Apple gaining North American notebook share
Apple's MacBook is taking share from competitors in North America.
(Credit: Apple)Apple's picking up notebook market share faster than any of its competitors in its home continent, according to DisplaySearch.
Market research figures released Wednesday have Apple's share of the North American market for notebooks, up from 6.6 percent to 10.6 percent in the second quarter of this year, compared to last year. Every other major notebook maker's market share was either flat or down, compared to the previous year, with market leaders Hewlett-Packard and Dell picking up just 0.3 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively, and Acer's share plunging 4.2 percent, including Gateway's totals.
The second calendar quarter of the year is generally a slow one, at least compared to the third and fourth quarters in the PC-buying year. Apple watcher Piper Jaffray thinks that the company will sell roughly 2.8 million to 2.9 million Macs during the current (third) quarter, an increase of 29 percent to 34 percent.
And that's without any new Macs being released during this current quarter, which earlier in the year seemed like a given. Now we expect new MacBooks in October, which could give Apple a boost as it heads into the holiday shopping season.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Back in my day... we thought we were stylin with a $50 Walkman cassette radio. Who'd have ever thought students would shell out $200-400 for a music player and/or phone??!?!?!
More likely: the people that can afford to buy a computer at all are much more susceptible to the "buy cool" pressure than those that cannot afford to buy any computer. There are fewer people that have that kind of dough lying around...the ones that have that money are more likely to buy to impress...
Unfortunately, CNet doesn't let you delete poorly-thought-out posts...
Unless you were living in a cave for the past years or so we are in a economic downtime. Apple being a consumer-first company is often not affected by such downtime as quickly as enterprise-first company. Let me explain. Companies like Morgan Stanley, for example, who are currently under stress for many many months will look at their current financial situation and determine than an upgrade circle (new desktop, new server, new laptop) can be deferred to save me. So companies like Dell, HP, etc feel the pitch much much earlier than others. Consumer-first company will eventually feel, but usually, a quarter or 2 after when jobs are being lost, and salary are cut. So to make a valid and complete judgment, we need to wait for the next 6 months.
Laptops give buyers the opportunity to try OsX without a full committment, granted that they still have their desktops available and are not replacing machines.
People are just sick of bloat and malware so is ditching Windows.
Apple is getting double digit growth rates, while those OEM's that hawk Windows are getting 0% growth at best.
You do realize that MS fudges their numbers and the linux installs on most laptops get counting in MS's favor, don't you?
The fact is that Windows market share(and their browser, and just about everything else) is dropping, and has been for some time. Windows overall is maybe 80% of the desktop, they are the minority in the server room and is losing share in the enterprise. Linux and OSX are growing.
Spin it all you want, but MS is shrinking, with no signs of reversing it. In fact, the rate of decline is increasing.
You do realize that Apple makes a bigger cash profit off that one Mac than MSFT can make off of 20 Vista licenses, right? (and the ratio is even more in Apple's favor once you start talking about OEM bulk license costs...)
Probably explains why Apple has more money stashed in the bank than MSFT does right now... ;)
- by RampantAndroid October 14, 2008 5:35 PM PDT
- What the hell do you people do that your laptop only lasts a year? Take it in the shower with you?! If you're a gamer, fine. Laptops won't last long against modern games...but the term "gaming laptop" is a oxymoron if you're spending under 3,000 USD on it. If you're using it for light gaming, Office, maybe compiling some code (since school projects are never very large) or surfing the internet, the system can last ages. I've still got a single core Celeron lying around that runs XP...the thing is ancient, but still works if I need something in a pinch.
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(30 Comments)So tell me, why do your laptops last a year? Unless you regularly drop it while it is turned on, I don't see how that works.
As someone else pointed out, it is hard to compare the sales of Windows to a Mac - and I'll bet that the ability to run Windows on a Mac is helping those sales...I'll also bet that most comments on this article are people who enjoy Macs and are overly enthusiastic about them (dare I drop the term fanboy?)...which may explain why the SECOND someone isn't praising Apple, they're called an idiot. And furthermore, the question is: how quickly does advertising work? Microsoft is getting its ad campaigns going now, so how long until we see the results of those ads? A month? 3 months? 6? A year? Microsoft did not advertise for the longest time...leaving apple do its ads without any real response...which I am going to bet is largely why we see this growth. The people buy what they are told is cool, which is why the iPhone sells...people I talk to who have them say "its an OK phone, I hate the lack of a keyboard, it has its problems. 3G works sometimes. It's battery time dies often."...then why do you use it? Go buy an HTC Touch or something, it does things almost as well, except it is reliable, and has good battery life....