Vista Wow Starts Now … at Apple
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 15, 2008 at 8:16 AM PT
When I look at this, it sends shivers up my spine.”
– Apple COO Tim Cook demonstrates a new MacBook running Windows
If there was any comic relief during Tuesday’s Apple event, it was provided by Microsoft (MSFT), which played Curly to CEO Steve Jobs’s Moe and COO Tim Cook’s Larry. Discussing the dramatic increase in the Mac’s market share in the past year, Cook said it was driven partially by “something we didn’t do: Vista.”
“I think it’s fair to say that Vista hasn’t lived up to everything that Microsoft hoped it would,” Cook said. “And consequently, it’s opened doors for a lot of people to consider switching to the Mac. And Apple has been the beneficiary of this.”
Recognize misfortune for what it is: an opportunity to lift yourself to a higher level, eh, Tim?
Anyway, according to Cook, 50 percent of all new Macs sold are purchased by switchers. Moreover, the Mac has outgrown the market for 14 of the last 15 quarters. That’s nearly four years. “The Macintosh represents 17.6 percent of all unit sales in U.S. retail,” said Cook. “That means one out of every three dollars spent on computers in U.S. retail is spent on the Mac.”
A remarkable point. And one seemingly borne out by the latest PC vendor shipment numbers from Gartner (IT) (click on chart below). Apple (AAPL) showed nearly 30 percent year-over-year growth in the third quarter, its market share rising to 9.5 percent from 7.7 percent.
Comments
Those statistics are pretty stunning especially when you consider how out of price whack they are with everyone else. If they’re getting 17.6% of US retail and 33% of dollars spent at US retail, they’re literally just about twice the price.
Posted by Roy Howard at October 15th, 2008 at 10:14 amI think a lot of the people who switched did so to avoid pain. They heard about the trouble some were having with simple tasks like installing a printer driver and decided to try their luck with a Mac. This overruled concerns like price.
Posted by Ken Okel at October 15th, 2008 at 10:33 amVista was the biggest boost Apple could have. It was real irony watching all the BS extolling Vista on my screen as I was stuck reloading Vista, which had crashed on my 6 week old PC (and losing all my data in the process).
My next computer will be an Apple – never again a Microsoft.
Posted by Eli Bensky at October 15th, 2008 at 12:26 pmRoy Howard is missing a major point about Apple’s profits.
Macs don’t cost twice as much as PCs. In fact in the high end they can be $600-$1000 less then comparably configured Dells.
Most PCs are sold at razor-thin profit margins. Another statistic Apple has pointed out makes it better than I could. They own 66 percent of the over $1000 computer market.
Apple doesn’t sell unprofitable junk. Dell and HP and the others do. What good is market share if you don’t make enough money to compete?
Everyone keeps telling Apple they should be more like Dell. This certainly puts the lie to that meme.
In the end, Apple really is the beneficiary of this trend. They make enough money to continue to innovate and make better and better computers and improve OS X, while PC makers struggle to make any profit at all.
All the while Microsoft keeps shooting themselves in the foot with their unfocused strategy of buying their way into markets rather than innovating like Apple does.
That’s why Win Mobile is becoming a joke while the iPhone eats its lunch. Ballmer exists in an echo chamber, fiddling around while Redmond burns – to mix a few metaphors.
Posted by Eric Welch at October 15th, 2008 at 2:53 pmMmmm. I love the crunch of those new Apples.
Posted by Neil Anderson at October 15th, 2008 at 5:31 pmEric,
I was just doing the math.
Honestly, I’ve had some bad customer service experiences with PCs — and the internal component breakage rate seems impossibly high with most of them. I’ve written letters to companies complaining that a service contract means THEY do the service, not that I spend 8 hours running some diagnostic for some tech guy so he can tell me what I already know — that it doesn’t work and they need to fix it. And my Apple experiences have been good on balance (my wife has one) with the exception of the $1400 they tried to charge me to get a broken hinge fixed.
If you really think Macs aren’t more expensive you haven’t done your homework. Price out a comparable machine from a PC manufacturer. The same specs that come standard on a Mac will cost you half as much on a PC. By no means am I saying its a comparable experience — Apple is a much more graceful company from software to service, no doubt. But don’t fool yourself — you pay for that.
Posted by Roy Howard at October 15th, 2008 at 5:41 pm