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103 Comments
- frobozz0, on 10/12/2007, -10/+39The industry average is 9% growth this year. Apple is hitting 40%. As such, apple is gaining 31% more market share than it's average competitor.
Many people have stated this before, but Apple could very well hit 8% to 10% of sales market share this year overall (in the US) and something to the tune of 15% in the laptop sector. Of course, we'll know for sure soon.
This also doesn't take into account installed base, or installed base for consumers versus institutions. You'll find Apple in many more living rooms that you'd believe. Many of the statistics for installed base include P.O.S. (cash registers), kiosks, etc. that can't really be attributed to a consumer purchase. Windows has a strong hold on these types of "installs."
Overall it looks like Apple is steadily increasing it's market share of sales. I don't think anyone expects them to own the market inside of 10 years, and they don't have to. With the market-share they currently enjoy, they could survive forever. It's a great time to be a Mac user.
I work in a PC-centric company. 50% (literally) of our content designers and developers (c++ people and design people) bought a MacBook or MacBook Pro this year for personal use. Of the software developers, all but 2 purchased a MacBook after realizing 3 critical things:
1) They're inexpensive, especially for the spec's.
2) They do everything a windows laptop can do, AND everything a Mac laptop can do.
3) Once they used them for about a week, they fell in love with all the "little things." Back-lighted keyboard, two-finger scrolling, Mac OS X, iLife, etc...
If you're a software developer, you have one code repository pointed to both your MS IDE (Visual Studio) and mac IDE (Xcode.) - kelly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Lynn,
Apple's global sales rose only marginally.
However their Europe, Japan and US sales rose significantly. In other words, Apple didn't rise in the parts of the world where $200 PCs are prodominantly sold, yet Apple rose significantly in the areas where $600-$3000 PCs are sold. - toasterweasel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Just to let y'all know..... I work for the computer store in the school bookstore at the University of Missouri and take a look at our sales figures comparing last year and this year.
Dell – 2664 units sold (down 1% from 2005)
Apple – 3525 units sold (up 27% from 2005)
Notebooks – 3776 units sold (up 17% from 2005)
Desktops – 2419 units sold (up 8% from 2005)
Total Computers – 6195 units sold (up 13% from 2005)
That’s a huge increase in units sold for one year. I’d like to point out that our dollars increase is not as significant showing that computers are getting cheaper. As of 1/1/06 we are up 3.38% in sales dollars over last fiscal year. - Antialias, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7We've been getting them for other manufacturers, what's your point?
- sv650touring, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Damn those greedy shareholder and their incessant demands to know what their company is doing!
- chedabob, on 10/12/2007, -9/+15And under-specced. I can't buy a mac laptop under £1300 with a decent GPU.
- Lynn, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9@Ireland
Apple Sales 2006
Q1 1,254,000
Q2 1,112,000
Q3 1,327,000
Q4 1,600,000
PC sells are 230 million units. Apple has 2.3% share in 2006. - kcap122, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9none of those 1.8mil macs can compare with the delicious nutritiousness of the Big Mac.
- totorototoro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Yeah, funny thing how computer companies actually report these updates every quarter. You'd almost think it was an Apple conspiracy!
Oh, its Monergism...nevermind, to him it all is an Apple conspiracy :p - dochollidaydds, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8I am waiting for Amiga to come out with a notebook that will crush PC/MAC
- kelly, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6ChoadNamath,
The components were added to make it a fair and equal comparison.
And what you're ultimately saying is then that a PC only costs less when its not a fair and equal comparison. - Annon, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Yes.
- superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Units sold is more meaningful though to understand something like "how many computers are a possible target market for application X". Then you don't care how many total dollars were spent, you want to know potential market size regardless of the cost of the computers in the market (notwithstanding some special applications like games that would have to take into account which of those units had particualr features like more powerful graphics cards required for applications).
- MacParrot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Hmmmm, did Apple sell more computers than last year?
Did Apple make more money than last year?
Are more people interested in Macintosh computers than last year?
Are more developers becoming more interested in Macintosh computers than last year?
Since the answer to all four questions is yes, why am I supposed to be concerned about marketshare? - Altotus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It doesn't take much looking to find sub-$1000 MacBooks new:
http://www.pcsuperstore.com/products/J93923-Apple-MA254LL_A.html/froogle/
I suppose the trick is to not buy them from Apple directly (the MSRP is $1100). - cmiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Buy less and spend less isn't a good thing at all though. The macbook would be a MUCH better machine if somebody could add $50 to the price and get dedicated video, or $100 to the price and get a WSXGA+ display. Apple obviously doesn't want this because they want you to drop an extra $700 on the pro... which I think is a logical business move, but certainly alienates a lot of people.
- inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@Lynn,
I didn't say I "believe" anything and I'm not trying to spin this at all. I was asking a question about your post. And yes, I have seen it reported as revenue many times so save your insults for someone else. Here's a bit from Wikipedia if you doubt it.
