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Apple Climbs Into Third Place In U.S. PC Market
Tibor the Hun writes "According to Gartner and IDC, Apple now has between 7.8 and 8.5% of market share. While those numbers are not astonishing, they are not insignificant, and their growth does not seem to be slowing down. Will the pearly gates of acceptance open up for them once they reach the magic 10%, and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption? Hard to tell, but it's good to see that normal people (not just us geeks) are choosing to go with a different OS, rather than staying with the headache-inducing Windows."
And since when have Apple users been considered "normal" around here?
Or did you really mean 'orthogonal'
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
when will a project similar to WINE come out for OSX? I have seen all sorts of apps that run on Mac and/or PC's but not linux. One would think it would almost be easier to "not emulate" the OSX software, as it is mostly unix based. If more software starts coming out for mac and PC, it might be easier to get the Mac software running under linux.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
While those numbers are not astonishing
Not astonishing? A single company, offering a proprietary product*, is outdoing nearly all of several hundred companies combined who build to a given standard! Astonishing indeed!
* - including hardware, OS, and a broad range of application software
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Why is 10% "magic"? This number is significant because that's how many fingers we have?
Will the pearly gates of acceptance open up for them once they reach the magic 10%, and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption?
Wow, talk about a strange corollary. Linux desktop adoption has nothing at all to do with Mac market share. It would have been just as valid to write, "Will the pearly gates of acceptance open up for them once they reach the magic 10%, and will that lead a surge in kitten adoptions?"
Personally, though, adopt a cat anyway.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Any browser can induce a boatload of headaches to those who are uninformed on how to use it. Aside from Vista and all of it's obvious headaches such as drivers and legacy software not working, XP and 2k were not quite as bad.
I think anyone will agree that even Linux can cause plenty of headaches as well if one is not careful. Sendmail was one of those battles I had a while ago.
If TV and the movies have taught me anything, it's that at least 90% of the computers and laptops out there are Apples. Hell, even alien civilizations use Macs on their motherships.
I really can't see how anything but goodness can come from this. Afterall, if you really want to gain ground against an evil closed-source monopoly that charges too much for it's products, it makes perfect sense to switch to another company that even more protective of its source, charges even more for its products, and even has a nasty habit of keeping its platform as proprietary as possible.
Success!
As opposed to Microsoft's "do it our way or the highway" approach to computing?
Has anyone else noticed that after Vista came out, Microsoft seems to have been losing ground? Netbooks/UMPC's are selling with OEM Linux like hot cakes, and Apple is steadily gaining market share. I also bet that the disappointment with SP1 made it even worse for ol' Billy. Even if Windows 7 is all that and a bag of chips, it'll be too late because Joe the Layman will have seen that Linux really is ready for prime time.
I've never known anyone to buy their first Apple desktop or laptop without trying it out first. Surely they notice the interface is different.
Developers: We can use your help.
At least Windows users don't have to open a console window and recompile their webcam driver after the monthly patch.
No sig today...
I REALLY hope that increased Marketshare will motivate games being ported to OS X. I fear it will have to be at least 20% for that to happen though.
Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.
I am referring to the new iPhone - and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build 'native' applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad - and it wasn't even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.
Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code?
What is more worrying is what the next move could be. Now that there is an AppStore with applications in iTunes, why wouldn't Apple move next to distribute all applications through iTunes - both desktop and mobile? There is no reason for them not to - the response to AppStore has been so enthusiastic that it is almost assured that you will start seeing desktop apps distributed in the same way. As soon as users are ground into looking at everything through iTunes, distribution of software in the traditional manner would be near impossible. Apple would become the gatekeeper, and both developers and users will enthusiastically pay the toll in exchange for pretty devices with pretty applications.
Apple has a very strong following in the open source community, and I can no longer understand it nor justify my own support (I am writing this on a Macbook). They built OS X on FreeBSD (a project I have enthusiastically supported, contributed to and been a user of for 10 years or more), they built Safari on KHTML, and are now using libraries such as SproutCore in MobileMe. They have taken open source and everything it built and leveraged it to get to market faster - yet they have now, with iTunes and the new SDK, built a layer on top of it that excludes others. For Apple, open source is great when it furthers their own goals, but not when using it with Apple software where it may further the goals of others.
