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.'"

Comments

this is surprisingly good news

[VolciMaster]

and not because I'm an Apple fan (though I am). It means that people are starting to decide on the machine they are going to buy, not merely on price, but on capability (or incapability when it comes to virii). I presume that the majority aren't the so-called media pros that Apple normally markets to, but rather 'typical Joe' computer buyers who have decided that the benefits of a less-attacked platform far outweigh the higher cost. They're also not being put off by the lack of applications often cited for the Mac platform, which makes sense considering most people only want to send and receive email, chat online, surf the web, and do homework (papers etc).

The real test of this switching will, of course, have to be seen to continue over the next couple quarters, which would also show that most people are not caring about the processor used in the machines, so long as they work well.

Re:this is surprisingly good news

[sgant]

I would love to go to the Apple if I could build my own machine instead of being locked into what they want me to have.

But that's just me...not everyone builds their computers. I do it cause it's cheaper and I just don't have the disposable income that others have. But I'll always crave a Mac.

No, the MacMini doesn't cut it for me.

Mac Market share has always been higher

[BitGeek]

This has been a long time coming, and is less dramatic than I think people will realize.

The numbers of mac users have long been under-reported for a number of reasons:
1- The "independant" research agencies don't reports sales apple makes directly or thru apple specific retailers.
2- The sales market share is reported, rather than the Total Addressable Market (TAM)
3- Macs last a lot longer than PCs and are useful a lot longer
4- Windows is counted twice- once when the PC is sold and once when an upgrade is bought, meaning that many of the "new PC sales" are actually windows upgrades.

They don't go into their methodology for a reason-- because the goal is to market windows as the dominant platform. (How many linux boxes were shipped with windows and count as "windows marketshare"? A large percentage.)

Recently I heard that an independant survey had been done to find the TAM, and that this survey found that %16 of the household machines currently in use were Macintoshes.

I'm glad to see Apple has been growing Mac shipments. I hope that software developers will realize that the Mac market is much larger, and vastly under-served compared to windows. But then, again, I think maybe I should shut up and go write some software to sell, and hope nobody shows up to compete with me. :-)

I wonder if the intel switch will affect sales for Apple... but I don't think so. Most people don't realize that Macs don't already use Intel chips (believe it or not!) and it seems amazing to believe, but I think mainstream america thinks that Apple makes windows boxes and doesn't really see what the difference is.

This would explain teh failure of the switch campaign-- people think Apples are just another form of PC like Dell, and why would you care? They just buy what the salesman at the local store tells them to buy.

This brings up the third factor for Apple. The halo effect helps, and the ipod store brings people in.... but these average, mainstream amercians, then end up asking the salesman what computer to buy, and since they are in an Apple store, he sells them a Mac.

So, while I think computer retailing is on the decline, Apple's stores strategy will prove to be brilliant. When the others won't carry your product or market it, do it yourself.

And I'm glad to see Apple showing the haters to be wrong-- when given a chance to know about them, people will buy Macintoshes.

Word Choice

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Quality of the OS

[guildsolutions]

I much, much preffer using OS X versus windows. OS X is so much more mature of an operating system than windows even attempts to be. The old addage of 'it just works' very much so applies. If Apple can come down in price a bit more, and bring in more software development, and market there machines a bit more agressivly, then Apple has a great chance to take over some market share.

Add to the fact with the rumors of all the DRM lockup of longhorn, OS X has none of that expect with iTunes, who wants to use an OS that is crippled for media?

I have purchased a Mac Mini, and a 17" top of the line Powerbook within the past 3 months. I was praying that OS X would at some point run on all intel/x86 hardware, but I doubt I ever see that.

Mac has OS X going for it, and Its a very good thing indeed, no wonder people are switching over and dumping spyware, adware, drm crippled, and virus infested PC's that, never ever come close to having a realitivly bug free, secure operating system.

I switched because of MS, not because of my iPod

[mcgroarty]

I recently switched to Mac because of the upcoming Intel switch. MacOS has been a pretty attractive platform since OS X 10.1 or so, but for all the ranting and raving about the PowerPC, it just doesn't stack up against P4 for general purpose computing. (Altivec is nice, but only helps in "broad brush" operations. It's pointless outside of graphic processing tasks.) Going Intel will be a huge boost for general purpose computing.

Meanwhile, I'm looking ahead at Longhorn. I'm not seeing Windows maturing in the way we'd all expected -- .NET was supposed to help unify the branching 64 bit architectures and foster finer-grained security controls, but MS are backing away from .NET for Longhorn. Instead of eating their own dog food and telling us it's good, they're telling third party developers "you go first" and apparently waiting to see if it's safe for THEM first. Why is skipping out on .NET so bad? Things are bad enough with wildly different Windows configurations, thanks to MS' lack of library/DLL versioning and much larger range of hardware platforms. It's impossible for a developer to test or even forsee every target configuration. And now instead of migrating to .NET with versioning and a narrowed virtual target platform, we're just going to add random combinations of DLLs from 3-4 slightly different CPU architectures in the mix.

