Apple Surpasses Dell in EU Education Market

wackymacs writes "According to a report from Macworld UK, Apple has confirmed it has taken the number one spot in the Western European education market. The company's education market share in the region is now 15.2 percent, placing Dell, with 14.7 percent, to second place. Gartner analyst Isabelle Durand confirmed: 'During the fourth quarter 2005, Apple became the number one PC vendor in the Western European Education market. The company has continued to grow very strongly (+22.4 per cent) and achieved a 15.2 per cent of market share in Q4 2005.'"

Comments

Re:Either way...

[ackthpt]

...it's a win for Intel!

What? I thought Dell were finally opening their monolithic doors to AMD, which have processors which would be quite popular in "Green" Europe.

Re:Smart move for Apple

[tbone1]

Except that, at one time, Apple was THE option in US education. However, DOS/Windows became the staple of business, largely riding on the back of the "nobody ever got fired for going with IBM" mentality. People purchased a home computer based on this, and schools were convinced by the type of middle management fusspots that get on school boards that they should get kids on Windows ASAP. There were other factors involved, of course, but that was part of what led to Apple losing its dominance in education.

Of course, whenever someone makes that "Think of the children!" argument, I tend to smack my lips and say "Mmm, delicious!"

Re:Smart move for Apple

[MrPeavs]

Another major reason why Apple faded out of the US school system is they cut their incentives. They simply were not good enough anymore to justify the cost difference between the systems.

Common misconception

[this great guy]

There is also this common misconception that, on the global desktop & server PC market, Apple is extremely small compared to Dell. People think that Apple sells 1% or less of the total number of PCs sold by Dell. But this is wrong, Apple has got 1/7th (14%) of Dell market share. Given this perspective, Apple suddenly appears much bigger...

Re:Common misconception

[the_humeister]

Well, Apple's global share is around 1.9% as of 2004. Dell's market share is around 18% as of 2004. So that means, Apple has about 1/9th of Dell's market share. In terms of number of computers sold, they're still smaller than Acer. I mean, you could also rephrase your statement to say that Apple has nearly 2/3 of Acer's marketshare (or 66%). That makes Apple even larger, right?

Re:Common misconception

[hattig]

I think Apple's marketshare was around 5% the last time they said anything about it, last month. Seems the Mac Mini and iMac G5 did improve their rather piss poor marketshares since a couple of years beforehand!

More information

[wackymacs]

The story is missing quite a bit of substantial information, which I'll post here:

Hewlett Packard at 14.2 percent, Acer at 9.5 percent, Fujitsu at 7.8 percent, and the remaining PC vendors taking 38.6 percent. Dell is still outcompeting Apple in the US, where Apple reportedly garners 22-23 percent of the education market share. Macworld UK reports that Apple's biggest European success is in Switzerland, where Apple holds 54.4 percent of the market-- Apple also ranks number one in France with 19.5 percent, Sweden with 15.2 percent, and takes second in Germany with 15.6 percent.

Something doesn't jibe.

[MisterSquid]

If anything, putting their computers in an environment like a school to show young people that Macs *do indeed actually crash quite a bit, even under OS X* is a bad idea.

I own 4 macs: a 15" Powerbook, a 12" iBook, a dual 2.5 GHz G5, and a 1 GHz G4 (MDD). These 4 machines are up and running 24/7. Two of them are servers exposed to the Internet. One of those servers also runs Final Cut Pro, email, etc.

I can count on one hand how many times these machines have crashed since 2002 (three times). Applications do occasionally lock up but can always be force quit.

If your macs are running OS X and the hardware is not faulty, your Macs are not going to be crashing. Since 50% Mac share at your school suggests more than a few Macs, my intuition is that you're making this up or that the users at your school don't know what a crashing Mac looks like. In other words, I think either you're lying or you have no idea what you are talking about.

Do you have any details about these crashes?

Re:Macs on Campus

[RedBear]

Uh-huh, yeah. I just have two things to say to that.

1. Before Mac OS X version 10.2, I would have agreed, Macs certainly did suck. Especially Mac OS 9 and earlier. It really sucked bigtime. I hated Macs back then.

2. If all those G5 iMacs are operating worse than the PCs on a regular basis, they need to get someone in there to maintain them who has half a clue. Those Macs should be rock solid. I speak from experience with a couple dozen different types of Macs running Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. We're talking anything from G5 towers to gumdrop iMacs from 6 years ago. And proper maintenance is not rocket science either.

You're either full of it or the techs in charge of that campus are morons. Not to mention that anyone with a little training can set up a Mac server and netboot every Mac in the building whereby it's possible to make them basically foolproof and impossible to mess up. You can make them boot from a fresh disk image every time. Great for school environments. But hey, if you hate them that much I know several million people who would be happy to take them off your hands, cheap.

If you've got a specific piece of software that keeps crashing, here's an idea: Stop blaming it on the Mac and replace it with a different piece of software that doesn't crash. It doesn't matter how stable your OS is, if your application is crap it will still crash.