"It can be expressed as a company's sales revenue (from that market) divided by the total sales revenue available in that market. It can also be expressed as a company's unit sales volume (in a market) divided by the total volume of units sold in that market."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share - Petronski, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"...the analyst predicts the Cupertino-based company is heading towards a "Macworld introduction and a [first quarter] release for the full-screen video iPod which," according to his checks, "is noticeably more innovative than the current generation and should not be considered as a simple refresh."
Hmmmm. - aristotle0dude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The number of units sold is pretty meaningless with regard to marketshare given that the total market is usually expressed as a dollar value rather than units and the price of a unit can vary wildly.
It makes more sense to me that marketshare should be expressed as a percentage of the total dollar value of the market. - kelly, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9A Mac costs the same or less than a equally equipped PC.
The difference comes in that Apple gives you fewer options to configure your PC and thus buy less and spend less. - jads, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7well....sorta...yes and no. However it depends who is doing the classification of what the computer industry is. I know some sources refer to not only desktop/laptop computers but also to PDAs, smartphones which have seen massive growths in sales and are leading the industry. I thought I read somewhere that the actual rate of computer purchases has slowed despite the holiday period.
- kelly, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5MeatBiProduct,
Macs cost the same or less.
What you described in that the base PC costing less than the base Mac is an example of PCs allowing you to buy less and spend less. Apple gives you fewer options in this area but of those that they do offer, when a PC is matched equally in specification, the price eithe revens out or the Mac is less.
Here are a few examples:
http://www.systemshootouts.org/ - hotdamn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You do realize that these 1.8 million were sold in a quarter, and not in a year.
- Lynn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4My bad, I thought we were talking about Market Share not profits. Yes, Apple is good at making money.
- Markie1006, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5As Yoda once said "Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not."
A lot of Mac adoptees are from Unix-land and are probably far more skilled than you realise. - decromin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Got no hard figures, but ZDnet predicted that 2006 would do 233.7 million units worldwide. http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=11750. HP, for example, has about a 20% market share, so that would put that at a little over 10 million units per quarter in sales. These are all rough figures, but it's something useful to use as a comparison.
- kevinwiz, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5whenever I see someone make a statement like this, I think, "This person is speaking uninformed and has never used an Apple computer in his life."
- ClaiE, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6How many for Lenovo/IBM ? DELL ? HP ?...
Where have they been sold ? What kind of notebooks ?...
This information is useless since it's not really precise. - Ireland, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Could someone let me know how many Mac's they sold last quarter? And if possible how many they sold this quarter last year?
- kelly, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7I've been reading several reports as of late saying that PC sales were actually down as compared with previous quarters.
- awm4, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3One of them was sold to me
- Quix, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7"Apple fanboys... Commence down digging!"
Troll block initiated. Farewell, flaming friend. - kelly, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8No, a better way to compare would be to compare install base rather than market share.
You wont hear discussion about this within the reach industry because each of these analysts are funded by both Microsoft as well as each of the PC hardware OEMs. Install-base statistics would only make Apple look bigger and make the PC OEM's share look smaller. This is primarily the result of Mac users keeping their computers in use longer while PC users replace them more often. Because the "market share" statistic is based solely on the sale of a product, it can make the install base numbers look especially skewed if you don't factor in the life-span of a product. - superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@Choad: Your complaints do not really appear to be very valid, at least as far as warranty - Apple has 90 day phone support but also a "real" warranty against defects that lasts a year and lets you have things fixed at an Apple store. That is why the Dells warranty was also raised to a year, which is really a bare minimum for laptops as far as I am concerned. And as noted people rate Apple support higher than Dell.
- cmiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They're also gaining marketshare though. Not by leaps and bounds mind you... but it's going up. Especially in the laptop area, Apple desktops aren't really turning heads (probably because of the price/performance ration in comparison to a build yourself box).
- insomniac8400, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Wow, Apple can't even outsell the nintendo Wii.
- aristotle0dude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Units sold and market share by units is meaningless. From a financial perspective, units sold is a completely meaningless statistic for anything other than for spotting trends. What matters most to the company bottom line is revenue and profit. As I have said before, the price of the unit can vary from 300-4000 dollars. This makes unit number a completely useless statistic for determining the real share of the market. The size of the market is always expressed in a dollar value and because of this and the fact that the price and profit per unit can vary widely, it makes more sense that marketshare should be expressed as either a percentage or dollar value of the total market value.
Some would argue that developers might look at unit sold numbers when making determinations about whether to release a product for a particular market but what they should look at is the numbers and percentages for the market they are targetting. Games, for example are not targeted at either the corporate or Point of Sale market but rather the home market. For this reason, it is foolish to look at the total market. It is also foolish to look at just numbers alone. They should do a trend analysis of sales by competing products in the same niche by platform to get a better idea of their actual potential sales. - cmiz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I'll admit there aren't a lot of us (the Linux/Unix geeks that use mac for whatever reason even though we all realize it's not BSD and certainly not Unix), but there are some. We know what Darwin is, we know how to work our way around the BSD userspace (the userspace is BSD, if not the kernel), and we are generally smarter than most people give us credit for. I personally use OS X because I like Linux a lot, and It's a little prettier and a lot less of a hassle to get laptop drivers working on (note that Linux has gotten better but I switched awhile ago). I've also grown used to a lot of programs that are OS X only, and would hate to part with them. OS X is much less likely to get viruses, granted I never really had to worry about viruses on my XP box because I kept it up to date, used a lot of open software (firefox et al) and didn't surf sketchy websites. OS X is supposedly more stable... but low level tweaking has gotten me more kernel panic screens than I'd care to talk about.
