February Mac Sales: Insanely Not Great

jobs_thumbs_down Apple’s recent desktop refresh couldn’t have come at a better time, because February was a lousy month for Mac sales.

With consumers postponing their Mac purchases in expectation of a desktop refresh, Apple saw double-digit declines in Mac sales for the month, according to the latest NPD data. They were down 16 percent compared to February of 2008. A decline, but one that’s not quite as grave as it first seems, as Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster notes. “[We] note that year-over-year Mac performance faced a tough comp in the month of February 2009 due to the February 2008 MacBook Air launch,” Munster explained. “That said, we expect Mac NPD data to rebound in the month of March due to the shipment of new iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Pros in early March.”

For the March quarter, Munster believes Apple (AAPL) will sell between 2 and 2.2 million Macs–a decline of between 13 and 14 percent. Not so bad considering that Gartner predicts PC sales will chart their sharpest unit decline in history this year. Really, the fact that Apple is selling desktops at all in this economy is worth cheering.

Mike Lane

NDP data is pretty worthless when it comes to Apple as a significantly large portion of Apple’s sales come through unmeasurable channels, namely their own stores and Apple website online sales, which are not reported/closely held. NDP can might be used in this case as part of a general trend, but are totally unreliable as to definitive results.
Mark Ashton

What you don’t mention is that PC sales actually went UP from the same month last year. People are buying PC’s even in the down economy.
James Lombardo

In January, Apple notified its sales channel that there would be longer time for delivery of iMacs. EVERYBODY in the Apple blogosphere knew that it meant new computers were coming.

As word spread, people held off buying until the new iMacs were introduced in March. Now, Apple has raised its build rate due to strong demand.

That is one reason why Mac sales were lower in February.
George Slusher

This reads like a “quickie” by John, who is usually much more astute. Why didn’t he mention what Mike Lane and James Lombardo did? I’ve read several others saying the same things on various sites, so it’s not like those factors were unknown.
John Lawrence

Without the recent release of the new Macs, results would have been very dismal this quarter. Add to the economic woes to the fact so many were waiting for the upgraded versions to appear and it would have been a shocking decrease for that Apple faithful. Now, we’ll see a moderate decrease that is pretty damn impressive given that Apple is maintaining margins and still selling decent numbers. If you factor out the no margin netbooks, the Apple numbers are indeed excellent.

February Mac Sales: Insanely Not Great

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