The numbers are preliminary, but Gartner's analysis of the US personal computer market for the 1st quarter of 2008 shows some remarkable market expansion year-over-year for Apple. With a 6.6% share of the US market (behind Dell, HP and Acer), Apple shipped over a million Macs in the quarter and had 32% growth in unit sales, far outpacing the 3% growth of the overall market and blowing past sales leader Dell's otherwise stellar 15% growth.
Gartner's report notes that "Apple enjoyed strong retail sales, and there were indications that Apple showed decent growth in the professional market as well." Someone's got to be buying all those machines!
Currently in lead in the UK, Nokia may be given a run for its money as the iPhone is set to be the number one mobile web browsing device. According to iTWire and StatCounter, the iPhone took 0.06 percent of the total internet browser marketshare in the UK for March 2008.
According to StatCounter, the iPhone definitely has some work cut out, if it is to surpass Nokia's 0.15 percent market share to date as of March. iPhone is currently in second place with it's 0.06 percent (which goes up to 0.09 percent if iPod touch browsing is also figured in). But that is still way ahead of the Blackberry with it's 0.02 percent.
Over at Mac Daily News, they're citing a USA Today article which indicates that Apple's "home computer market share" hit 7.6% in May 2007, up from 3.2% in May 2004. MDN says "we assume that the market share number came from USA Today research." Presumably this number is for the US and obviously focuses on consumers rather than businesses, but this feels right to me. We've already mentioned that sales are way up and Mac shipments are up 30%. Let the Mac train roll on!
Safari has been available on Windows for less than 24 hours, and already the hacker community is apparently tearing it to shreds. The Errata Security blog has been keeping track of a few announcements across the web, including a fully disclosed 0-day exploit that Thor Larholm apparently found yesterday within two hours of the software's release (and says more are "popping up like hotcakes"). And just to be clear on the use of 0-day exploit: it means Larholm found a way to execute any piece of code on a Windows box when Safari visits a properly crafted site to successfully exploit a vulnerability on the day the vulnerability was found.
What will this mean for Safari's reputation and traction in the Windows market? I'm not really sure yet. There are any number of reasons behind Apple's decision to develop Safari for Windows, and even though a healthy pool of tech-savvy users are already tinkering with it (for better and for worse), the real results will be seen once it reaches much more of the mainstream market. One of the primary reasons (besides making it easy for Windows-based web developers to write web apps for the iPhone, of course) for SafariWin, as some are calling it, is because that tiny little search box in the upper right of a browser has become quite a revenue generator if the browser does decently in the market. When users search through that box, the browser manufacturer makes some money off the resulting ads that are displayed along with that search. Firefox reportedly made around $50-75 million last year for Mozilla because of that little search box (not bad for an open source product, eh?). You don't have to be Internet Explorer to bring home at least some bacon for your company; heck, I would bet that Opera is still in business largely due to their search box as well.
But none of these reasons will mean anything, and Safari won't generate nearly as much revenue for Apple, if it doesn't gain at least a respectable share of Windows users who are actually firing up Safari to search, browse the web, view and click on ads. But If Safari keeps getting torn apart like this within 24 hours of a release, it could gain a terrible reputation before it ever hits the radar of a crucial portion of the general public. In this new web browsing and computing world where security is everything when you talk about a browser, Safari needs to plug these exploit holes ASAP if it plans to get any farther than the fleeting front page of digg.
Since the overall Mac OS market share is still progressing quite nicely - up to 5.39 percent now - this slow in Safari's growth could be attributed to any number of factors, one of which I'm willing to bet could be all those switchers coming over and bringing Firefox with them (note: that's just my theory; I can't find numbers right now to back it up). Still, this is good news for the spread of Apple either way, as it can probably be safe to bet that the company won't be stopping the development of Safari anytime soon.
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.
These days it seems like any analyst with an axe to grind or a website to build pageviews with is taking a dig at Apple, making any claims that zing well in a headline, deliberately misinterpreting any data they can to make it look like the Mac is receding into unappreciated obscurity. Fortunately, Switch to a Mac has done their research and laid the smack down, calling out the falsifying data and proving that Apple's market share in the computer market (hooray! Finally talk of 'market share' without 'iPod' in the same sentence!) has been expanding. The article analyzes data from various market share studies, Wall Street announcements (for what those are worth), Apple's own releases and more to see through the fog and find that Apple is really doing quite well. If you need some cold hard numbers to convince family/friends/your boss that a Mac is a good purchase, head over and soak up more statistics than you can probably remember.
I've noticed a couplereports from analyst firm Gartner Research that claim Apple's pricing on the new iPods betrays an increased interest in profit margins at the expense of market share. These reports focus on the iPod nano's pricing of $199/4GB and $249/8GB as being a bit high, given their estimated materials cost of $90 and $130, respectively. Admittedly, similar players from competitors such as Creative do beat out Apple in pricing; the ZEN V 4GB player is only $159.99 - but what rulebook dictates that a higher price on one particular member of a product family (by and far the most popular member) definitively means the company doesn't care about market share?
These reports don't seem to mention anything about the nano's big brother (unless MacNN and Playlist used some sneaky cut and pasting techniques), where Apple is competing quite well: they dropped their 30GB iPod price to match that of Creative's 30GB ZEN Vision:M ($249), and the 60GB ZEN Vision:M (if you can find it on their site), is reportedly $399 - a full $50 more expensive for 20GB of less storage.
