Apple Now Selling Better Than One Laptop In Six

Lucas123 writes "Apple's share of the laptop market has grown over the past few years and the company is now beating Gateway in sales, according research firm NPD Group Inc. in Port Washington, NY. 'Their sales are continuing to grow faster than the rest of the marketplace,' the firm stated. In June Apple was responsible for 17.6% of laptops sold (at retail) in the US and is now in third place behind HP and Toshiba."

Comments

College kids

[PlusFiveInsightful]

Most college kids I see at coffee shops have a Mac notebook...
I guess Apple's strategy of marketing to younger people is finally paying off. Also, does this prove the iPod's halo effect is Real?

Re:College kids

[mycoupons]

My youngest son is a new freshman at Kent State. He wanted a Mac, I got him a Mac and well... one for myself too. When comparing my MacBook to my ThinkPad running Linux (or my office machine running Linux), I look forward to heading home not only for the beer but to use my Mac. Steve Jobs understands that things need to just work, period, they need to be straight forward and easy to use and great design is important. The Mac just works.

As soon as my company moves from the red to the black, I'm investing in MacBooks for my entire staff. I'm no zealot, I'm a business man. I want my people to be productive and I want my people to enjoy their work. After spending a few weeks getting used to the interface, I honestly believe that my people will enjoy using their computers. The really amusing thing is that I really like MS Office on the Mac a hundred times better than on Windows. Entourage is actually pretty cool (when compared to Outlook or dEvolution) and after learning it I love it.

When choosing whether to move the company from XP to Vista or just to a Mac, if I can pull it off financially, Mac it will be and Vista will never make it in the door.

Re:College kids

[cp.tar]

No, it proves that people who would have bought an IBM ThinkPad want the best. Since the LeNovo ThinkPad is not the IBM ThinkPad, the best is now the MacBook Pro.

This is as close to my case as could be expected.

I wanted a T61p. With Linux. Or FreeDOS. Or empty. Whatever; I just didn't want to pay for Windows. I'm not using it, I'm not paying for it. Period.

In the time it took me to collect the money, it was out of stock - mostly everywhere (in Croatia). Except for a more expensive version with Vista, and I'm not that stupid.

Then someone told me I could buy a MacBook Pro for that kind of money anyway. Oh, really?
Turned out, oh, yes, really. Comparable hardware, comparable price, available, polished, and with an OS I actually would and do use.

I'm only having some trouble installing Linux on it, but I'll get there, too.

And if I only found a way to stop my gf from trying to steal it... (I think it's because of the remote.)

Re:College kids

[datapharmer]

I don't know about the ipod effect, but something is definitely working, and I think some of it is quality and ease of use.

I looked around in a large lecture hall class of 100+ at University of Florida and 4/5 of the laptops were macs of some sort, and most of those were the new macbooks. They are at the price point parents can afford to get their kids (I mean seriously.... a crap dell of for a few hundred more something that won't burn down the dorm room), small enough to put in a backpack (there is a lot of wasted screen real-estate compared to the powerbook, but alas they still get the job done), and are powerful enough to do almost anything a college class could require (except maybe some 3d graphics work - FCP works fine).

When I got my powerbook a few years back it was almost a grand more than many other laptops (sony vaios and some upper end thinkpads aside), but the difference is I am still using it, and despite having it get pulled off a desk by my dog twice and being dropped, bumped, and lugged around to 3 jobs, clients houses, and college classes it is still working great. The screen was starting to degrade so I replaced it for $210, but that was ENTIRELY my fault. If it were most other machines it would be in the garbage.

Re:College kids

[fyngyrz]

Honestly only an idiot would buy a MacBook and run Windows instead of OS X.

Well, not exactly. Sort of. For instance, I run Windows XP sandboxed on my dual core MacBook Pro laptop, and that's the only place I run Windows at all. Windows isn't allowed to get to the net where it can get hurt, I just use it to host a few desktop applications that don't have Mac equivalents. With Parallels "coherence" mode, I'm in the OSX filesystem for the images and other files I use under Windows, but I have the Mac right there doing the right things for everything else.

I also run a linux install pretty much the same way (though no coherence, unfortunately.) The linux install is allowed on the net because it considerably more secure "out there" than Windows is. I can run all three OS's at once without any problem and get realistic performance from all of them.

Hence, no need for a Windows machine, and no need to be an "idiot", either. ;-)

As for Vista... No need to go there. We won't be writing any applications using Vista specific capabilities, either. As far as I'm concerned, Vista was dead at the starting line.

Re:College kids

[Penguin's Advocate]

When I went to college I got a Thinkpad, my brother got an iBook. My Thinkpad barely made it through 2 years, my brother still uses his iBook (this is now ~6 years later). A year ago I relented and bought myself a MacBook Pro, today's Lenovo Thinkpads don't even compare. A couple people at my office have the new Thinkpads, but far more now have MacBooks or MacBook Pros. It has nothing to do with PC vs. Mac, Apple simply makes excellent machines. For the record, my office is a Windows XP only shop, so all those Mac owners are running XP on their macs (at least at work).

