-use commitment

Yet one survey shows that 80 percent of enterprises support the Mac, making it a widely adopted niche product.

How Apple fares in this area is likely the key to whether the Mac can evolve beyond a beloved but marginal player and instead become a serious option in business.

The case for the Mac's ascension in 2010

For years, Apple has doggedly removed the barriers to business adoption of the Mac, while not compromising the UI, design, and media-oriented strengths that have always appealed to the Mac faithful. The elimination of proprietary ports in favor of USB, Wi-Fi, DVI, and FireWire, the adoption of IDE hard drives and PCI graphics cards, the elimination of AppleTalk, the inclusion of ActiveDirectory support in Mac OS X, all have made the Mac enterprise-network-ready for years.

Moreover, Apple's switch to the Intel chip in 2006 allowed Windows to run on Macs, and the groundbreaking Parallels Desktop made it possible and easy to run Windows and Mac OS at the same time, thereby removing IT's lingering software compatibility concerns. Since then, the rise of browser-based enterprise apps, especially those less likely to rely on Windows-only ActiveX technology, has continued to make platform choice less of an issue for IT.

Snow Leopard's support for Exchange and VPNs now frees IT from the increasingly broken Microsoft Entourage email client, just as Apple's iWork productivity suite helps hedge against Microsoft's half-hearted commitment to Mac Office. Other features, such as auto-detection of nearby networked printers, help make it easier for IT to allow Macs in to the enterprise without having to devote significant resources to support them.

At the same time, Apple's sleek and solid MacBook Pro laptops have become the Mac of choice of professionals, designers, programmers and increasingly both IT pros and "regular" businesspeople. In terms of quality, they outrank all the major business-oriented PC makers (Dell, Lenovo, and Hewlett-Packard).