“Hewlett-Packard is still on top, and gaining. Dell is slipping. Apple is still a darling, with a pair of asterisks,” Rick Aristotle Munarriz writes for The Motley Fool.
“The first of Apple’s asterisks is that HP actually posted stronger year-over-year growth than Apple. This bodes well for HP heading into its upcoming quarterly report. Naturally, this doesn’t look good for Apple ahead of its report later this month, but just remember that Macs are no longer a material driver for the Cupertino titan. IPad and iPhone sales made up 72% of its holiday quarter revenue, with Macs accounting for a thin 14% slice of the revenue mix,” Munarriz writes. “The second asterisk is one that you won’t see from this table. We have to dig up Gartner’s data from January to show market share data for the fourth calendar quarter. Apple had a chunky 11.6% of the U.S. market during the period. It’s now down to 10.6%.”
Munarriz asks, “Apple’s present — and undeniably its near-term future — is more about iOS than Mac OS. Isn’t it better if Apple simply focuses on those platforms and nixes its Macs and MacBooks? …Should Tim Cook kill that Mac?”
“Are you insane?” Munarriz writes. “I was only testing you. Apple has better things to do than pry MacBooks from a fanboy’s cold, dead fingers. Letting the long tail for PCs play out makes far more sense than putting all of its eggs in the iOS basket.”
Read more about why Apple is not “wasting its time on Macs” in the full article here.