The solution is simple. If you truly believe in open standards, open source and the good that it has created, then don't accept it. The spirit of open source was about building on the work of others in a transparent fashion, as the gains further the common good of all. Despite not taking over the desktop market, the philosophy and its resultants have destroyed the old enterprise market and many others. Open source and standards keep Microsoft and other big companies on their toes, the movement as a whole and the philosophy is very real. The solution isn't to adopt new licenses to try and prevent this, as it results in the mess that is GPL v 3.
It should be very possible to attach a simple BSD license to code, and if a large company utilizes the effort from others in a way that is unacceptable - the market should be able to sort that out, we simply wont buy it. The community needs to do more than just wear their support for openess and standards on their sleeves (and on their laptops). The problem with Apple is that the blind demand is driven by a distorted reality, so those same developers who poured thousands of hours into the BSD kernel now turn around and purchase an iPhone running that code, but it is now tied up in DRM, licenses and restrictions placed there by others.
The summaries I've seen indicated that Apple had gotten to 3rd place in terms of hardware sales -- not that people were sticking with Mac OS X instead of Windows on their new machines.
I assume, of course, that a large number of people who buy a Mac stick with the native OS... but I'm not a market research firm, so I don't have to have actual data to back my beliefs :).
Hard to tell, but it's good to see that normal people (not just us geeks) are choosing to go with a different OS
Most of the Mac owners I know are normal people. Either students that got an imac laptop from their school, older people who wanted an easy to use computer, or an artist (musician, photographer, graphic designer, etc.) who wanted a powerful machine that wouldn't get infected with a ton of spyware and viruses in a week.
None of the Mac owners I know (besides myself) are very tech savvy, they just know that their iPod works great, their PC is always infected with "viruses" (usually some spyware they installed cause it promised free smileys), and their friend's Mac never has any problems. Personally I didn't buy a Mac just for a different OS. If I want to toy around in something other than Windows, I just go install Linux on whatever old computers are lying around the house. I bought the Mac specifically for Aperture, and Final Cut Pro since I do a lot of photography and video work. I know there exists open source software or expensive Windows software to do that stuff, it's just none of it is as powerful or easy to use as the Mac versions. I don't need Mac OS to have a stable computer, I just like the software that exists for the Mac.
I use linux/*nix all day long at work, and I have a mac at home, yet there's very few things that I use on OSX that are *nix related. Maybe running 'top' is about it, and that's a rarity. I picked OSX because of the applications and how they are all integrated in with each other, pure and simple. My laptop at work is a company provided XP system and while not having the polish/eye candy that OSX has, it gets the job done.
When linux distros have the same ease of use, smooth upgrades and most importantly application integration (with each other AND the OS), then I can see people like myself thinking about saving a few bucks and going with Linux instead.
I assume that when I buy a dishwasher, the interface is intuitive and it just works, why should we treat computers any differently?
These figures just count units shipped in the US, they exclude mini-notebooks and handhelds and don't take into account profitability or unit costs.
If you go by market capitalisation, Apple isn't behind Dell and HP, it's ahead of both, but behind IBM who don't even get a look-in in the units shipped list.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
2008 will be the year of OS X on the desktop! :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That would be GNUstep http://gnustep.org/
It's got a long way to go, but eventually, they intend to make .apps from OSX run natively. Remember mac OSX is really NeXTstep 5 (or something).
"...and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption?"
Until Linux wireless is brain dead easy, the answer is NO.
Apple has seen these numbers before. They're currently on a crest, but they'll sink and rise again. They have an upper limit of around 10-15% market share. They've made it quite clear that they don't *want* any more than that, and aren't interested in meeting the needs of the rest of the market.
I've got my share of -1 postings from ripping Apple but on this you are off base. I think thi would have been true in 1992 but it is certainly not true today. It's a completely different world out there. Personal computers running Windows have become corporate computing appliances, not personal ones, where Apple has doggedly focused on being a personal computer and is imaginatively building a software, service, and shopping stack designed to build a premium consumer brand.
If they decoupled their anaemic hardware offerings from their OS, they could see double digit growth yearly, but failing that they'll stay right where they've always been.
Apple has double digit growth yearly. Apple stock is kicking total butt right now in a stock market that sucks. I wish I would have bought them a couple of years ago when Jobs first came back... I'd be retired!
