Apple Reaches 12% Market Share In U.S. Notebooks 377
bonch writes "Apple's U.S. notebook market share has doubled to 12% after shipping 1.33 million Macs in the quarter. Apple also shipped 8.11 million iPods, topping analyst estimates, for a net income of $472 million. Remember when Apple was dying?" From the article: "The iPod shipments appeared to calm investors worried that growth in that red-hot business was slowing and Apple's results topped what analysts had said was a conservative forecast. Shares of Apple were down some 24 percent since early May. 'Apple looked good,' said Jane Snorek, technology analyst with First American Funds. 'The PC numbers were great, too.'"
Re:Stock (Score:3, Interesting)
If they ever get a true 6G iPod out the door (and not the 5.5G that is being talked about) I think the market will respond favorably as there is a lot of pent up demand. Its funny how the markets and consumers judge apple's innovation by the latest iPod and that perception has somewhat stalled, particularly as MS makes noise about their new player.
But if a 6G ever comes out and integrates movie rentals, TV shows and music along with a Mac Media PC things could shift. I think Apple is almost in 'quiet' mode as they get ready for the next iteration.
Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Competition. Microsoft has been lazy because they dominated the market for so long. If Apple becomes a serious competitor in the business world (where they're just really beginning to scratch the surface) then MS will feel the pinch and be forced to raise the quality of their product. We've seen nothing but good results from the CPU and video card races and price wars.
Realism. As Apple becomes more mainstream and falls into the hands of less competent users, we're going to see a lot of the myths about Apple go away. Its vaunted security comes at the price of ease of use, and I think we'll be seeing a lot of people wondering why they can't do on their Mac what they could do on their Dell...the answer is because they shouldn't have done it on the Dell to begin with, but that's beside the point. I've long said that for Apple to make a play for market dominance they'll have to dumb down their OS the way Microsoft did, and that will make them vulnerable, the same as Microsoft.
Less hypocrisy. Right now I see people on just about every tech site that will tear into Microsoft for packaging a browser with Windows, but praise Apple for packaging an OS with every PC, and dozens of applications with every OS. If Apple takes a large chunk of the market, we're going to have to hold them to the same standard we do Microsoft, meaning that we should be demanding an end to their anticompetitive practices of bundling their own software.
Not that surprised (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Shipped? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stock (Score:5, Interesting)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y [yahoo.com]
Notice that every year except 2002, the stock price started accelerating after WWDC [wikipedia.org]. Apple stock, therefore, is usually flat or slightly downward trending for the first half of the year. The stock market is heavily influenced by whatever Jobs' latest reality distortion [wikipedia.org] is.
I would also argue that, in addition to the seasonal fluctuation's effect, Apple stock was highly overvalued at the end of last year on half-baked speculation that apple would somehow conquer the entire PC market because of its move to intel. What we're seeing right now is that unbridled enthusiasm getting reigned in. If the apple desktops sell as well as the macbooks have, I expect we'll see the price jumping up again after August, which of course will dissipate by the end of the year, rinse, lather, repeat.
Re:Apple Dell (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Defective hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
The less people over there that are unemployed...
The more demand there are for workers there...
The more those workers are payed.
Economics like this actually works. I was reading recently in Time or Newsweek that India is outsourcing some of the jobs that have been outsourced to them. Indian jobs are moving to China and Vietnam because the demand for workers in India has increased the wages there.
good for everone, especially linux! (Score:3, Interesting)
With firefox and the fact that most people use the web alot for everything, it makes a transition from windows to linux on the desktop easier.
Re:Good Products = Success (Score:5, Interesting)
You do realize that people have been saying this kind of thing since at least 2002?
When a product becomes this popular, it is almost impossible to dislodge it, and it becomes self-perpetuating. I don't know where this idea started up that the more popular a product is, the less chance there is of its continued success - common sense should dictate that the opposite is true. Successful products tend to stay successful and build upon that success. That's the case with the iPod.
