“Last week’s Financial Times headline claiming that Google had overtaken Apple in U.S. education—based on data from IDC—was not just technically inaccurate but wildly misleading and served to obscure far more meaningful trends occurring in the PC market, particularly in education as well as the broader emerging segment of new computing form factors,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.
“The Financial Times article, written by Matthew Garrahan and Tim Bradshaw, bizarrely claimed that ‘Apple has lost its longstanding lead over Google in U.S. schools,’ based entirely upon IDC estimates that stated the collective shipments of netbooks running Google’s Chrome OS to U.S. schools had surpassed Apple’s iPad sales by 13,500 units in the September quarter,” Dilger reports. “The authors actually admitted half way through their article that the headline was false, noting that ‘Apple retains a slight lead over Google’ when actually comparing the products both companies market to education. ”
Dilger reports, “Based on IDC’s reported numbers, Apple’s U.S. education sales of Mac and iPads were not only larger than the corresponding, combined shipments of Android and Chrome OS products, but the ‘slight lead’ Apple had over Google was a margin 172.6 percent greater than the unit differential that Garrahan and Bradshaw directed attention to in their article.”
“The reason why IDC is working so hard to promote Chromebooks as ‘gaining real traction’ is much easier to understand: Intel is heavily invested in leveraging Chromebooks to win back mobile market relevance from ARM, after having failed to gain any from Atom-based Android tablets or Windows netbooks,” Dilger reports. “Prepare to see a lot more ‘news’ reports about how a few million Chromebooks are dramatically shifting the market in ways that a quarter billion iPads haven’t, because there’s a lot of money on the line.”
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bill” for the heads up.]