Seriously, the fact that the pipe dream of a consumer driven economy is starting to fall apart under the weight of consumer debt has nothing to do with Apple predicting less profit in the near future?

Can we see some comparison to other, like, businesses before anticipating the demise of the kool-aid drinker's favourite?

TIA

2007Q4 worldwide PC shipments...

vendor millions share

HP 14.695 19.0%

Dell 11.314 14.6%

Acer 7.394 9.6%

Lenovo 5.826 7.5%

Toshiba 3.029 3.9%

Others 35.122 45.4%

Total 77.378 100.0%

So Apple's 2.3 million Macs gave them less than a 3% market share.

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/08/01/17/worldwide-pc-shipments-up-155-in-4q07

You appear to be saying that the Mac marketshare is only 3% and that is somehow a bad thing for Mac owners?

If 97% of people decided to jump off a bridge, would you decide that you had to be part of that 97% or otherwise somehow feel like a loser?

To see an anti-fanboi getting in quickly to make a point just to take a poke at macs....and an anonymous coward at that. I'm not even a fan of macs but I get annoyed by it.

Bah humbug.

Market share where it counts. With top flight executives, affluent middle classes, students buying their first laptop. In other words not stuck in some vending machine or used to run a cash register.

Don't be so quick to write em off just yet, people with influence are increasingly choosing Mac's. You never know you may be called into your bosses office to hook his Mac up to that Exchange server of yours. May be a good time start learning OSX. Useful brownie points could be earned.

Apple will NEVER get even close to challenging Window$ for any kind of decent market share. And that's all there is to it.

(polite applause)

"If 97% of people decided to jump off a bridge, would you decide that you had to be part of that 97% or otherwise somehow feel like a loser?"

If there were a bunch of Mac fanbois chasing me shouting "The iPhone is a revolution in mobile technology! The iPod is the only MP3 player! The Mac is just as good for gaming as the PC, with lots of great titles like Quake 1 and Myst! Bono deserves a Nobel Peace Prize!" then yes, I would happily jump off a bridge.

Jumping off a bridge analogy a bit harsh...

How about this. By volume sold, the best car is the Toyota Corolla (see http://www.automotoportal.com/article/Top_5_Worlds_Most_Successful_Cars_Ever).

Of course, MR AC Apple baiter is likely to own such a car. I think BMW, Mercedes and Audi make good cars but are not best sellers, so he won't be wanting one of those.

I'd contest that the best sellers are perhaps the most affordable or best value, not actually the best.

So, if you want the computing equivalent of a Toyota Corolla, get a HP, or if you want the equivalent of a Ford get a Dell. I'm not sure what an Apple would be - perhaps a BMW (you're paying a lot for the badge, but it is for the young, dynamic market and is made well.).

Last I heard, Apple were one of the top selling brands for laptops, and given that's the growth market at the moment, that's a good place for Apple to be. Especially given that growth is coming from converts, and mostly from (as MCP stated) "influencials".

Apple will always struggle in the "commodity" PC market, which is dictated by price as the driving factor. And frankly it doesn't need to, given it's niche products (mini, imac, promac - Design/media etc) do so well. I personally want to see it stay below 5%, but then again, I don't work on Wall St.

It is also a time to be realistic.

Other comments seem to expect Mac to go from a 3% market share to a 97% market share overnight. Yeh? Well? Ummm? Realistic?

Mac is doing well 'nuff said.

"Apple will NEVER get even close to challenging Window$ for any kind of decent market share. And that's all there is to it."

You'll never beat your dog at chess, but we don't harp on about it.

So Apple made $9.6Bn that quarter, great, well done, but the Fed made $64Bn in monopoly money, to bail out the collapsing US banks.

I'd dispose of your $ assets if I were you, we're got 11 more months of this idiot still left.

Apart from some people needing to grow up, the main thing to see here is the fact that Apple are growing as a company, their sales across the board are up.... are HP, IBM etc really growing? Sure it's harder to grow so rapidly when you have such a large market share, but ask any company exec and they'd rather their company was growing then staying where it is.... most investors would too.

Well done Apple.

I'd be careful making statements like that. Historically, some now dominant Microsoft products were scoffed at for being tiny. IE vs Netscape being a good example, though the promotion of IE was rather aggressive.

those domestic users who call me up and say "I'm so peed off with the B****y PC I've bough myself a Mac."

I get calls like like almost every day now - and people are not just buying 1, I've one family just threw out all their PCs and bought 3 Macs and are thinking about adding another.

I visited a new client yesterday (trying to sort out broadband), she has bought herself a 24inch imac and it sits in the lounge of her up-market apartment. She also has a PC, a Sony. She keeps that in a dresser- with the doors closed.

In the past year, probably 80% of my new clients have been switchers. (And yes, I would class a significant number of those as "influencials".)

Both aimed at the 'premium' end of their markets, with premium price tags.

And both generally bought by wankers....

Sure, real drivers appreciate BMW's for the way they handle. But 90% of the buyers will be social climbing tossers, who are just interested in the badge (people who buy the 3-series with puny 4-cylinder engines, or anything from the 1-series range).

...if the figures quoted are "shipments" as the AC has written, then someone please tell him and the idiot Thurrot that this is not the same as "sales". Not that it is likely to make too much difference to the %'s but, hey, apples and oranges.

