“Charles Wolf, an analyst at Needham [has] posted an investment note on Apple which points out that Apple’s Mac shipments have grown faster than the PC market for the past 20 quarters (that’s five years in normal money),” Charles Arthur reports for The Guardian.
Apple’s Mac “shipments to business were up by 66% (while the overall market grew 4.5%); to government by 155.6% (v 2.3%); to the home market by 21.6% (v a 6.5% shrinkage),” Arthur reports. “Why are all these home users, business users, government users getting Macs? One argument is that with Apple, you’re starting from a small base, so any increase is going to look dramatic. And yet something is going on. My analysis of Apple’s sales figures and the numbers from Gartner and IDC shows that in the second quarter of 2010, Apple hit 4% of the whole PC market for the first time in more than ten years; it hasn’t happened since 1998, and I can’t find the time before that when it was true.”
“[Beyond the iPod, iPhone and, now, iPad “halo effect” on Macs, “one argument is that the increase in Mac sales (in the last quarter, at just under 5m, a level it has been nudging for the past three quarters) is due to governments and businesses getting interested in developing apps for those iPhones, so they’re buying one to be able to run the iPhone Software Development Kit,” Arthur reports. “And home users? Quite probably they are the ones who are trading up (or as Wolf puts it, exerting an outward shift in the demand curve).”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]