Slashdot Mirror
Apple Reaches 12% Market Share In U.S. Notebooks
bonch writes "Apple's U.S. notebook market share has doubled to 12% after shipping 1.33 million Macs in the quarter. Apple also shipped 8.11 million iPods, topping analyst estimates, for a net income of $472 million. Remember when Apple was dying?" From the article: "The iPod shipments appeared to calm investors worried that growth in that red-hot business was slowing and Apple's results topped what analysts had said was a conservative forecast. Shares of Apple were down some 24 percent since early May. 'Apple looked good,' said Jane Snorek, technology analyst with First American Funds. 'The PC numbers were great, too.'"
I think consumers are waiting out the iPod upgrade cycle and that has an impact. The market is fairly saturated as you note and there has not been a real upgrade in something like 18 months.
If they ever get a true 6G iPod out the door (and not the 5.5G that is being talked about) I think the market will respond favorably as there is a lot of pent up demand. Its funny how the markets and consumers judge apple's innovation by the latest iPod and that perception has somewhat stalled, particularly as MS makes noise about their new player.
But if a 6G ever comes out and integrates movie rentals, TV shows and music along with a Mac Media PC things could shift. I think Apple is almost in 'quiet' mode as they get ready for the next iteration.
The bigger Apple's market share, the more we'll see:
Competition. Microsoft has been lazy because they dominated the market for so long. If Apple becomes a serious competitor in the business world (where they're just really beginning to scratch the surface) then MS will feel the pinch and be forced to raise the quality of their product. We've seen nothing but good results from the CPU and video card races and price wars.
Realism. As Apple becomes more mainstream and falls into the hands of less competent users, we're going to see a lot of the myths about Apple go away. Its vaunted security comes at the price of ease of use, and I think we'll be seeing a lot of people wondering why they can't do on their Mac what they could do on their Dell...the answer is because they shouldn't have done it on the Dell to begin with, but that's beside the point. I've long said that for Apple to make a play for market dominance they'll have to dumb down their OS the way Microsoft did, and that will make them vulnerable, the same as Microsoft.
Less hypocrisy. Right now I see people on just about every tech site that will tear into Microsoft for packaging a browser with Windows, but praise Apple for packaging an OS with every PC, and dozens of applications with every OS. If Apple takes a large chunk of the market, we're going to have to hold them to the same standard we do Microsoft, meaning that we should be demanding an end to their anticompetitive practices of bundling their own software.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Laptops have always been something that Apple has done well. They are sleek, fast as hell and other than the heat issues with the current crop (I'm running a MacBook Pro right now and cooking breakfast) as stable or more so than most other offerings. Will this thread start a flame war? Probably. But for crying out loud, they are tools, not a religion. I'm running both XP and OS X through Boot Camp. I wouldn't have gotten a mac laptop if that weren't possible. Their sales will go up because of this, but probably not anything that Dell needs to worry about. OS X's strengths tend to lie in niche groups (Music, Video and Graphics) or the arcane (command line *nix world). Win XP does everyday business tasks in a more comprehensible manner for most folks because most folks have been trained that way. Having both is a great thing for geeks. I know I'm happy about it. Apple saw this and is embracing it, but it won't give them the market share most are saying it could. They still will be, for the foreseeable future, a small segment.
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
You need to put that metric into context. Analysts see signs of the PC market slowing in growth . Yet, Apple has actually grown in sales. The conclusion is that Apple stole sales from Dell, Sony, HP and the like and that is significant.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Perhaps, but there are a few counter-points to be made. Take a look at how their stock has performed:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y
Notice that every year except 2002, the stock price started accelerating after WWDC. Apple stock, therefore, is usually flat or slightly downward trending for the first half of the year. The stock market is heavily influenced by whatever Jobs' latest reality distortion is.
I would also argue that, in addition to the seasonal fluctuation's effect, Apple stock was highly overvalued at the end of last year on half-baked speculation that apple would somehow conquer the entire PC market because of its move to intel. What we're seeing right now is that unbridled enthusiasm getting reigned in. If the apple desktops sell as well as the macbooks have, I expect we'll see the price jumping up again after August, which of course will dissipate by the end of the year, rinse, lather, repeat.
For those who can't remember...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
The more jobs that go overseas to low-wage workers...
The less people over there that are unemployed...
The more demand there are for workers there...
The more those workers are payed.
Economics like this actually works. I was reading recently in Time or Newsweek that India is outsourcing some of the jobs that have been outsourced to them. Indian jobs are moving to China and Vietnam because the demand for workers in India has increased the wages there.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The more people use macs the less we'll see fewer and fewer "internet explorer" only web sites. This has been a good trend.
With firefox and the fact that most people use the web alot for everything, it makes a transition from windows to linux on the desktop easier.
The classic sign of a top in a trend. Of course, it always seems that way just at the point of reversal. Now if only we could have a Business Week cover proclaiming that Apple is unstoppable, that would be a decisive indicator of a turn.
You do realize that people have been saying this kind of thing since at least 2002?
