Slashdot Log In
Apple Reaches 12% Market Share In U.S. Notebooks
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jul 21, 2006 10:36 AM
from the growing-tree dept.
from the growing-tree dept.
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.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
With apologies to Stephen Fry... (Score:5, Funny)
John
I know the parent's joking, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think about it, Apple's laptops really are the top 12%. I've gone through two laptops in twice as many years, and having worked on/with a ridiculous variety of brands & models, I've finally come to realize that all laptops are crap. Not only that, all laptop manufacturers are crap, too.
Except, of course, Apple, and possibly IBM/Lenovo. Apple makes decent machines, only slightly overpriced, and when they break (as practically every laptop I've ever encountered has done within two years of use, some spectacularly so) Apple has a history of going to great lengths to fix their mistakes. Remember the iBooks with faulty motherboards? How many of those did Apple replace with newer models (models with double the RAM and disk space)?
They have their faults, and their mistakes, but by-and-large I'd say Apple is one of the few laptop manufacturers whom I'd trust well enough to buy from.
Oh, and those spectacular failures?Good Products = Success (Score:5, Insightful)
With the iPods, they seem to be unstoppable. No matter what other companies offer, people want the iPod + iTunes more. With laptops, they make a sexier product than almost anyone else. Even the die-hard Windows folks I know are buying Apple laptops, running OS X + Windows via BootCamp [apple.com] or via Parallels [parallels.com].
To top it off, they do all this with higher profit margins than any other company. It's no surprise that their market share, and their stock, are both on the rise.
Re:Good Products = Success (Score:5, Informative)
Each time I walk by his desk and see one monitor with the OSX desktop and another with his win desktop up, I wish for the imminent doom of my dell.
Years back this would never have been the case. The only place I ever saw macs before were the graphic design/advertising folks. And they couldn't run the apps we had to run.
Re:Good Products = Success (Score:5, Funny)
See that little fan in the back? Put a little screwdriver in there and run the laptop for a few hours. I "smell" a Macbook Pro in your future!
Re:Good Products = Success (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Apple Dell (Score:5, Funny)
*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:Shipped? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Stock (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a Mac fan, so much so that I work for Apple (though I am not involved in any way with the notebooks)
The whole notion of Mac overpriced-ness used to be a real issue, and at the higher-ends of Apple's products still is. Performance-wise the MacBook Pro still offers precious little for what some el-cheapo notebook mfg's are doing for the same price. But have yhou taken a look at the MacBook lately?
Let's step back and evaluate what the average user wants. Tech geeks like us may care about whether we're getting an ATI Mobile X1600 vs. an Intel GMA950, because we actually use that bit of performance, but the vast majority of users do not. Throw the average emailing, IM-ing, music-listening user in front of a MacBook Pro vs. a MacBook vs. the fastest Windows laptop in the west and they can't tell the difference in performance.
What they CAN tell is that:
A) The MacBook has a nifty little camera! Beats clipping a monstrosity haphazardly to the top of your LCD (yes I am aware some PC laptops have it, but the majority of casual user-level laptops still do not)
B) It's so small and simple! I have a Toshiba laptop at home, and even though it technically is about the same size as a MacBook Pro, it doesn't feel that way. When I handle a MacBook Pro, it feels smaller, it feels lighter, it feels overall easier to work with. Why? Because it's a fucking rectangle, whereas my Toshiba has plastic flap, hinges, plugs, trims, and other needless protrusions that make it look like a bad prop from a B-sci-fi movie.
C) It's not tacky. Some manufacturers have taken this hint. I'm rather a fan of Dell's new case designs, but a lot of manufacturers (Toshiba, I'm looking at you... or hell, the high-end Dells still have a lesson to learn) are still working under the whole tackiness routine. No, we don't need any fricking chrome trim. No, we don't need an LED on the front showing me EVERY POSSIBLE THING THE MACHINE IS DOING, etc etc. A lot of users are just dying for something simple, and Mac gives you that.
D) The hardware simply works better. To remove the battery from a MacBook I just turn this little knob, and the battery pops out. To remove said battery from my Toshiba I have to flip this little plastic switch on the bottom (which feels very flimsy btw), and then pull this other switch thingy to release the clamp, and ALSO I have to pull on the battery at the same time. Is it especially difficult? No, but the Mac experience is infinitely better. It's the little things about the hardware that counts: I can check my battery life without turning on the machine, there's no lid latch to break, there's no power cord to kill your motherboard with (it does happen a LOT, I know many people who ripped the power connector assembly right from the mobo just by tripping over the power cord), I don't have to pay an arm and leg to get bluetooth... need I continue?
