Year of the Mac, Indeed: Apple Headed for a 2.9 Million Mac Quarter
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has declared 2010 the “Year of the Mac,” and it’s hard to disagree when looking over the latest retail sales data from the NPD Group: Mac sales during February were up 43 percent for the month–this after a 36 percent spike in sales during January.
Mac sales through the first two months of the March quarter are up 39 percent year-over-year. As Munster observed in a research note this morning, NPD’s data suggest Apple (AAPL) is on track to sell between 2.8 million and 2.9 million Macs in the March quarter, well above Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 2.7 million.
Now, these numbers benefit from an easier year-over-year comp, as I’ve noted before. That said, they’re still quite impressive.
Incidentally, Macs aren’t the only things selling vigorously these days. iPods are as well. NPD’s data show iPod sales up seven percent year-over-year through the first two months of the March quarter. That’s the first sales increase they’ve seen in a year.
Looks like Apple’s headed for a hell of a quarter (click tables below to enlarge).