66% Apple Market Share For Sales of High-End PCs

An anonymous reader lets us know about a recent analysis of retail computer sales numbers that shines a spotlight on Apple's sales growth as the PC market has flattened. In the lucrative >$1,000 PC segment, in the first quarter of 2008, Apple's retail market share was 66%. This includes a 64% market share for laptops and a market share for desktops of 70%. The article attributes the bulk of this success to Apple's stores. Fortune picked up this report and pointed out the somewhat obvious fact that the >$1,000 PC segment is Apple's by default, since Dell, HP, and Lenovo sell the bulk of their machines in the $500-$750 range, and Apple has only one model selling for less than $1,000. As the analyst said, "If you don't give people a choice [in the Apple stores], people will spend more."

Comments

$1,000 market dominance...

[Totenglocke]

is exactly why I don't own an Apple. I'd love to have a Macbook Pro, but I just can't justify paying that much for yet another computer. I really think Apple would increase their market share of all systems if they lowered their prices or at least had models that started at lower prices.

Re:$1,000 market dominance...

[ronanbear]

To be fair, chavs didn't just discover it. Burberry was carelessly selling to them and lapping up the extra sales and profits until they realised the damage that the -synonymous with chavs- Burberry print baseball caps were doing to their image.

It was nothing to do with chavs suddenly starting wearing the same Burberry jackets that everyone was familiar with; instead, Burberry bizarrely brought out a range of clothes that only chavs would wear.

Your example is one that perfectly points out the dangers that Apple would face if they went toe-to-toe with Dell for $500 laptops and grey boxes.

For U.S. Retail sales only.

[TinyManCan]

These numbers don't really represent that much. They are for U.S. Retail sales. Since Apple is very dominant in the (tiny) retail computer sales industry, its not a shocker that they have high market share in a slice of that market.

If you were to count BTO computers sold over phone or internet in the U.S. Apple's market share would drop. Add the rest of the world and Apple's market share shrinks even more.

That said, Apple is gaining speed and is only going to be selling more computers for the foreseeable future.

Re:Industrial design does matter

[flabbergast]

No flashing logos? On the MacBook I'm using right now there's a giant glowing Apple logo on the back of the screen. I also get the spinning disk quite a bit. =D Or how about when something happens in an application that's out of context and the Dock tells you about...by bouncing the icon until you switch over. I think that counts as a flashing logo. =D

As for not "moving my hand from one place" try moving between open files in Xcode within the same window pane without using a mouse or the touchpad. Its <option><command><left arrow> or <option><command><right arrow>. I don't mind having to use two modifiers but I do mind having to use two hands. Or how about page-up and page-down? Again, on my MacBook, for aesthetic sake, page up and down were left off. So, I have to use two hands (<fn><arrow up> to page up. Or Home and End. Is it <command><left arrow> or <fn><left arrow>. I've found it depends on the application. Will it take me to the end of the line or the end of the text? And will the cursor come with it? Or Delete. Again, depends on the application.

Yes, no stupid buttons on a MacBook (or Apple keyboard) Instead, Apple decided to appropriate the functions keys. Who needs those right? I do: Parallels or VMWare is worthless without re-assigning all the Expose and Spaces keys. <Command><F12> here I come!

Also, on my 4 year old eMachines I can click, right click, scroll and middle click without having to move my hand off the trackpad either. And, there are trackpads out there that pan too. Sure, it doesn't do it with two fingers like the Mac trackpad, but at least I get two real buttons which can then simulate a third (for true Unix goodness)

Look, my primary machine is my MacBook and I love it. Further, I do Visualization research on a Quad core Mac pro. But OS X and Apple are not the end all be all of of good design. I love the MacBook keyboard but guess what? Showed up on the Vaio first. And the matte grey finish for the hand rests? Mine are kind of scummy and discolored. I've had a bunch of Dell laptops (D610, D620, Inspiron 3200, 700m) and I've never had the hand rests of them go all scummy. And don't get me started on the Dock...

P.S. I think the m1330 is actually a pretty nice piece of kit. Its designed well and its got discrete graphics and can be had for cheaper than a MacBook if you wait for a sale (which happen about every other day).

Re:Correction

[jcr]

Keep in mind that the Mach microkernel is not unix, it came from CMU. Some userland stuff came from the *BSD lineage, but calling OS X a "true UNIX" rings about as true as calling windows + cygwin the same.

What's your next guess?

In OS X, Mac schedules threads and allocates memory. That's about it. The rest of the kernel services in OS X either came from BSD, or were written in-house at Apple.

Mac OS X is UNIX. Read and learn.

-jcr

Re:Price != High End

[koinu]

FACT Apples have always been about the same OR BETTER priced compared to equal PC's Exactly. I once wanted to order a HDD which failed. I opened up the case and have seen an ordinary Hitachi 250GB drive with SATA. Apple wanted about 3 times the price, because they say they "test them very thoroughly and this is not such crap that other PC customers get". Yeah right... do I look that naive? As if they got special HDDs with blessings from Buddha personally.

FACT Apple has always been at the top of the list for quality and customer service Exactly. I waited 2 weeks for the HDD replacement in my Xserve RAID system. This was an expensive "applecare" contract. This contract said, someone would come and replace the drive. Instead the HDD was shipped. They also wanted the failed disk back.

FACT one of the reasons Apple is doing so well right now is Redmond fanboys are buying Macs to run Vista on...even the PC mags agree that MacBooks are the best windows machines out there. No. People buy Macs, because they feel somehow better. They want to have a moment of pride. Well, after short time, all the attention to the Mac is over, because everyone has to do their fucking work. Now, as you mention it. There are 2 colleagues here that have Macbooks Pro. So what? They still use MS-Windows XP on them.

I have a simple FreeBSD notebook here and can do my work without MS-Windows.

FACT sub $1000 PCs are crap..thats why most people that go to Dell's site to buy one of those $500 PCs leave spending around $1500 Who the hell buys complete PCs? I recently upgraded my old PC for just $300. It is over twice as fast as my last PC. And btw, I can construct an entire PC, part by part, and it runs without any problems for just $200 more. And it has a very decent quality, it is not comparable with any PC that companies like Dell sell (I have not single no-name component). Go and buy 1GB RAM more in Apple shop. They charge you about 10x as much. My PC parts are carefully chosen. They are not crap at all. I simply choose good quality prodcuts and try to find out which have a decent price at the moment according to their speed and power requirements. You won't have this choice with Apples.

Re:It really is preference

[stewbacca]

Ignoring the "My anecdotal evidence blah blah blah" guy's comments, you make an excellent point. It is easy to show that transitioning to OS X is very painless (but not the other way around). I did so in my grad thesis! The only two issues for new Mac users in my research was the concept of closing a window doesn't quit the program, and pushing the "maximize" button doesn't make the window go full screen like in Windows. One other minor quirk is that PC users have a hard time adapting to the one-menu at the top concept, but this was found only in more advanced users.

Other issues I noted really demonstrate that learning the "windows way" really limits the user. Example: you don't HAVE to close the document you have open to move it or rename it in MacOS, even though you've grown accustom to having to do so in Windows. I won't even get into the way Windows users over-think installing and uninstalling apps!