Secondly, Apple hardware is hardly anemic. Apple's new PowerMac, for example, is the latest Harperton Xeon and while it might be a tad pricier than the equivalent from the likes of Dell, I guarantee you that the entire service experience, from Apple store to home, is very, very good.
Christ, I'm talking myself into buying a Macintosh... and that's the thing about Apple - you walk into the store, and it reflects the sort of perfection that Americans expect from products.. indeed, Apple has gone beyond even Japanese cars when it comes to the detail of their products...
This is my sig.
Magic isn't supposed to be logical. That's why it's magic. If it was logical it'd be something else. But not magic.
I find it suspicious that Mac adoption has exploded shortly after the release of Bootcamp. I'd like to know what fraction of this 8.5% of Mac users is dual booting to Windows.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I figure the Mac revolution would have happened when OSX was released, or maybe when the iPod was launched. Why should the surge happen today?
Make application development a breeze. Windows has given away free Visual Studio express editions that can enable developers to program next generation WPF applications for free.
It doesn't run on my Mac or my UNIX boxes. I have to buy Windows to run Visual Studio, like I have to buy OS X to run XCode, and I have to buy Linux... well, OK, I don't have to buy Linux.
XCode comes only if you buy the expensive Mac.
But XCode is included in the cheaper Macs, too, and frankly I don't really WANT to know about the sexual problems of my IDE.
How many macs have been built by the owner?
Three here. OK, I started with an Apple motherboard, but I had to get a third-party processor, replace the RAM, add cache, video cards, case... XPostFacto let me install OS X on "unsupported" Macs. 7600 upgraded to a G3/400, G3 upgraded to a G4/533, and another G3 upgrade for my daughter. After Apple abandoned the headless desktop in '97 I didn't have much alternative but extreme upgrading until the Mac mini came along.
all it takes to run Windows is to pop in the disk and let it install
This little bit of folklore deserves to die.
1. Got a system restore disk? (Not an OEM-style installer!) Then sure, many minutes later your "my documents" is gone, but you are pretty much back up to day-1 status.
2. Got an OEM installer disk? How many of those disks do not include the drivers for devices like, ohhh your *ethernet* adapter? That is the purest soul-sucking time sink ever.
Apple's installer is pretty great for this reason. I seem to recall it kept my wife's home files intact.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The point is that the registry is essentially one difficult to edit text file that bloats for the life of your Windows installation. Linux et. al. use application specific text files, each which can be ported, edited, removed, copied, etc. as required.
Apple has seen these numbers before.
Not since 1995.
They're currently on a crest, but they'll sink and rise again.
Sales are different different quarters, but year-over-year they haven't been going in cycles for over a decade. They've just been slowly going up. The trick is predicting how high up they'll go, as eventually everyone loses share again.
They have an upper limit of around 10-15% market share.
They haven't had market share that high in twenty years, when the industry was completely different.
They've made it quite clear that they don't *want* any more than that, and aren't interested in meeting the needs of the rest of the market.
I disagree. They want more market share and they're expanding both their PC business and their other markets. Apple is just conservative about expanding into new segments of the PC market, but they've slowly been targeting parts of the market both lower and higher than previously.
If they decoupled their anaemic hardware offerings from their OS, they could see double digit growth yearly, but failing that they'll stay right where they've always been.
If Apple decoupled their hardware and OS sales they'd go out of the OS business. The desktop OS market is monopolized. Nobody with any business sense is stupid enough to try that. Until MS monopoly is seriously weakened, Apple needs a business plan that bypasses that market.
"Will the pearly gates of acceptance open up for them once they reach the magic 10%, and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption?"
Absolutely not.
Some of you may recall that, back in the late 1980s, the Mac's market share was about 18%. For a period of time lasting into the mid-1990s, Apple was the #1 maker of PCs (IBM, Compaq and Dell rounded out the top 4; HP, Packard Bell, Gateway and a few others fought over the scraps).
If you take into consideration the fact that Macs lasted longer than PCs in those days and Mac users tended to buy more software (claims supported by numerous published Gartner studies), you could make a fair argument that Macs represented as much as perhaps a third of the total installed base and of the potential software market.
This was not seen as sufficient. Throughout the entire mid-80s through late-90s, the PC press maintained a steady drum-beat of, "Apple doesn't have enough market share to survive." Of course Apple's not going to make it if the press keeps telling everyone they can't! Combine this with some of Apple's strategic management blunders, and you have a perfect recipe for also-ran status.
