Stan Beer
Tuesday, 27 November 2007 11:36
Opinion and Analysis
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Recently a long time PC user friend dropped a bombshell on me - he had a "c-change" and bought an iMac. A sophisticated Windows user who works for one of the world's largest PC software companies (not Microsoft), he told me he couldn't be bothered with Windows any more, didn't like Vista. What's more, he said many of his colleagues at the office had also gone Mac. What's going on here? Recent Mac market share statistics are quite revealing.
For a start, we must define market share. The way
that some market analyst groups, such as Gartner and IDC, define it,
which is based on new shipments of computers, can be misleading.
If we were to go by global shipments of personal computers as tabulated
by IDC for the September quarter of 2007, then Macs had a 3.2% share of
the units shipped. That is a marked improvement on the 2.5% figure for
the March quarter but still less than one fifth the number of units
shipped by HP and less than a quarter of the units shipped by Dell.
However, the more interesting story of personal computing market share lays in the installed base rather than new shipments.
PCs are among the most disposable large ticket consumer products in
history. Quite often purchases of new PCs are made to replace obsolete
systems just three years old.
Macs tend to have greater longevity than PCs and don't end up in
landfill as readily because they have better resale value. Of course,
plenty of new Macs are being bought to replace old Macs. However,
there is evidence to show that a significant proportion of new Macs
being bought are for new users. What's more, the sales of new Macs is
growing faster than the sales of new PCs.
How do we know this? It's really not too difficult to discern when
nearly every PC and Mac user on the planet is connected to the
Internet. Here at iTWire for instance, we know from our logs that
somewhere around 6.5% of our visitors use the Safari browser and more
than 7% use Mac OS (obviously some Mac users prefer another browser to
Safari).
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