MS' operating system lifecycle is 3 years and growing, and we're preparing to see more of the same. The current model is too fragile to do new and exciting things reliably, and so unless MS are working on a new OS in secret, Windows is going to be a pretty boring place for the next 3-5 years.

Re:Still a computing firm ?

[bill_mcgonigle]

This clearly flames the debate : is Apple all about iPod now (or already video iPod) ? Or is it still a true old fashion PC company ?

Yes.

It's an old-fashioned PC company. They do R&D and come up with new, good ideas (and sometimes some bad ones).

It's not a mass-marketer who tries to sell as crappy of a box as they can get away with. That's the new-fangled PC company.

Mac was certainly a foot in the door for the Music and Film industries - don't discount Mac usage in those industries as a reason why Apple got the green light to do iTMS.

Old reliable needs good care and feeding, and she probably has a few tricks left in her. Lest there be any doubt, if Mac was unimportant they'd let it languish on PowerPC.

Where's the tipping poing

[intmainvoid]

In the last year Apple has gone from 3.7% to 4.5% marketshare. Impressive, but even at that pace there's a long way to go to even 10% marketshare.

What'll be interesting is if at some point network effects kick in and Apple's marketshare really takes off. What marketshare do you need to get to before people stop worrying that "no one else has a mac"? Once Apple is past that things will get interesting!

What a spin!

[spitefowl]

Just because sales raise does not mean that a Windows/PC user has 'switched'. Even if a PC user did buy a Mac, it doesn't mean he's abandoned his PC for OSX land. I, myself, am considering purchasing a Mac just to work with the otherside. That in no way means I will never use my Windows/Linux boxen again.

My Parents New Machine

[Omega1045]

My brother and I just bought our parents a Mac Mini to replace their aging PC. They love it. I had been anti-Mac for a long time, for what I consider to be good reasons. My reasons for our decision of Mac over PC (Windows) in this case were:

1) My positive experience with my iPod,
2) The security and virus issues associated with Windows and the lack of said issues on Mac,
3) The Mac Mini is now in the range of price I am willing to pay for a desktop computer, especially one that will mainly be chacking email and surfing the web,
4) Positive reviews of Mac's OS X from programmers and IT geeks.

Mac has done a lot of things right lately to start winning over former Mac haters such as myself.

Re:My Parents New Machine

[chochos]

I just gave my parents my old graphite iMac G3 @400MHz. They had a very old PC with windows 98. They had bought a digital camera and couldn't connect it. buying a USB card and installing the drivers was a nightmare. The hard disk finally failed... they called me and I told them I would temporarily let them borrow the iMac. My mother just loves it! she can plug the camera now and up comes iPhoto automatically; Mail is so much better than the old Outlook they had, connecting to the internet (they still use dialup) is so much easier, and well, Safari is way better than explorer 4 which they were using... so my parents are switchers now and won't show in these stats. How many more cases like this can there be, where mac fans give away their old macs when they get new ones?

The Apple Store

[jpiggot]

I'm sure all those people heard about the Ipod, or the Mini, and were exposed to a massive "Switch" marketing campaign, but what about the Apple Store ? Apple's computers used to be sold online, or in the back of some CompUSA with uninterested, and undereducated sales reps who couldn't have cared less. By bringing well stocked, and well staffed Apple Stores all over the country, Apple finally gave those people on the fence a place to see that the Mac was...cool, easy to use, and functional.

And they did it correctly. Remember those Gateway stores ? Neither does anyone else, because they were around for about ten seconds and cost the company millions of dollars in losses. All the news media claimed the same thing would happen to Apple when they first announced their plans. And today, you've got 400,000 "switchers"

That's not an accident, and it's not just the Ipod.

I switched.

[ashp]

I'm one of those switchers.

I got a mini-mac just to play with, a new gadget, figured if I didn't like it then it was only the minimal specced model.

Within two days I removed my PC completely, and gave it away to someone. I was using XP, because I'm too lazy and I don't really have the time to mess with things. I used to use Linux exclusively, but (personal opinion) the font handling was so bad I gave in.

It's funny, this mini-mac is drastically underpowered and when I do things like unzip stuff I notice it, but for general use I guess I just don't care. I use a webbrowser (Safari), itunes, adium (MSN),
mail, terminal (ssh), and none of those need much power.

Well, this was long and pointless, but this thing is just so elegant that I couldn't stop myself gushing like a fanboy.