Friday, July 18, 2008
‘Course, According to Hollywood, Apple’s Market Share Is More Like 90 Percent
John Locke (played by Terry O’Quinn) and his Apple II in ABC’s “Lost”
“Because they’re the super-small-market share guy, they get all these statements about them.” Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates said that about Apple back in 2005. And while it’s essentially still true, it’s less so than it has been in years past. In separate reports today, research houses Gartner (IT) and IDC (IDC) both note that Apple has climbed to third place in the desktop market in the U.S. Gartner figures Apple’s share of state-side PC shipments for the second quarter of 2008 to be 8.5 percent, up from 6.4 percent in the quarter a year earlier. IDC pegs it at 7.8 percent for the second quarter this year, up from 6.2 percent in last year’s second quarter. And that puts the company in third place in the domestic PC market–ahead of Acer, if you believe Gartner. And in fourth place behind Acer if you believe IDC.
Not that it matters all that much. Because regardless of whose metrics you prefer, Apple (AAPL) still lags far behind the two PC sales leaders. Dell (DELL) is still the No. 1 seller of PCs in the U.S., with 32 percent of the market according to IDC. HP is No. 2, with 25 percent. And in terms of worldwide sales, Apple hasn’t even cracked the Top 5. Yet.
It’s definitely No. 1 in Hollywood though, as critic Roger Ebert noted a few years back. “Macs turn up in the movies all the time–not so much because of product placement, but because so many movie people use them and like them,” Ebert wrote. “A historian of the future, counting all the on-screen computers between 1983 and today, would likely conclude that Macs represented 90 percent of the computer market.”
