What’s so cool about GarageBand is that it exemplifies the market that Apple is going after. People who want to use their computers to make cool things. People who want to be producers, not just consumers. If it’s possible to distill into a single thought what it is that makes Apple Apple, and what has made the Macintosh so enduringly popular, that’s it.
That’s why Apple’s industry-wide PC market share numbers are nearly meaningless. The vast majority of Wintel PCs are used as little more than modern-day typewriters. They’re just office equipment.
PC pundits pound their heads against the wall, asking why, if Apple only sells a small percentage of computers, the company receives such a disproportionate amount of media attention. The answer is simply that they’re selling the best computers, to the most interesting people. Maybe it is only two percent of the total PC market, but it’s the most interesting two percent.
I have called PCs “typewriters with TV screens” for years: in my experience, most people use them as a terminal, rather than a computer. You don’t need 1+GHz of CPU to type correspondence or manage email, and the fees associated with meaningless software upgrades (does Office 2000 do a better job of “taking a letter” than Office 97 did?) make it a subscription that has to be maintained, whether you get anything out of it or not.