Not that any of this is necessary to ensure Windows' continued market dominance. Most businesses are going to use what other businesses in their industry use. Most people are going to buy for home use what they are comfortable with at work. Windows' prevalence is its own best selling feature. This is why Microsoft enjoys a "natural monopoly", and why it will take a bigger disruptive market force than anything we've seen so far in the past 20+ years to change it.
I think you have to be a little insane to use some Apple hardware. Does anyone remember the puck mice? The ultra-flat desktop keyboards they're selling now are almost as bad. The earbuds that come with iPods are all universally crappy, both in build and sound quality. It's bizarre that, with Jobs exerting such obsessive compulsive control over Apple's output, crap products like these somehow slip through the cracks. It's almost like Jobs is schizoid.
Then again, if Apple just isn't good at designing certain things, what are they supposed to do? Start selling updated IBM Model-M keyboards with their high-end desktops? Grado's with the iPods? Paint microsoft mice white!!? It's almost unimaginable, and I see that as a problem.
This is my main beef with Apple. They're too image conscious. Admittedly, some of their user-base just wants to be fashionable, but is being fashionable really a long-term plan for success? Given how much of an asshole he is, sooner or later Jobs is going to become "uncool". Increased market share and, hence, lessened uniqueness isn't going to help. Normal people will use uncool hardware if it's *good*. This is a lesson I feel Apple needs to learn.
If magic were logical, it'd be science.
Enemy of the Sun
Apple's stock price has been buoyed not by it's PC offerings, but by iPods, and that only happened after they decoupled them from their PCs and let non-fanboys buy them.
For a while that was true. However, in the past year or two Apple's stock price has been riding the earnings created by exploding growth of their computer offerings. For the last year, growth in ipod sales has been pretty flat.
Apple's hardware selection is certainly anaemic. They have, what, half a dozen models? For the vast majority of the market, their offerings just aren't suitable.
I don't know that I agree with that. The growth in the sales of macs suggests that a lot of consumers are either desperate to get away from windows, or have decided that the models offered in the mac lineup are suitable for their needs. In my experience, macs provide everything the majority of home computer owners need and provide it in a simple and attractive way.
The dissatisfaction with their offerings, in my opinion, comes primarily from gamers (a group not served by the mac lineup) and more technical users who have specific hardware desires and generally want to build their own system.
A lot more people would be willing to shell out a few hundred dollars for OS X if Apple would be willing to sell it to them for the hardware they do want.
This will never happen. Doing that would probably destroy Apple as a company. Remember, they are a hardware company first and their software and services exist to support the hardware.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who want to spend a few hundred dollars on an operating system. If you asked the average person on the street, they'd probably tell you that they didn't even have to buy an operating system, it came for free on their computer.
As for Apple licensing OSX to dell, HP, etc; It'd be foolish for them to expect to get a few hundred dollars per OEM copy of their OS. They'd have to be price competitive with Windows. A non-geek going to dell's website and pricing out two machines identical except for the operating system is going to think that's ridiculous. Looking on Newegg real quick, Vista home Premium OEM is $109. Dell likely pays significantly less. And if MS felt like they were being threatened by Apple, they could lower their prices even more, and Apple would have to follow.
Apple's moving more hardware than they ever have before, and they're doing it with profit margins that the rest of the industry can barely dream of. Why would they want to change their strategy?
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
.
Top Operating System Share Trend
August 07 - June 08
Windows Vista 16%
Up 10%
The MacIntel 5%.
Up 2%
The Mac 3%
Unchanged.
Linux 0.8%.
Up 0.3%
In these stats, adoption of Vista appears to be accelerating and the Mac stagnating as we head into late summer.
MacIntel is where the action is for OSX and the MacIntel has BootCamp.
Desktop Linux draws flies.
Top Operating System Share Trend
Windows 91% - All Versions
Down 2%
The Mac and the MacIntel 8%
Up 2%
Apple sells an upscale urban life-style. Microsoft solid middle class value.
Apple has the boutique in Manhattan. Microsoft the big-box retailer in every township populous enough to rate a single traffic light.
Long term and with the economy in recession, who do you think holds the stronger cards?
