“Last quarter the iPad had unit growth of 166% with revenue growth of 146%. The iPad is selling more than twice the (also rapidly growing) Mac,” Horace Dediu reports for Asymco.
“A big reason the Mac is still growing is that it now consists of 74% portables and the MacBook Air and Pro products are still largely unmatched and have a near monopoly in their target price,” Dediu reports. “But more importantly the iPad and the Mac both outgrew the PC market. Taken as OS X vs. Windows, the growth rates were 27.7% vs. 2.5%. If iOS is included along OS X, Apple grew its ‘computer’ shipments at a rate of 99%.”
Dediu reports, “Last quarter’s 16 million OS X and iOS tablets brought it into second place behind the 16.6 million PCs that HP sold. That was enough to give Apple 15% share vs. 15.7% for HP. Over the last three years Apple has gained nearly 12 points of percentage of share.”
Read more in the full article here.
This quarter Asus and others started to offer MBA clones. The reviews say that the keyboard and touchpad are lousy, but otherwise competition on hardware level is already high.
Back when Apple announced its unibody manufacturing process in 2008, it said that they are years ahead of competition. Obviously, they understood even then that these years of competitive advantage will someday pass.
So lets see how well Apple will fight the phase when unibody manufacturing process is already accessible to competition. I mean new advances in manufacturing and/or price shifts.
That said, Apple’s hardware-software tie will stay unmatched, so competition will be lagging in user experience anyway, even without exclusivity for hardware manufacturing process that Apple has had in the latest years.
Yet the Asus still costs a bit more than the MBA.
Like fighting the iPad, the OEMs will have a hard time matching component pricing in this category for a while.
Actually, “similarly configured” 13″ Asus costs cheaper than 13″ MBA.
11″ is still in favour of Apple, though.
But it runs Windows. Fail.
Unibody is machined from a single block.
What’s to follow?
We haven’t heard about liquid metal in a while. It is supposed to be stiffer (and subsequently lighter) than standard blocks of aluminum.
Maybe thinner and lighter and just as rigid — once again?
And, if I recall correctly, Apple owns sole rights to it.
Yes, that would be great, but it depends on whether Apple will come up with manufacturing process that would allow to use it big scale. This liquid metal is obviously way pricier than aluminium, so I am not sure that this material will be possible for mass production of something bigger than smartphone.
Also, it is way harder than aluminium, so it will not be possible to use unibody manufacturing with it. The drills will not survive for long in the attempts to make an enclosure from such material, it is not realistic.
But lets see.
Way harder than aluminum???? Holy crap man, some of the liquid metal alloys are way harder than -titanium-! (like in the range of double that of 6Al-4V Ti alloys) However, you wouldn’t need to machine liquid metal enclosures like you do aluminum. Liquid metal can be easily melt forged or cast (has a relatively low melting point) into the perfect shape minimizing (or eliminating) the need for any post process machining.
High stiffness (young’s modulus), high yield strength and exceptional hardness (abrasion resistance) make it a perfect material for the future iPad & MBA enclosures (though will likely make it’s debut on the iPhone)
It’s my understanding that the magic of Liquid Metal is the possibility of injection molding it. The difficulty was that custom machinery would be required which had it’s own set of issues.
This is a complete sea-change, paradigm shift or transformation of the personal computing landscape.
Those that argue otherwise are severely deluded.
It is easy to forget that a dozen years ago, all the heavy lifting in 3D, Video and Audio was done on pricey “workstations” and now a MacBook Pro does a lot of these things quite well.
Forget that Mac growth noise. Apple already missed their numbers so anything from last quarter is in the past and long forgotten. Wall Street doesn’t care what Apple is doing to the Windows PC industry. They do know that Apple continues to hold an insignificant amount computer market share. Apple’s relative growth to the PC industry doesn’t appear to mean a thing. What truly matters is analyst expectations. It matters little if H-P or Acer or Dell are being crushed in growth. Even if Apple takes half their computer sales away don’t think that Wall Street is going to reward Apple for that. It’ll just be considered a short-term fluke.
Apple certainly gained in computer market share, but they missed the numbers that mattered and the shares are down. That’s it. End of story. Sugar-coating some irrelevant numbers to Wall Street doesn’t change anything. Apple is still being considered as a long-term under-achiever. Sorry, but that’s Wall Street’s future vision of Apple.
Troll.
@ TheWiseInvestor
You miss typed your last sentence:
Sorry, but that’s Wall Street’s future vision of Apple.
should have been:
But that’s Wall Street’s sorry future vision of Apple.
😆
Apple EXCEEDED their guidance. Not their fault wall street trolls live in alternate reality. Like you….
Apple won the PC wars. Steve made a head feint in letting Gates think he won the PC wars, but Steve was always fighting a guerrilla war. In 10 years, we’ll look back to this time period and everyone will agree that the launch of the iPad was the key to Apple winning the PC wars.
In the jounalistic sense, Horace is not reporting; he is creating original content based on data available on the net which he synthesizes into unique results and conclusions of his own. I think it would be more accurate to say, “Horrace Dediu writes for Asymco”.
+1
We appreciate you, Mr. Dediu; thank you for your original, inspiring hard work, while keeping a sharp yet levelheadedness. So refreshing.
As the iOS and X in some ways merge closer together, as the MacBooks continue to be as popular as they are, as iOS devices continue to be as popular as they are, it does not paint a pretty picture for Windows.
Tim Cook was handed a gold, it must be at least a little stressful thinking about blowing it.
uh – oh… I still remember times when people from the PC faction of all things used to talk down unto the Mac community like this. It’s refreshing to get a slight Deja Vu this way 🙂
What a mean cold heartless world you live in. Tell all people more about it, they may come and cuddle up to you… the ones you may want, I mean. 😛
LoL, Apple is probably going to move to carbon fiber enclosures soon…