Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Retail
Apple's US market share still falling and rising with the tides
Yesterday's prelim 4th quarter report was great news for Apple's health as a manufacturer of personal computers - they shipped over 1.6 million Macs, the most ever in a quarter and 30% more than the previous quarter. Today's news of a rise to 6.1 percent market share in the U.S. from Gartner, however, has the Mac web doing the market share dance all over again, as just a year ago this month it was the NPD Group reporting that Apple's U.S. market share - excluding online sales - had risen to 6.6 percent. The confusion ensues when considering MacNN's conflicting report from Gartner claiming Apple's U.S. share just rose to 6.1 percent. Of course where and how these different groups are getting their numbers is unbeknownst to this blogger, but methinks something might have been lost in translation between all these analysts.Still, while market share numbers might be getting a little fuzzy as of late, we can at least trust Apple's announcement of selling the most.Macs.evar in a quarter, and that's alright with me.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Zeke said 2:28PM on 10-19-2006
6.6% NOT including online sales?
Why is that number relevant?
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Robbie said 2:48PM on 10-19-2006
I think it's funny that every quarter we hear how Apple is selling millions of computers yet the % is still so small. How many freakin PCs are out there, its incredible has to be trillions... It's almost hard to believe.
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Liquidmark said 2:59PM on 10-19-2006
@Robbie
You have to take into account the number of manufacturers.
If a new manufacturer comes out and starts selling computers, that lowers everyones maerket share.
Considering that there are 6 billion people in the world. if every company has a share of a 1 billion unit userbase. Even 10 million units would be a small amount compared to everyone else. What I'd like to see is a pie chart showing all of the companies on the market.
6.1% US, is nothing to sneeze at.
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Drew said 3:19PM on 10-19-2006
These numbers are always difficult to interpret. Sometime the totals include things like ATMs and POS systems (no pun intended) running Windows. Apple is selling more Macs than before. Period. Isn't that all that matters?
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Alex said 3:46PM on 10-19-2006
That pie joke never gets old.
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AstroBryGuy said 3:57PM on 10-19-2006
Hey, where's Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde? ;-)
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Deven said 7:11PM on 10-20-2006
Nice Pac-Man-esque pie chart.
I agree with Liquid. We would have a better idea where Apple stands on this chart if we see exactly who made each PC.
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ToeKnee said 4:28PM on 10-19-2006
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.
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Peter Payne said 9:41PM on 10-19-2006
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.
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spil said 9:53PM on 10-19-2006
wakka wakka wakka wakka...
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Tortri said 10:59PM on 10-19-2006
Does no one else see pacman in that pie?!
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Hal said 2:19AM on 10-20-2006
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
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ToeKnee said 3:01AM on 10-20-2006
Re: 7
ToeKnee, Marketshare does matter in decision making. Ask MS, the EU, and the DoJ.
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Nate said 11:00AM on 10-20-2006
Yes, first thing I thought was "OMG PAC MAN!" Nice twisting of the pie chart to make it look like Pac Mac :) Props2u.
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ChillyWilly said 1:05PM on 10-20-2006
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.
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ToeKnee said 2:47PM on 10-20-2006
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.
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James said 8:48AM on 10-22-2006
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.
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