E) MacOS. The average schmoe is sick and tired of being thrown jargon by Windows. They cope with it, but feel more at home in the more intuitive aspects of OSX. Everything works out of the box, and the UI is never cluttered with inane BS (Windows Media Player, step up). For a personal average user, he/she does not have to install ANYTHING to do the things he/she does everyday (except the office suite, which doesn't come with a Mac). Dialogs are verbed and more understandable, each button's purpose and actions are clearly communicated (do you really know what the "OK" button does in Windows?), so it's all quite simple to understand in comparison to Windows' bloated interface. Hell, I know average non-techies who figured out how to change their resolution in MacOS, when they didn't have a clue how to do it in Windows.
Users are not interested in paying for hardware, then software, then more software. The average user wants a full solution that works right from the get-go. They want to use hardware that they barely have to learn, and OS that looks as good as it runs (WinXP's default theme gives me nightmares), a
Re:Stock (Score:5, Insightful)
The real issue with Mac Pricing, is the "premium" on the premium versions. Frankly I think the base MacBook and MacBook pro aren't too badly priced. But the jumps for the models up, and lack of customization is baffling.
e.g. I'd like a base macbook with a superdrive, except that I can't. Superdrive is not an option on the base. So I have to move up to the middle model. $200 bucks to move from a combo drive to a superdrive? (Sure it comes with a slight cpu bump, but I don't care about that.)
and the next model up from that? Another $200 for what? 20 mor GB of HD! Ridiculous!! (Oh and its black plastic)
Worse, I'd like to potentially run parallels on it, and would like to start with 1GB of ram on one chip, so that I can upgrade to 2GB down the road easily. Nope can't do it. I have to shell out $500 bucks for 2GB RAM. (Which is itself ridiculous for RAM)
Why isn't 1GB of RAM on one chip an option? (It is with the MacBook Pros, using the same CPUs!!)
Ditto the HD upgrades... $250 for 120GB to upgrade from a $60. That is again, ridiculous. You can get a 60 for ~110, and 120 for around ~200. So the upgrade should cost around ~100, why am I being asked to fork out $250?
The base model at 1100 is pretty decent, but to put in the big HD, 2GB of ram, and a superdrive will run another:
$500 to upgrade to 2GB RAM
$250 to upgrade to 120GB HD
$2oo to upgrade to model with Superdrive
----
$950 bucks
That's easily double what those upgrades are worth.
stop the madness (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the point of all these comparisons? There are so many variables that such things are completely useless. You don't compare a BMW and a Chevy on horsepower, torque, size, and weight alone. I'm not making any value judgments here -- the Dell can be the BMW for all I care -- But my point is there are dozens of issues to make comparisons on, not just the four or five biggest numbers.
Re:Stock (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Did you read the article? iPod sales are up 32 percent year over year with sales of 8.1 million for the quarter. If there's "pent-up demand" there, then I can't wait to see what happens when the 6G actually is released.
The moral of the story is people keep buying iPods, and the pace continues to accelerate. There is no slowdown, despite what everybody seems to predict every single quarter. I think it's time people finally realize there really is no meaningful competition for Apple in music players and there never will be. (And yes, I've heard of the Zune.) It's going to take a paradigm shift in the way people listen to music to dislodge the iPod, but the current war is already won.
Re:Stock (Score:5, Insightful)
There must be an awful lot of Mac fans considering they shipped more than 4.5 million of them this quarter (and it's not a new model).
As anybody who actually goes and runs the numbers finds out, Macs are similar to Dell pricing. Sometimes a little more expensive, often a bit cheaper. Apple simply doesn't sell a bargain basement junk model that Dell will sell you if you want. Most other PC retailers are more expensive than Dell.
Macs tend to stay in operation longer than Windows machines. Macs have higher resale value than Windows machines. Doesn't sound like the entire Mac community is dumping their computers and upgrading at the drop of a hat, does it? Sure, there are some. Those would be the equivalent of the people who buy the highest end Alienware PCs.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Could you provide an example of something, here? Because this really makes no sense. Give an example of something people can do on a Dell that they can't on a Mac, that is unavailable because of security restrictions in Mac OS (as opposed to the appropriate application simply not being ported yet).
What ease of use has OS X given up for security? I can't think of anything. Have you ever used Mac OS, or are you just saying that because you think it sounds plausible?
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't get how an OS can be easier to use than Windows and still at least as powerful as Linux (I'll argue moreso, because you don't spend 2 weeks setting up your OS for your hardware (wireless cards, 3D cards, I'm looking at you)). Or that having to know how to deal with mundane setup & maintenence tasks on computers is a fault of the _OS_ vendor. Computers are supposed to simplify our lives, not give us more shit to worry about.