Re:College kids

[Anonymous Coward]

We have at least a thousand running Thinkpads and have had several thousand over the last 3 years. T41,43,60,61,62 and X30,31 and maybe a few oddballs in there. For those that are familiar with IBM and Lenovo, you will notice some of those laptops were pure IBM, some hybrids, and some are pure Lenovo. We have seen no difference in the quality of these laptops over the years. People can have their own opinions based on a neighbor or a relative but my experience is from a real data with a significant quantity that we support on a daily basis. I currently have three of them assigned to me that I use daily as well (A T60 at home, a X32 for utility work and testing in the server room, and a T43 at my desk which is about to go back on lease which I will replace with a T61)

Overall, the quality on these laptops is outstanding and they are very durable and very stable. I'm not comparing them to any other current companies offerings because I can not (other then the HP/Compaq models we had years ago maybe).
So overall, we have not seen any reduction in quality over the past few years, no increase in maintenance costs, and they are very reliable units.
YMMV.

Re:College kids

[kestasjk]

Most of us manage to run Windows on the net confidently. If you prefer OS X or Linux that's fine, but don't act like security is the reason you're not on Windows and that you have to keep it separate from the net; I've had the same Windows XP install running for over a year and it runs as well as when I installed it, and there's no spyware.

As for writing code for Vista. Well I'd say give it time; people didn't write for XP the moment it came out either, it took a while for apps to stop supporting Win98, but as people update their computers and get Vista by default there'll be a transition, whether it's worthwhile or not.

More to Come

[mordors9]

Let me preface my comments by saying that I have not used in a Mac in 6 years or more. So I am not a zealot. From what I saw at Best Buy this weekend, I think the sales may go up even more. I hadn't realized that they were selling them now, but I saw a crowd ganged around a table where they had the laptops and iMacs sitting out for people to play around with. There was a steady stream of people and you could feel a sense of excitement about it. Unfortunately I was there to buy a washer and dryer...

Gateway is the company to beat (like a dead horse)

[the.Ceph]

I find it kinda amusing that either earlier today or yesterday there was an article about how Gateway got bought out for just over a dollar a share and most the comments were tashing the company's business model and how it was driven into the ground.
  Then this article triumphs being tied with Gateway as an achievement.

Re:Brand Synergy

[gujo-odori]

How cool is Apple's industrial design?

When I started a new job in January, they issued me a MacBook Pro. The first time I brought it home and pulled it out of my bag, my four year old daughter - who is used to various desktops, LCD and CRT monitors, my and my wife's Thinkpads, and the Toshiba Tecra I had at my previous employer - immediately popped it with "Wow, that's a cool computer!" as soon as she saw it.

She'd never seen a Mac before, has no clear idea about brands and stuff, yet immediately recognized that it looked cooler than the other computers she's seen. Couple that level of cool with OS X and you have a winner, so Apple's surging laptop market share doesn't surprise me.

Re:At retail...

[PhotoGuy]

I too, used to laugh at Apple Fanboys. I got fed up with XP, thought I'd try OS X, with the ability to fall back to XP on the same hardware, if I wasn't happy with OS X. Well, there was no looking back! (And Parallels lets me run any old legacy thing I need, which turns out only to be MSN webcam, and little else.)

So crash free, virus free, and great performance, it's a dream come true for me. External displays work as expected. Everything just works, in general. (A few gotchas, but *very* few as compared to XP.)

The funny thing is, I don't consider myself a Fanboy. But when I talk about the Mac, I get excited about how well it works, and people accuse me of it! Well dammit, I *am* excited about how well it works for me! And want to share it with others. At the end of the day, I don't care if people convert, as long as it's there for me. :) (But the more market share they get, the stronger they'll be, and the longer they'll be around for me :). The only reason I want people to convert, is I know it would be for *their* own good, not for validation of myself as a Fanboy.

Re:College NON-kids, too.

[Shag]

I'm (non-teaching) graduate-level support staff in astronomy at a state university known for its graduate-level astronomy program, and from what I see among the post-docs, professors and staff I work with, both at the university and elsewhere through collaborations, I think Apple's market share in some of the sciences is significantly better than one-in-six laptops, and has been for the last few years. A friend who did database work for an observatory told me of going to an ADASS conference a couple years ago, and getting looks of pity because he had the only non-Mac laptop in the room.

Why is this the case? It's not about iPods and it's not about Vista. It's about UNIX, X, and Boot Camp/Parallels/VMWare. The professor who used to have a Sparc, a PC and a PPC Mac in his office now just does his number-crunching and scientific visualization on an 8-core Mac Pro with dual 30" displays, and takes a MacBook Pro places with him. (I'm low on the totem pole, so I have a plain black MacBook.)

What's really amazed me lately is that this isn't just a US thing. I work near a major Japanese facility, so there are always Japanese scientists around. For years, they've always had these cute little Panasonic/Toshiba/Sony/Sanrio/whoever laptops that we never see at stores in the US (except at Shirokiya in Honolulu, I guess). Earlier this month, I actually worked with three of them one night, and they brought 2 laptops with them - both Macs. I never thought I'd ever see any "American" brand become that popular with the Japanese scientists.