Gartner's claim that competitors like Creative and Microsoft's new Zune could start chomping at the iPod's market share, based solely on the profit margins of one member of the family, also doesn't seem to take into account the value of the full package that Apple's iPod offers, such as seamless, 'it just works' integration with a leading digital media store (maybe Gatner simply forgot that the existence of Apple's margin-thin digital store leans fairly heavily on the popularity of the iPod).
While there are plenty of consumers out there to whom a $40 difference between an iPod nano and a ZEN V can (understandably) make or break a purchase, the are still other important factors consumers can evaluate for a DAP purchase. Unfortunately, some of these elements aren't capable of being factored into an analyst's equations, but Apple is clearly still banking on their weight with a consumer's dollar.
TUAW has long agreed that Safari support is not optional, and MacDailyNews is reporting that Apple's baby browser is continuing its marketsharemarch and has snagged 3.21% - up 46% from its 2.20 share in August of '05. However, MDN also notes that, from analyzing the data from NetApplications, it appears most of Safari's growth happened during 2005's holiday season, from about September to December of '05. In fact, Safari actually peaked this year in April with 3.30%, which could be attributed to anything - dropping Safari for Firefox being the most likely, since a lot of switchers probably use Windows/Firefox-heavy sites that might not play well with Safari - yet.
Either way, (as a reminder) this represents a strong upward trend of Safari use, which is also a strong indication of Mac use, since the browser is Mac OS X-only (well, mostly). March on Safari, march on.
Michael Dell, amidst lackluster growth reports and a dismal earnings warning, has fired a couple more potshots across Apple's bow. During a recent Q&A, Dell's CEO cited MTV's new URGE music service as one reason why he is skeptical of the iTMS market dominance over the next ten to twenty years. I guess we'll have to see how well Microsoft irons out their Plays for Sure, er URGE, er Zune project (indecisive, anyone?), and how upset users get when the Zune crashes with a BSOD right in the middle of a wireless purchase, accidentally charging their credit cards for 5 additional albums that weren't even in their shopping cart.
Going further, Mr. Dell also bragged about Dell's market share statistics, stating that Apple isn't a threat because they haven't broken into the list of top five market share holders. All debates as to whether Apple is trying to, or even should, dominate the world with their shiny computers aside, Michael is only half right: Apple's market share in the U.S. has actually jumped high enough to rank them 4th in PC manufacturers (again, in the U.S.).
How many times do we have to tell you this, Mr. Dell? Insulting Apple won't make them open up OS X for you.
AppleInsider writes about a new Gartner report that states overall Mac market share has decreased in the first quarter of this year compared to the same quarter last year. However these findings conflict with an earlier news article by ZDNet based on earlier research by Gartner which suggested that worldwide Mac market share had actually increased slightly. MacRumors.com puts the numbers together:
U.S. Mac Market Share 1Q 2005: 3.8% 1Q 2006 (ZDNet): 3.5% 1Q 2006 (AI): 3.6%
So depending on which report you believe, Apple could have gained or lost overall marketshare across the world. Both articles state that Apple has lost market share in the U.S. The only thing that's really clear is that Mac sales have obviously been lackluster in the first quarter when compared to the rest of the industry.
That's not entirely surprising considering that only Intel Mac that was available throughout the first quarter was the Intel iMac. The MacBook Pro didn't ship until mid-February, the Intel Mac mini wasn't released until late February and the MacBook was released just under three weeks ago. It's remarkable that the Mac market share has managed to stay as high as it is considering that half the Apple line-up hadn't made the transisition to Intel CPUs for much of the quarter. We've got to ask though, where did that 6.6% U.S. Mac marketshare that was reported last year go?
That's up 76 percent from last year. And we're still
talking about a 3.19% browser market share, according to
Net Applications. Of course, as stated on the Surfin' Safari blog, the hope (for Apple) is to see more WebKit-based
browsers out there too. You may recall Nokia's S60 web browser is just such a
beast. Whether or not a cell phone browser will make a dent in WebKit's market share? I'll let you decide that one. In
the end, I can really only hope all this great market share business is going to make some developers out there (you
know who you are) work a little harder to make their websites Safari-compatible. List the worst Safari offenders in the
comments, and just ignore Google, where everything is
beta. Besides, it could be worse: you could be using Opera.
The numbers are preliminary, but Gartner's analysis of the US personal computer market for the 1st quarter of 2008 shows some remarkable market expansion year-over-year for Apple. With a 6.6% share of the US market (behind Dell, HP and Acer), Apple shipped over a million Macs in the quarter and had 32% growth in unit sales, far outpacing the 3% growth of the overall market and blowing past sales leader Dell's otherwise stellar 15% growth.
Currently in lead in the UK, Nokia may be given a run for its money as the iPhone is set to be the number one mobile web browsing device. According to 
Over at 
In a post cleverly titled 
Yesterday's 
These days it seems like any analyst with an axe to grind or a website to build pageviews with is taking a dig at Apple, making 
I've noticed a 
TUAW has long agreed that 
Michael Dell, amidst lackluster growth reports and a dismal earnings warning, has fired a couple more potshots across Apple's bow. During a recent Q&A, Dell's CEO cited MTV's new URGE music service as one reason why he is skeptical of the iTMS market dominance over the next ten to twenty years. I guess we'll have to see how well Microsoft irons out their 
AppleInsider writes about
That's up 76 percent from last year. And we're still
talking about a 3.19% browser market share, 