I don't see any trends in the industry that would indicate any reversal of that success, and that includes MS's Zune. The iPod continues to define what a portable media player is and should be in the minds of consumers, and as long as everybody else is following Apple's lead, there will be no "reversal" of the iPod's fortunes.
People don't stop buying products just because they're popular. In fact, the opposite is true. People stop buying products because better products become available at a cheaper price with a marketing message that appeals to them. How you define "better" becomes complicated when you're talking an entire ecosystem like the one that surrounds the iPod, but I think that you should listen to what consumers are saying by their actions, and what they're saying is that there is nothing better for them right now than the iPod.
Long story short, you can expect iPod sales to continue accelerating, despite what the naysayers have been saying for at least the last four years.
Re:Defective hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know why labor protectionists are determined to raise trade barriers (fair trade?), but I think it is rooted in racism.
Re:market share will increase... (Score:3, Interesting)
If Apple;s marketshare culd top out around 10%, it'd be prefect. Large enough that software developers would be hesitant to ignore the market, but small enough so Apple could keep up the pace of improving the OS's foundation rather than focusing as much on backward compatibility as Microsoft.
Or, they could innovate a way to retain backwards compatibility while still providing innovation for those who want to move forward. I'd be happy if they grabbed about 30% of the market. While Windows dropped to about the same. That would guarantee everyone competed and innovated and customers would win.
*Retail* Marketshare (Score:5, Interesting)
What Mr. CFO did not do, was define exactly what the bold-faced phrase in his quote actually means. I accuse him of jockying with the statistics. I suspect that the "U.S. retail notebook market" excludes Internet-direct sellers, like Dell, and probably corporate sales as well. I would imagine this is looking at only brick-and-mortar (or glass in Apples' case) retail stores.
Re:Stock (Score:3, Interesting)
If you do work for Apple, could you do me a favor and suggest making a camera-less MacBook a BTO option?
Apple lost one potential sale-- me. My place of employment does not allow cameras of any sort on the premises.
Re:Defective hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stock (Score:3, Interesting)
market share (Score:3, Interesting)
So now that I've logged some time on a Mac, doing the types of things I used to do on my windows box, I can honestly say it was worth every penny of the "premium" to own an Apple machine vs. a Dell/HP/Compaq. The hardware is beautifully designed, the included software is actually USEFUL, and OS X is to die for (a geek's dream come true).
While I'm head and shoulders above the "average computer user" (read: drooling moron), I'm a fairly typical Slashdot reader. If the Mac lineup is compelling enough to make me switch, there has to be hundreds of people reading this that are thinking of switching too. My advice... do it, you won't be sorry.
Re:*Retail* Marketshare (Score:3, Interesting)
2005 World Notebook Market Share (estimate [digitimes.com])
Re:Good (Score:1, Interesting)
Completely different, and if you don't see that please stick with Vista.
And seriously, WTF is with these automated post prevention pictures?? I can't even read these things myself!
Re:Shipped? (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone in the industry reports units shipped. The way independent retailers work, a manufacturer selling
through them can't nail down a 'sold to end user' number for months with any solidity.
Jobs' big concrete business contribution when he returned to Apple was to smash the old tempting retail pipeline that
could get stuffed and which Apple *had* stuffed to their own delusion and eventual distress a few times in the early to
mid 90's. Apple no longer has independent Apple dealers worth speaking of, and their own stores are kept very thin on
inventory. The also sdell a large fraction of their systems directly through the online store, where 'shipped' is identical to 'sold'
The original comparison to Sony stuffing the pipeline with PSP's points up a key reason that Apple can't play that trick
any more: Apple's product cycle on the Mac side is too fast for a stuffing event to wind out before the stuffed hardware is
discontinued.
Re:I know the parent's joking, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's customer services is good, and once you get a machine made completely out of good parts they really can't be beat, but I can't see how this high defect rate is more profitable than just testing the fucking things more thoroughly at the factory. They must have very low cashflow for that to be the case I imagine.
Re:Good news everyone! (Score:5, Interesting)