None of this has anything to do with Apple's market share - unfortunately this kind of shows off the blinkered outlooks "computer people" who can't see anything outside the context of Mac-vs-PC.

The issue has to do with what Apple's profits are, what they expected them to be, and what they'll be in the future. While this is *related* to market share, it's related to the *delta* in market share much more than *absolute* market share, and even that to a limited extent.

The real issue here is the idiotic method by which stocks are valued - Apple as a company is not magically worth 11% less because their profits ROSE by less than they said they would! I've seen cases where companies' stocks plummeted because they didn't beat estimates by as much as people estimated the estimates would be beaten - when the people estimating those estimates were the people trading the stock in the first place.

It's an intrinsically unstable system fed by myopic, short-term-focused investors and analysts, and related to the, "Is there going to be a recession? Better sell! Look, people are selling; there's going to be a recession! There's going to be a recession! Sell!" bullshit that's creating an economic disaster because a few financial companies are going to write down a small percentage of profits for a year or two.

"It's an intrinsically unstable system fed by myopic, short-term-focused investors ...There's going to be a recession! Sell!" bullshit that's creating an economic disaster because a few financial companies are going to write down a small percentage of profits for a year or two."

No there is not going to be a recession, US Fed will create another $64bn by 'magic', they will buy every man woman and child in the USA a free iPod Touch.

The happiness at receiving a 'free' iPod Touch will boost Apple's profits. While they're checking their APPL stocks on the iPod's Wifi browser, the Fed will slip another $343Bn of extra funny money into the economy to cover Citigroups liabilities.

Then they'll slip another $343Bn into the economy to buy every American man woman and child a new MacBook Air. Now they can see their APPL stocks in big screen graphs, making them even happier. So the Fed will create another trillion $ in money from thin air and cover the rest of the subprime liability.

\rant.

Anyway, people with APPL stock at least you have a part of a company with products that foreign people want to buy with hard currencies.

"Anyway, people with APPL stock at least you have a part of a company with products that foreign people want to buy with hard currencies"

Not quite as good as buying Microsoft Stock, where people (many foreign) have to buy the product even if they don't want to ! Dell XPS1330 and a host of other laptop manufacturers give you no choice. Better to have stock in a company with a monopoly.

A guy in the lab has just taken delivery of his first Mac (a MacBook, thanks for asking). And you know what? He's delighted with it. The build quality, the ease of use, the fact that 'it works' and the fact that it isn't bloated with Windows crapware. He was up and running on it within minutes of opening the box.

Anonymous Coward says:

"Not quite as good as buying Microsoft Stock... Better to have stock in a company with a monopoly."

Monopolist or little guy? Let's see... I bought equal $$ of MSFT and AAPL back in 1999. The big, scary monopolist has given me roughly 2% per year annualized returns. AAPL, on the other hand -- even with the recent carnage -- has returned better than 40% PER YEAR annualized returns.

Let's re-state that -- mostly because it's fun:

Microsoft has returned about 16%.

Apple has returned over 1200%.

*

Looking at it from another angle: who has better growth prospects -- a monopolist who desperately tries to enter new markets without falling foul of regulators, or a company with single-digit market share and a passionate user base?

"Both aimed at the 'premium' end of their markets, with premium price tags.

And both generally bought by wankers...."

And both making you really wonder what to think about the Corolla owners who not only assume that all BWM owners are wankers who bought the car to make a statement but then go on and actually feel _smug_ about owning a _Corolla_. I guess there's a logic to it but still... the mind boggles.

You still lose - 97% vs 3%. Windows rulez! W00T!!!1!

(I mean it's like I have 97 friends and you only have 3 friends - and having 97 friends feels so much better, believe me...)

OS for 600 UKP

OS for 90 UKP

One OS supports breaking hardware, workflows and technology.

An alternative OS is about 10 years behind and costs more.

The 97% win and the 3% win with equal veracity?

"You still lose - 97% vs 3%. Windows rulez! W00T!!!1!

(I mean it's like I have 97 friends and you only have 3 friends - and having 97 friends feels so much better, believe me...)?

Yeah! Eat Sh*t! Ten Trillion flies can't be wrong. :) hehehehehehe.

Everyone I know has switched away from Windows, to one or the other "mostly tech people" except for a few retirees. After 15 years of Windows, my mixed Linux/OS X environment is a paradise. I figured they are both good and "non Vista compliant" hardware is cheap, so why not?

Apple is a big player in the laptop market "where the growth is" if you missed that part. The 3% number is OLD news. but we will be hearing it from Msoft drones for years to come.

You want to talk numbers? How about the numbers in Vista adoption? You guys are really quiet about that. Most of us Linux and OS X users actually ENJOY our upgrades. You are just too funny.!

Microsoft has now shipped 100 Million copies of Vista, not great but also not a complete disaster.

OS X is just not a serious player in the corporate world, (outside of desktop publishing), if it was that great they would use it. TCO defeats Macs every time.

You may recall that Apple was the first to market with a decent GUI OS, however they blew it and this was mainly down to the arrogance of Jobs, some things never change.

"Microsoft has now shipped 100 Million copies of Vista, not great but also not a complete disaster."

How Many of those licenses were sold to builders and are still siting there? How many of them were on machines that later got "upgraded" to XP, and lastly how many were bought as actual upgrades instead of just received as the default on big box systems?

Tell me again how "successful" it is.