Seriously, why can't people understand this? Why can't they understand that whatever 'overpricedness' they feel macs have doesn't matter compared to the hours & days they save not putting up with the bullshit of Windows & Linux? Yes, I said & Linux.
Hell, most Linux users still bitch about which 20 year old text editor's better: vi or emacs. Here's a hint: neither, they're both antiquidated pieces of shit. Mice are useful, _especially_ when text editing. They're response: write your own! Linux comes with dev tools and the shitty apps are open source! My response: fuck you! I've got real work to do, and I'm not wasting my time fixing brain-dead software that 'scratched the itch' of some jackass who jerks off on Lisp macros.
People, including me, love macs because they leave you the fuck alone and let you get your work done. You don't have to make sacrifices. How hard is this for people to understand? It's my fault, really. Lots of people come to slashdot to jerk off on how much computer knowledge they have, and the idea that a computer doesn't need them to be experts destroys their purpose in life. I guess I should understand that.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I checked, Microsoft was convicted of being an illegal monopoly, Apple wasn't. Different rules apply to each category.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
When someone goes to court and testifies that Apple intentionally made tweaks to their OS specifically to break Adobe Photoshop so they can sell more copies of Aperature, then we'll talk.
I'm referring to the "DOS isn't done until 1..2..3 won't run." saying that came out during the Microsoft anti-trust trial.
Also, when Apple steals some else's code to put in their own product we'll talk.
I'm referring to the incident where a consultant who had access to QuickTime For Windows was caught giving that source code to Microsoft where it ended up as part of their "Video for Windows" product. The related lawsuit was only dropped when Microsoft threatened to cancel Office for Mac.
I can't think of any incident where Apple has mis-treated third party vendors. The closest one I can think of is the guy who created Frontier(I think I'm remebering it right) which was a thing that was similar to AppleScript in some ways. He released it right before Apple introduced AppleScript which of course killed his potential market and he crief foul. The thing was that obviously Apple had spent years on AppleScript and it was a superior solution to Frontier, so despite his claim I don't think they stole his idea. It was just bad timing (for him).
Even when they were starting iTunes, Apple approached the various small 3rd party vendors who were doing stuff with MP3 and offered to buy them and given them jobs at Apple. The ones who didn't accept the offer got steamrolled by iTunes, but how is that Apple's fault?
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood this. What is wrong with bundling software? Here's a hint for you, if windows didn't come with IE or [Other Bundled Browser] people would find it awfuly hard to go dowload the latest version of firefox. Budling software is not wrong, evil or bad. Making the bundled software hard or impossible to remove IS. And please note there is a distiction between the bundled software, and the actual back end technologies (i.e. Safari != WebKit)
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
I never understood this. What is wrong with bundling software? Here's a hint for you, if windows didn't come with IE or [Other Bundled Browser] people would find it awfuly hard to go dowload the latest version of firefox.
You're mistaken. The law makes it illegal for Microsoft to bundle a browser with their OS. It is not illegal for Dell or Gateway or HP to bundle Windows and IE or Windows and Firefox or Linux and Opera. End users don't have to download anything.
Taking that choice away from Dell and HP and Gateway or in any way using their monopoly to make sure IE is the one they choose over better alternatives is what is illegal.
Budling software is not wrong, evil or bad.
Assuming one of the bundled products is a monopoly, then yes bundling is bad. It bypasses the free market and the advantages it brings. Have you ever noticed that most people use IE, even though it has long been inferior in many obvious ways to Firefox? This is because IE is bundled. Thus most people never have a chance to vote with their dollars for the best browser. Now if each computer manufacturer had to choose on even footing which one to pre-install, what would happen? Some would choose one browser and some a different browser. Say Gateway decided to bill their machines as "more secure than Dell" because they pre-installed Firefox. At this point consumers buy computers and tell others and eventually the market decides which is better for different parts of that market. And here's the important part. Because consumers are making this decision, both the Firefox team and the IE team are motivated to make a better product to compete. Consumers gain choice and innovation.
When a monopoly bundles something with that monopoly, capitalism breaks. All the economic models show consolidation of sales, rising prices, and falling quality. If you have no competition why lower prices or work to improve? For this reason it is illegal.
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.
Re:Defective hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, in the case of Mexico, we actively work to fuck up their politics so that they never recover, and we can keep exploiting them.
But the most significant aspect in many cases is pollution. A big part of the cost savings is that these companies can go someplace they can pollute all they want. When the country becomes more wealthy and the laws change, they pull out, sell most of their equipment for scrap and ship it out of the country so no one can use it, and leave behind a big dirty smoking hole full of pollutants.