Is the whole world having a "c-change" and going Mac?

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 27 November 2007 10:36

Opinion and Analysis

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). CONTINUED