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400,000 Windows Users Switch To Mac
bonch writes "Analyst Charles Wolf of Needham & Co. wrote that 400,000 Windows users have moved to Macintosh, citing factors like the fabled iPod halo effect and the desire to escape the Windows virus epidemic. Mac shipments rose 35 percent, three times the rate of the PC market, with sales expected to surpass 45 percent in the current quarter. Quote: 'Assuming that Mac shipments would have been flat year-over-year, these percentage increases imply that about 200,000 Windows users purchased Macs in both the second and third fiscal quarters.'"
200,000 per quarter (2nd and 3rd quarter) = 400,000 total. Learn to read.
200,000 Windows users purchased Macs in both the second and third fiscal quarters.
200,000 x 2 fiscal quarters == 400,000
Sure it was poorly written (saying 400k in two different ways), but shame on you for not bothering to read the entire post before Trolling.
I don't see how you can't build oyur own mac. You can pick the amount of memory you want and the hard drive size, etc. What is it you want that you can't get from Build-To-Order?
As for price, you're not really saving anything-- if you're comparing using first tier products. Apple's machines are competitive with dells on price. And while you can go use random cheap parts to build a PC, you're not getting the same quality you get with a first tier manufacturer.
Now, if building your own machine is something you jsut enjoy, then I can understand that. (Though I don't know anybody laying out mother board circuits these days.
If you buy a desktop G5, you can put wahtever cards in it you want. Building a machine these days is merely a selection of parts that are assembled... I don't know what parts you can't get for a mac.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
When making a decision as to whether to write an application for a given platform, you want the market share of that platform, or the Total Addressable Market. These are correct uses of the term. Installed Base is another figure, which is not a percentage, but a quantity.
When the "analysts" talk about "market share" and go off of the last years sales data, they are using it incorrectly. Don't let their consistent use of it in this way convince you that they are right.
As an aside, its amazing how pathetic the analysis in this industry is. Its about as poor as the reporing in the media, both in this industry and outside of it.
Those who want to support the Windows Dominance Theory will always frame their statements in such a way to imply they mean more than they do-- which is kinda pathetic when you think about it-- there's no doubt that all forms of windows make up over %50 of the market.
But the misdirection goes further. The vast majority of OSX capable Macs have switched over (I think its %80 for Panther) and do so each year... while the Windows "market" is fractured, with signficant numbers of users still using Win98 and Win95 (And actually even DOS for the people who actually bother to track it.)
This means that in terms of the installed base, there may well be more OS X Panther machines in US homes than Windows machines that are up to date. But I don't have recent (accurate) numbers to back that up.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Mac market share has always been bigger than was generally reported in the press. Not bigger than windows, but bigger than it was reported.
This diminishing of the Mac's market share has gone on since at least 1990. It was particularly bad when Apple was selling so many machines with CD-ROMs (because you couldn't get PCs with CD Roms) that they had %26 of annual sales and %50 of the addressable household market... yet PC Week was reporting things like "Analyst so and so says that Windows has %80 market share."
Macs have always been the number 2 platform, but for a long time they were a close number 2. Its just never been reported accurately, or to be truthful, honestly.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
While I'm a PC user who uses primarily XP and Linux myself (I'd like to purchase a Mac in the future) when it came time to help my friend buy a new computer, I recommended she get a Mac mini.
Traditional her and her family had always bought PC's, mostly because they were the default option. They owned several old Compaqs and a white-box store built machine. The primary reason I got her to buy a Mac is because she's a totally non-techie, and hasn't the slightest clue about computers (nor should she have to, IMO). Mostly she just wanted to be able to type stuff up for college, browse the web, IM, email, and play music.
Initially she was very hesitant about going through with the purchase (she had been set on a Dell previously..) since it was something totally new and she was concerned she wouldn't be able to use it. But I eventually convinced her to buy the Mini.
I was supposed to go over there and help her set it up once it arrived but when I called her to confirm, she gleefully told me that she had managed to set the whole thing up by herself and was already using. No help from me required, and this was someone who was a complete techno-phobe.
She's had her mini for several months now and uses it way more than she ever used her PC, which was full of crashing software, crawling with spyware, and in generally a bad state. Last I checked, the mini was running good as new. She's now recommending it to all her friends.
I think this experience highlights what I think is the best part of Apple's whole initiative.. they have simplified the computing process for the average user. Most people have no need nor desire to be computer experts, they just want the damn thing to work properly and stay out of their way. This is the way it should be. I really hope Apple keeps up the good work, because if someone like my friend can set up, use, and maintain their computers with so little trouble, then Apple is doing things right.
From my experiences with Microsoft, I still don't think they "get it". People should just be able to USE their computers, and from what I've seen of Longhorn, it doesn't look like the situation will be improving..
I just bought my first Mac (iMac 20") yesterday. Over the years, I've had a 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, Athlon, and now a G5. I was a heavy Windows user until around Win98, after that I mostly have used Linux.
So yes, I am a win for Apple. But Windows pretty much lost me years ago. I'll still continue to use Linux, but will have no need to dual boot to Windows anymore.
>>The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total
>>Addressable Market (TAM)
>Market Share refers to the sales cycle. You're talking about
> Installed Base. They're not the same and Mac haters have good
> reason for choosing to frame the argument in their terms.
Actually the grandparent is more correct than the parent, although the terminology is a little off.
Although I haven't seen good universal definitions for it, Total Adressable Market (TAM) indicates how large the total market of people that could purchase a product is. For a software developer this is a very important number and is often the same as the fraction of the installed base that can run the software. So if there are 100 Macintosh users, 75 on Panther and 25 on Tiger, and your software application requires Tiger, your TAM is 25. It can get confusing when you start talking about Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), in which case, the definition of TAM could be 100 and the SAM is 25. However, those definitions are a bit fuzzy.
Market share is different, but it's a generic term. A good business person does not take the statement "Apple has 4% market share" at face value because frankly it has no meaning. Market share must be defined in terms of what the market segment is, what the time period is, and other factors. You can therefore have installed base market share for a particularly defined segment. And defining the base market can be complex because you can do it based on unit sales or revenue (revenue is easier to come by than unit sales)
Market share can easily be defined as the grandparent said:
> %16 of the household machines currently in use were
> Macintoshes
That's more useful because we know the time frame (installed base, so it's cumulative), and what the market segment is (all U.S. households). And unit sales versus revenue is irrelevant. We still need to know more about the segmentation of the households for this to be useful, but it's a good starting place.
That's why when various people quote that Apple has 4% worldwide market share, the figure is so meaningless. Are we talking installed base? Quarterly sales? Quarterly shipments? Share based on unit sales or revenue? What about market segments -- U.S. households, every PC (including those for specialized purposes, like factories or POS units?), etc. What about specifically people that want to purpose my application, what's the share there (getting into SAM here)?
But just like the press can screw up statistics during any election year, the business press can grossly oversimplify market share rendering it useless.
All that said, it's great that Apple's unit shipments are up and growing faster than the industry. What's interesting is the iPod has helped Apple's Macintosh sales better than any ad campaign they've run.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.