I think the most annoying thing about being a really geeky mac user though is that all of the maczealots trample my logical arguments in favor of FUD and lots of flaming and then I get lumped into the "knows nothing so buys a mac" group. Some of us know what we're talking about... so try to give us the time of day. - Markie1006, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3MeatBiProduct: You work with designers who can't tell the difference. I work with Unix admins for a large Wall St financial.
Half of them have already made a Mac their personal platform of choice (laptop/workstation/mini etc), with several others seriously considering it.
On top of this most of the other Unix people I have dealings with are reporting similar findings.
edit: My thoughts exactly cmiz - kelly, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Who is spinning?
I'm just telling you that those sales are insignificant to PC OEMs. It didn't help their bottom line and it wouldn't help Apple's. So they don't target those markets. - cmiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2There's lies, then there's damn lies... and then there's statistics.
I'm sure you can find statistics that say anything, and I'm certainly not trying to make the claim that Apple is going to be 'bigger than Jesus'. I've seen other statistics that say OS X is moving up in marketshare, and I've seen an increase in the number of people around my that are buying macs. Do I think Microsoft is in serious trouble any time soon? No... I'm just putting to voice what I see around me. - osiris24x, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm guilty, I've bought two in the past few months...
- mav451, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The "Apples cost less" is something that I would only agree happened very recently (Intel conversion). And even still, Apple's product line remains skewed to screw the consumer to either buy very high or very low. Still waiting for the headless iMac here :)
- Sethwm2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think that people got more laptops is because the price and the power of the Mac Pro. It is just power that people cannot afford. If someone is going to get the same specs as the best iMac they should just get something portable. The Macbook Pro started off with a shaky start but now that everything has settled down everything if fine and I think is the best thing to get for the money
- hotdamn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2While true, that statement is still pretty dumb, considering a Wii costs like $250.
- superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Unit sales however give an indication of the "network effect" - that is, how many users there are that potentially can talk more users into acquiring the same computer. And Unit sales also are an important figure for understanding if true market share, the absolute number of homes buying a given computer, is increasing or if higher sales numbers are masking a lack of real sales growth in numbers.
Unit sales for instance, make it quite clear that the demand for laptops is increasing rapidly in a way that pure dollar amounts independent of quantity would not. - aristotle0dude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I will agree that network affect is a factor, however most of these statistics do not separate unique consumer purchases from large corporate or Point of Sale device installs. Neither of these segments would be a target for most software. If they do not separate the consumer and corporate numbers, then these numbers are useless for the majority of developers.
The average corporate desktop will be locked down with a limited set of applications available and obviously a POS will usually only run the point of sale software and nothing else. - Altotus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2If you look at mac sales over the past 10 quarters, it's quite amazing, actually. Sure, 6.4 million / year is not much of the big picture of 230 million computer sales globally, but it actually makes Apple the 4th biggest vendor. Moreover, they're almost exclusively non-server machines, and sold in far fewer markets than PCs. So, it's really amazing. They've got the largest sales growth in the industry too (year-over-year).
Apple's not going to dislodge HP quite yet, and I don't think OS/X is likely to displace Windows any time soon either (doing so would require a certain criitical mass to attract driver support from commodity hardware vendors that the OEMs buy from).
I'm considering buying a Mac myself. I'm a biologist, so most of the software I use professionally is Linux/UNIX based, but my company's IT issues us Windows XP-based machines, so I use them quite a bit too (namely for corporate communications -- Notes, WebEx, PowerPoint, and the occasional memo). All of the computational scientists (biologists and chemists) also have Linux workstations at their desk. The Linux desktop's gotten to the point where the scientists now find them easier to work with than XP. Some of my colleagues also have Macs and I've done some work on them too. There are some things I prefer about KDE over the Mac desktop, but I think it's a matter mostly of familiarity. I still think Linux has the most to offer at the moment, from a technical standpoint (not what it does out of the box, but what you can make it do if you know how). Yet, I'm considering a Mac because it's still a UNIX-like environment and supports the software I need for work, but it's also got some very elegant software that meets my needs for which there's no functional equivalent -- the Mac is more suited for casual/personal use in its default configuration. - themulf, on 10/12/2007, -6/+7Rather than compare apple to PC's as a whole, it might be more practical to compare to individual competitors.
- joeyjojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"In reality, they really only cost less than a Dell or comparable when you add unnecessary upgrades to a Dell that make its specs better than a Macbook."
So you are comparing Macs to Dells. That's fine. But to say 'Macs are more expensive that PCs' isn't painting the whole picture. There are a lot of other PC laptops out there besides Dell.
That's like saying SUVs cost more than Cars by comparing an Escalade to a Honda while ignoring the Porche and BMW. -
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