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U.S. Mac sales outpacing Street expectations; up 39% in January and February

Monday, March 15, 2010 · 4:07 pm · 20 Comments

“In a report to clients issued Monday afternoon, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster — a long-time Apple booster — found much to cheer about in the NPD Group’s U.S. retail sales data for January and February,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.

MacDailyNews Take: Munster is not an “Apple booster.” He’s an analyst who’s been bullish on the company for a long time. In other words: Munster has been right for a long time and, looking at the numbers, remains so to this day.

Elmer-DeWitt continues, “He points to two trends in particular. Mac unit sales are up. An average of 39% year over year for the first two months of the March quarter, which according to Munster translates into sales of somewhere between 2.8 and 2.9 million Macs for the full quarter. The Street, he says, is looking for Mac sales to be up only about 22%. [Also], iPod unit sales are up. After a series of 16 consecutive monthly declines, iPod sales are up 7% year over year for the last two months, suggesting total iPod sales of 9 to 10 million for the March quarter. The consensus is closer to 9 million.”

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Comment Feed

20 Comments

KeepHopeAlive

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:13 pm · Reply

But we haven’t heard from Shaw Wu…?
kirkgray

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:19 pm · Reply

We need to increase funding for math education — these rounding errors are getting out of hand.
x

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:23 pm · Reply

… or my mother
Arnold Ziffel

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:25 pm · Reply

KeepHopeAlive,

I thought his name was Whaw Shu.
macromancer

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:33 pm · Reply

“We need to increase funding for math education — these rounding errors are getting out of hand.”

Classic post!
Stephen

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:33 pm · Reply

Impressive numbers considering the MBP, Pro and Air are in dire need of refreshes.
Big Als MBP

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:37 pm · Reply

@ Stephan,

“Impressive numbers considering the MBP, Pro and Air are in dire need of refreshes.”

So am I.
m159

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:41 pm · Reply

Those Macs soon to ship pre-loaded with iSearch™.
Monger

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:52 pm · Reply

Apple is pretty much self-boosting, I’d say.
Rich Apple person

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 4:58 pm · Reply

Build a better product and people will come. Apple has learned this and now Ford is learning this as well. There is no way that an HP or Dell PC can equal the brand experience of owning a Mac and working on OS X. However I am a bit concerned that OS X is in serious need of an update. Mail is woefully outdated and does not integrate well with address book, Safari needs better integration with plug ins and Apple needs to integrate social media into a LOT more apps. But with all this OS X is still miles and miles ahead of anything Windows
Quad Core

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 5:37 pm · Reply

“But we haven’t heard from Shaw Wu” or anyone with a middle initial of ‘X’
Jubei

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 5:45 pm · Reply

We haven’t heard from the three stooges yet either. Maybe they are collaborating so that their stupidity will be 3x greater.
Gabriel

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 5:50 pm · Reply

Interesting that Mr. Glue-DeWitless feels the need to call Munster an “Apple booster”. Perhaps he’s just one of the very few analysts out there actually earning his paycheck by analyzing things accurately?
Spark

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 6:05 pm · Reply

@Gabriel
True. I’m glad MDN called De-Witt on that. It’s amazing how little journalists pay attention to the words they use.

Speaking of Apple Mail: Who else is bugged with the search component in Mail. It could be a lot smarter. For instance: if I am in my INBOX and a type a name in the search box, Mail ought to know that 99 out of 100 time I want to search the “FROM” field. Conversely, if I’m in the SENT box, Mail should know that my searches are going to normally be for the “TO” field and default to that. Mail almost never is preselected for the most obvious search choices and it bugs me. I’ve written to Apple to suggest this as a way to polish the app, but hasn’t happened yet.
justsayin

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 6:10 pm · Reply

@kirkgray
“We need to increase funding for math education — these rounding errors are getting out of hand.”

Math education grants here:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx
Excellent News

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 6:38 pm · Reply

This is great news to those of us who hope trends like this will continue – it gives hope that Apple hasn’t turned itself into a phone and gadget company.

The future is serious personal computing – not hobbies.
disposableidentity

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 7:37 pm · Reply

“Apple needs to integrate social media into a LOT more apps.”

Agreed. I think Apple should do something like LinkedIn (but better) and integrate it right into Address Book.

With tens of millions of users, it would be as big as LinkedIn from the get go. Built into Address Book, I’d actually use it.
iworker

Monday, March 15, 2010 - 8:27 pm · Reply

Great news but I’d also like to see world sales as well. Also I’d also like to see a comparison with overall market sales of other major manufacturers as well. Stand alone figures are just a bit too incomplete to give an accurate overall analysis.
Chas

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 12:53 am · Reply

But we haven’t heard from Zune Tang

=:~)
Tom

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 12:07 pm · Reply

Munster has been wrong on Apple many times, especially with too optimistic iPhone forecasts.