“How long can PC makers survive by selling cut-rate devices?” Farhad Manjoo writes for The New York Times. “Enter Apple and the new iMac it unveiled in the fall, an expensive desktop with a beautiful, high-resolution screen. If Chromebooks are cars, the new iMac is the world’s best truck. It’s a device optimized for professionals, not casual users, and it blazes a path forward for the once-beleaguered PC industry.”
“Playing the high end has proved lucrative for Apple. In the third quarter of 2014, by the research firm IDC’s estimates, Apple became the fifth-largest PC seller in the world. Though its market share is dwarfed by the Windows PC giants Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer, Apple is predicted to rake in about half of the PC industry’s profits. ‘They’re doing remarkably well, and I think they’ll continue to go up,’ said Tom Mainelli, who studies the PC market for IDC,” Manjoo writes. “Mr. Mainelli argued that the ubiquity of smartphones had increased the appeal of Macs. Because people are shifting more of their computing to mobile devices, they’re waiting longer to replace their PCs. The longer ownership period helps people justify buying Apple’s high-end machines. ‘Consumers are saying, ‘Well, if I’m going to hold on to this thing for five years, I should buy a good one,’’ Mr. Mainelli said. ‘Apple has really benefited from that.'”
“As the low end of the PC business is swallowed by cheap devices, the only people left in the market for traditional PCs will be professionals,” Manjoo writes. “Apple’s recent success shows that professionals still love PCs, and they’ll even pay large sums for them.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Apple is predicted to rake in about half of the PC industry’s profits.”
Who won the PC wars? That’s right, Apple did.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Scott M.” for the heads up.]