When a product becomes this popular, it is almost impossible to dislodge it, and it becomes self-perpetuating. I don't know where this idea started up that the more popular a product is, the less chance there is of its continued success - common sense should dictate that the opposite is true. Successful products tend to stay successful and build upon that success. That's the case with the iPod.
I don't see any trends in the industry that would indicate any reversal of that success, and that includes MS's Zune. The iPod continues to define what a portable media player is and should be in the minds of consumers, and as long as everybody else is following Apple's lead, there will be no "reversal" of the iPod's fortunes.
People don't stop buying products just because they're popular. In fact, the opposite is true. People stop buying products because better products become available at a cheaper price with a marketing message that appeals to them. How you define "better" becomes complicated when you're talking an entire ecosystem like the one that surrounds the iPod, but I think that you should listen to what consumers are saying by their actions, and what they're saying is that there is nothing better for them right now than the iPod.
Long story short, you can expect iPod sales to continue accelerating, despite what the naysayers have been saying for at least the last four years.
And China is simultaneously experiencing rising wages and labor shortages.
I don't know why labor protectionists are determined to raise trade barriers (fair trade?), but I think it is rooted in racism.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
If Apple;s marketshare culd top out around 10%, it'd be prefect. Large enough that software developers would be hesitant to ignore the market, but small enough so Apple could keep up the pace of improving the OS's foundation rather than focusing as much on backward compatibility as Microsoft.
Or, they could innovate a way to retain backwards compatibility while still providing innovation for those who want to move forward. I'd be happy if they grabbed about 30% of the market. While Windows dropped to about the same. That would guarantee everyone competed and innovated and customers would win.
What Mr. CFO did not do, was define exactly what the bold-faced phrase in his quote actually means. I accuse him of jockying with the statistics. I suspect that the "U.S. retail notebook market" excludes Internet-direct sellers, like Dell, and probably corporate sales as well. I would imagine this is looking at only brick-and-mortar (or glass in Apples' case) retail stores.
A) The MacBook has a nifty little camera! Beats clipping a monstrosity haphazardly to the top of your LCD (yes I am aware some PC laptops have it, but the majority of casual user-level laptops still do not)
If you do work for Apple, could you do me a favor and suggest making a camera-less MacBook a BTO option?
Apple lost one potential sale-- me. My place of employment does not allow cameras of any sort on the premises.
I think a lot of the problem is that corporations are using offshoring as a way to dodge the worker and environmental protections we have in the US and Europe.
There is no such thing as a comparably equipped PC! And there never will be until you get Mac OS running on a PC.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I recently bought my first Mac, a 2.0 Ghz MacBook. I've admired OS X from afar and during visits to the nearest Apple retail store for a couple of years, but I finally took the plunge. Why'd I finally do it? 1) Intel chips are fast enough that a Mac is performance/price competitive 2) I can dual boot to Windows or run Parallels Desktop if I want to 3) I'm sick of Microsoft's B.S.
So now that I've logged some time on a Mac, doing the types of things I used to do on my windows box, I can honestly say it was worth every penny of the "premium" to own an Apple machine vs. a Dell/HP/Compaq. The hardware is beautifully designed, the included software is actually USEFUL, and OS X is to die for (a geek's dream come true).
While I'm head and shoulders above the "average computer user" (read: drooling moron), I'm a fairly typical Slashdot reader. If the Mac lineup is compelling enough to make me switch, there has to be hundreds of people reading this that are thinking of switching too. My advice... do it, you won't be sorry.
That ignores a decade of specific facts about Apple and the norms of the industry.
Everyone in the industry reports units shipped. The way independent retailers work, a manufacturer selling
through them can't nail down a 'sold to end user' number for months with any solidity.
Jobs' big concrete business contribution when he returned to Apple was to smash the old tempting retail pipeline that
could get stuffed and which Apple *had* stuffed to their own delusion and eventual distress a few times in the early to
mid 90's. Apple no longer has independent Apple dealers worth speaking of, and their own stores are kept very thin on
inventory. The also sdell a large fraction of their systems directly through the online store, where 'shipped' is identical to 'sold'
The original comparison to Sony stuffing the pipeline with PSP's points up a key reason that Apple can't play that trick
any more: Apple's product cycle on the Mac side is too fast for a stuffing event to wind out before the stuffed hardware is
discontinued.
Apple hardware is great when it's good, but they must do close to zero testing at their end. Of all the apple hardware I've purchased (and seen purchased by friends) over the last 3 or 4 years, including all manner of laptops and iPods, only 2 iPods have not been replaced. The iBook I'm using to type this up is running perfectly, and without a hitch. Now that it's on its third motherboard. Girlfriend's Nano was DOA (wouldn't charge), and I've a mate who only ever uses apple, and he's not had a good laptop out of the box yet.
Apple's customer services is good, and once you get a machine made completely out of good parts they really can't be beat, but I can't see how this high defect rate is more profitable than just testing the fucking things more thoroughly at the factory. They must have very low cashflow for that to be the case I imagine.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Windows XP isn't constantly making use of your video card's 3D accelerator chip the way OSX does. That could be part of the reason for the difference in temperature.