Apple's US market share still falling and rising with the tides

You wrote "...over 1.6 million Macs, the most ever in a quarter and 30% more than the previous quarter". While any improvement is great, it's not that dramatic. This is a 30% growth from the year-ago quarter. The 30% growth didn't happen in three months -- it took one year.

To the fake ToeKnee:
You are a lame-o who cannot read what I wrote nor come up with a different name than I use, so I probably should ignore, but I can only say, you're completely missing the point.

TUAW-- geek.com finally enabled registration due to all the senseless trolling and name-spoofing. It had driven away most of their serious readership. They waited too long. Don't you wait too long... I'm even getting sick of having to verify every time I post before it shows up. Simple screenname--> e-mail address authentication could take care of that. Don't need realname, iChat username, shoe size, and all that other baloney some sites seem eager to collect.

Name spoofing WILL destroy an online community. It's not a problem here, yet, as far as I've seen, but why wait that long? It just happened above.

Looks like others beat me to the Pac-Man references.... which reminds me, I have MacMAME on my MBP. It's break time!

As for the Mac marketshare percentage, I think it's going to stay at 3% for some time. As someone above mentioned, it's not about the marketshare.... it's about the number of users. Which is most likey why we are seeing more Mac apps recently. If companies are waiting to produce apps based on limited marketshare, then they are missing out, IMO.

Yes, first thing I thought was "OMG PAC MAN!" Nice twisting of the pie chart to make it look like Pac Mac :) Props2u.

Re: 7

ToeKnee, Marketshare does matter in decision making. Ask MS, the EU, and the DoJ.

In my household Mac share is 100% and that's all that matters to me. And I don't count those three beige boxes sitting in the corner that I've got to take to the scrap yard to get recycled.

I read that Apple is now the fourth largest computer maker behind Dell, H/P and Gateway and they're right behind Gateway. Next quarter: #3!

Hal

Does no one else see pacman in that pie?!

wakka wakka wakka wakka...

Jeez, "not counting online sales" is so useless. But since every corporate PC sold, and every low-end PC that comes with a Windows license whether or not it will end up running Linux, also presumably count as Windows purchases, I have to say, WTF? Why don't we look at the retail market only, with no bulk corporate purchases, to see how many people are making an actual purchase decision here? Add in online sales since, heck, I haven't bought a computer in a store for a while.

Market share does *NOT* matter much, if at all, to software developers and hardware peripheral developers which do their homework, because they do not use such simple statistics as "market share" to run their business.

Market share seems to matter to the "mee-toosies" who make their decisions based on what everyone else does. It also seems to matter to virus writers, or at least, Windows fans would have us believe that.

But to a software development company which is deciding where to allocate their development resources, there are many more important things, such as units sold into the markets which might buy their software, competitors making similar software in the same market, costs to develop and distribute said software and expected sales price (by which they can calculate their expected ROI or "return on investment."

Trends are hugely important, and having a healthy Apple with trending sales increase, nice profit margins, and new product excitement is much more important to most developers.

Fact is, most Windows PCs sold go into corporate cubicle farms or other specialized business uses and are locked down-- no software can be installed by the end user anyway, it all has to go through IT and purchasing (so should not be counted in 'market share' for software dev purposes-- it's a dead market in most cases). The developers which make software to go towards that segment are different from companies selling to small/home business, the graphics and education market segments-- Apple is strong there. Do you think Microsoft would continue to develop and improve Office it were not a nice, healthy ROI?

Again, to summarize, market share in computers is such an over-simplified, useless term. Market share is more useful to mis-inform than to actually inform.

That is all I have to say about that.