Their "shitty business decisions" as you put it, currently have them placed as the 12th largest company in the US with a market cap of over $152 billion, right behind Google and IBM. As far as marketshare goes, there are steps that they could take to pull closer to Microsoft in terms of OS adoption, but in terms of profitability, they're doing just fine.
...and at this juncture some of the best Windows computers are Macs. You heard me right. They also make some of the best Linux computers. Now that MacIntel is the standard architecture for Macintosh, some people are actually running Windows or Linux on them. The reason why they do it? It's because quality control at the major PC manufacturers is down in the dumpster. If you want something that's built as good on the PC side, you have to go with boutique manufacturers like VoodooPC or Alienware, and even those are questionable because VoodooPC is now owned by HP and Alienware is owned by Dell. Since Lenovo took over the ThinkPad and ThinkCentre lines from IBM, quality has gone down the crapper quicker than you can say "ni hao."
Of course, part of the experience of Macs includes Mac OS X. And the folks who buy Macs only to put Windows or Linux on them are kind of unclear on the concept, in my not so humble opinion. Mac OS X is right now the best Unix or Unix-like operating system on the desktop. Now that Leopard is at 10.5.4 it is just plain awesome and just plain works. 10.5.2 was good for me too and so was 10.5.3, but I had no occasion to use 802.11n connectivity and I know that broke with 10.5.2. With 10.5.4 even those with 802.11n wireless access points are happy.
Still, if it means more people with Macs regardless of what OS they run, that's fine by me. More Macs sold equals more visibility for Mac. Everyone assumes that Macs run Mac OS X so the bigger the market share the more likely people will consider Mac users as more than fringies.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
This won't win points for being useful or insightful commentary, but my experience is that if you use your computer for more than typing word documents and surfing the web, you'll run into problems sooner or later. Computers are hard to use, period. And I say this as an engineer and scientist, not a computing neophyte.
Maybe it is an confusing GUI, or a required preference tweak that you shouldn't need to even know about. Maybe it is an incompatibility with a piece of harware or software whose vendors claim should 'just work.' Maybe it is a poorly written or patronizing but useless 'help' feature. All computers show some type of computing evil sooner or later.
Thanks to hard work by a lot of people, I think Windows and the Mac OS are 'equally decent for most tasks'. But let's not pretend either is 'easy to use' or 'good'.
I actually like INI files (reminds me of Linux, UNIX, etc.) during Windows 3.x days. Easier to manage! Registry sucks!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It makes sense that more people will use non-Windows operating systems as operating systems become more irrelevant. Nowadays the computer is the web browser.
My Freakin Blog
You are absolutely right. I worked for HP for quite some time, and believe me - the commodity hardware that $500 HP computer is built with is dirt compared to what Apple uses.
Think about it. HP sells a consumer laptop for $500 that includes all the bells and whistles, a webcam, shiny media buttons, etc. etc. Then they sell a business end laptop for 3x as much that is slower and has less features. Do you think there is a reason for this?
Consumer laptops are made with the absolute cheapest parts HP can source THAT DAY. Two laptops sitting next to each other on the shelf at the store can have different parts but look exactly the same. The quality control in this situation is, understandably, not good.
Business machines are the same in an entire series. They use good, proven hardware, and every single machine uses the same stuff. That way you can flash the same OS image onto all of them without problems. You can't do that with the consumer stuff.
So when people compare Apple to HP or other manufacturers, keep in mind that it's the business class machines that you should be looking at. Apple doesn't use commodity hardware - they use the same piece in every unit in a series, and they use parts that are high quality and proven to work well.
This is why people think Apple is expensive, when it's actually quite competitive.
or else!
It's supposed to be News for Nerds... not News for Ignorant, Inbred, Illiterate, Apple fan-bois.
Idiots talking about how this is going to decrease Windows usage? About how this could be good for Linux?
Here's another hint: Dell sells more linux boxes then Apple. But you wouldn't know that from the summary or any of the stupid, waste of space comments, including yours. Just M$ bashing and Jobs jobbing.
"normal people (not just us geeks) are choosing to go with a different OS, rather than staying with the headache-inducing Windows."
What's really interesting is the demographics of the people who buy Apple computers. You think it would be young people. Not now Apple costomers tend to be much older and much better educated then the average PC buyer. Turns out if you are a 40+ year old professional with a graduate level education you are a prime demographic for Apple's Mac. These people tend to NOT be geeks of "on the fringe" Certainly these people are as full on mainstream as it gets. (and there have the money to buy what they like.)
