Sunday, May 25th 2008
Apple Shows Strong Growth, Captures 2/3 of Expensive PC Market
Despite all the criticism Apple has gotten throughout the years, they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves. While the United States has economic issues that might otherwise prevent an investment in expensive technology, and the rest of the world becomes more eco-friendly, Apple is happy and/or smug to report that two out of three pre-built computers that cost $1k or more were built by Apple. Even in the market that isn't tres-chic, Apple is doing very well for themselves, boasting a 14% market share in all computers sold in Q1 2008. According to the vice president of analyst firm NPD, the sales of Apple computers are about as likely to decline as oil prices. "In notebooks [Apple is] growing two times the market; Windows notebooks are pretty much flat right now. IMacs are growing and the Windows desktop ain't. No matter how you look at it, Apple is outperforming Windows."
Source:
DailyTech
21 Comments on Apple Shows Strong Growth, Captures 2/3 of Expensive PC Market
If you read the comments people clarify that this is only brick and mortar sales, i.e. through retails channels and therefore excluding all business sales and home built pcs. So they basically only compete against the more expensive HP systems in stores and the few stores which sell XPS/Alienware systems.
However, apple's presence there is really big relative to say the UK. I know absolutely no one who owns an imac, mac pro and only one person with the mini. In the desktop market they are pretty much nonexistent. Of course the laptop domain is completely different with so many students and young adults with macbooks around.
Maybe its to do with apple's pricing in the UK being ridiculous. But it does seem to be a cultural difference of some sorts.
store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore.woa/wa/RSLID?nnmm=browse&node=home/shop_mac/family/imac&sf=w2YF4JXY4AHCAJCDF
and guess what, its because of leopard and looks. people love the macbook air, or the power of the macbook pro, and leopard beats the living shit outta windows when it comes to non-gaming uses and its extremely stable. the average joe doesn't need overclocking, loud fans, or watercooling. why wouldn't people get quiet good looking products with an excellent OS?
seriously, 8800 gtx and ultra's require massive dual slot cooling.. no freaking way it'd ever work in a slim passive cooling system in a laptop
BUT. Despite the failures. It is a wonderful laptop, its size to performance ratio is great and I get OSX and Windows in one machine. Sure it was overpriced but IMO for me it was worth it.
And yes for non gaming OSX > Windows.
(jk)
when i see Microsoft hating on these forums by gamers and graphic enthusiasts, it seems kind of odd
my grep against MS is that all their sw is proprietary, but unfortunately that is how you get to the top
Usually runs through my mind when i talk to mac people and they mention they want something different than a regular pc. I can see how they're doing well but i personally hate them so much for some reason. For one of my classes we had to use macs while learning flash and i must have crashed that bugger over a half dozen times. And it contains very annoying features sometimes.
Had a file named pool.jpg.
Re-named said file to oldpool.jpg.
Dropped in a new file called pool.jpg.
Called the file pool.jpg. from another program and it loads the original pool file instead of the new one.
Apparently the mac is sooo good it remembered that oldpool.jpg used to just be named pool using some special prefetch feature.
Because seriously, who really buys alienwares or Falcon Northwests or Voodoo PCs?