You do understand that just because Dell owns Alienware and HP owns VoodooPC doesn't mean they necessarily changed, or control, their design and production process, right? The point of a business merger like those is to get the parent company into the niche the bought company ocupied and to SHARE beneficial technologies (like Dell's purchasing power to lower Alienware's cost of parts). It would be a complete waste of money if we had bought Alienware and then just decided to make them Dell's with an Alienware exterior. We learn from them, improve our XPS systems and maintain their brand by allowing them to continue producing high level products and make even more money by paying less for the parts through our suppliers. /Dell Ops Manager
Probably heat related. Most of the recent Macs seem to run really warm, which is likely because Apple wants to make them as thin as possible while skimping on the cooling to keep them quiet. I predict that a lot of the new iMacs/Macbooks/Macbook Pros aren't really going to last more than a couple years because of this, unless they aren't powered on much.
Cheap $500 computer finally breaks down about the time you were wishing you could upgrade to a much newer, faster machine. Perfect timing, perfect excuse to upgrade ("Darn it! I just have to buy a brand new *fast* box...", he says with mock bitterness)
Expensive over-engineered Mac runs and runs for years after its technology has become so out-of-date that museums begin phoning you to see if you would donate your Mac as an example of ancient hardware. Every time you ask for an upgrade, your boss says "What's wrong? It still works, doesn't it?"
See, I prefer the cheap and nasty PC that costs a third of the price, lasts a third of the time, and gives up around the time I want a newer PC. I don't need to pay for a machine to keep going long past its prime. I want a PC that will last 3 years, not a cathedral that will last 3 centuries.
When the technology changes as fast as PC tech does, built-in obsolescence - cheap throwaways - aren't such a stupid idea. For the same price as a Mac I will have a newer, faster PC most of the time. And tech prices keep coming down.
Buy cheap, buy short-term, as it will always be cheaper and faster tomorrow.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Try counting to ten. Apparently the deep breath didn't help you much.
So Apple sold 38% more computers last year in the US, compared to the industry average growth rate of 4%. You're right, that's hardware sales, but what OS do you suppose most of those people buying Macs are running on them? Sure, a few might buy the pretty hardware and install Vista on it, but I bet most of them are running... OS X, a non-Microsoft OS.
Amazing, hey?
PS: Yes, I agree, your comments have been a waste of space thus far. Kind of entertaining though.
If you RTFA then you will see that the percentages stated are for US sales only and the 3rd place is only from one set of figures. The other set places Apple 4th in the US after Acer.
Looking at worldwide figures they don't even make the top 5. Everytime someone trots out one of these "Apple market share exploding" articles it is always based on highly misleading data. For example the recent article claiming that Apple has 66% of the over $1000 computer market ignoring the fact that the 66% only takes into account retail sales and only in the US.
Looking around most high street stores you would be hard pressed to buy a machine that cost more than $1000 and wasn't made by Apple. This isn't because they dominate the market but because they only offer high-price options and sell a disproptionately large amount through bricks and mortar stores opposed to online.
Removing the 'over $1000' filter brings that down to 14% and that is still only including US retail sales.
I am not trying to imply that they aren't doing well or that their market share isn't growing, but haven't we had enough of these flamebait articles with misleading summaries based on incomplete figures?
> and will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption?
What does that have to do with anything? Why is this question even being asked?
The answer is 'no', obviously. Several reasons. First off, nobody uses Linux on the desktop. Last time I saw the number it was hovering around 1.3%. Neck and neck with Windows 98. Second, the entire user interface philosophy between Macs and Linux are completely opposite. Apple strives for clean interfaces, consistency, and just enough features to make 95% of us happy. Linux doesn't have a cohesive strategy for it's UI. Some of it is decent, but the bulk of it is a mess. Average folks still cannot use Linux.
At least, these days, there's a growing realization of the problem within the Linux community. Distros like Ubuntu are doing they're part to make things better. But there is still a long, long, LONG ways to go before Linux catches up with Windows in terms of usability. And even farther to go to catch up to Apple.
The notion that Linux will benefit from Apple's rise in market share is fiction. Won't happen.
whj