Mac Growth Outpaces Market for 19th Straight Quarter

I think the big thing here is a shift from the I-T people saying you can have any PC you want as long as it runs Windows, to the actual users choosing the right tool for the job. Once you have a second kind of PC in the iPad, it’s harder to tell the graphics guys they can’t have Macs. And the marketing people all want them, too. The dam is broken.

I do freelance graphics, and I bring my own Macs even though a lot of places I work will offer me a desk with a big honking Dell running Creative Suite. It’s more productive for me to have AppleScript and ColorSync than to have Stuxnet and Conficker. Sometimes I would ask other artists there, why the Windows PC’s as graphics workstations, what is the advantage? Keep in mind Creative Suite is like $5000 and a high-end PC to run it costs the same or more than a Mac, so it can’t be price. Nobody ever answered with a practical benefit, they always said that is all I-T will let us have, we are 100% Windows here. Why would you let an I-T person choose art tools? Makes no sense. But they did it.

So there is a big pent-up demand for Macs in business. Now that the CEO got an iPad, I-T can’t enforce their Windows-only rule anymore. People realize the world is not all Microsoft.

Also, even the straightest business wants to do some video editing, Web publishing, photo editing these days. Companies are making video press releases for YouTube. The Mac makes sense to more people than ever.

Finally, once you run an iPad for like 6 months and it never crashes, it gets harder and harder to make excuses for Windows. A friend of mine had her PC go down with a virus and she asked her I-T consultant why her iPad hasn’t done that and he said “there are no viruses on Apple gear” and she went and got her first Mac the next day. As a backup machine at first, but in no time it replaced her PC. She learned to have higher standards from her iPad.

Then I would like to know what you are doing differently than me because my iPad crashes on a daily-basis while using the built-in programs. (crashing by me is defined as returning to the home screen while I’m trying to work) And the biggest headache I have on my PC is iTunes. I’m sorry, but neither of them things have convinced me to move to Mac.

Apple has made massive improvements over their OS over the years. They have given and taken a lot. Take email for instance, Apple couldn’t meet the needs that Exchange provided. So they built this integration into their OS, making it one less optical to overcome. The coming of the Intel chip, changed things just as dramatically. Bootcamp open the door to options, but more so opened the perception of Apple. People realized that Apple was doing what it could to make it a tool. It use to be that you used Safari, and a few years ago most parts weren’t friendly with this browser. Today, I rarely find something that it struggles with. Most of the barriers of 10 years ago have been taken down, and Apple has been slowly taking down the price barrier.
It seems like the A series chip (Apples ARM) is going to land in their Mac line as well. With changes like this, they are going to be able to reduce costs like there iOS platform. This will alway them to sell there premium product line of industrial quality to the consumers and still make a large profit margin.

“And in government, they grew 549.5 percent compared to the broader market’s 8.4 percent. Of course, government sales represent only 1 percent of total Mac sales, so that spike appears more dramatic than it really is, but still …”

He does cover this in his article, but I do agree with you about the PC numbers. We need to just include Tablets as PC and keep to that.

No, as a rule, unless they specifically note that they do, you can assume that groups like Gartner, IDC, NPD are not counting iPads or tablets in their PC data.

As for your explanation, Apple sold more than “two last year”. They currently sell over 4M Macs a quarter, and if IDC did count iPads, they’d be one of the 3 biggest PC sellers in the US, so we’re not really talking about tiny numbers as in your example.

Okay, when I said “it’s easier to have a 50% increase in sales if you sold two last year and three this year” I was oversimplifying my point. My point is the percentage growth means nothing when you look at the actual numbers. I wasn’t actually saying Apple only sold three computers.

Seriously, do I really have to explain that?

Since you seem to manage your open apps, try downloading the iStat app. It is a great utility to see how much ram you are using and what processes are running. It may give you some clue as to what is going on.

Re Mac growth in government:

Of course the point is well taken that the 550% growth is large due to the small starting size, but that should not hide the point. A real change has occurred, and now the government is beginning to invest in Macs.Surely they will not keep up this growth rate for ever, but it is very likely the beginning of real serious growth in that sector.

THIS IS a valid point and indicates continued double-digit growth overall.

NASA, the NSA and the CIA have used Macs for years. (They used NeXT – which is still around in the form or Mac OS X.) But government IT infrastructure didn’t like Macs for various reasons. Those reasons are no longer valid. And yes, starting with a small number the growth will be spectacular for a while. Same thing is happening with Android handsets right now. We’ll see in a year or two if they are still growing faster than iOS. I have a feeling they won’t.

You said: “my iPad crashes on a daily-basis while using the built-in programs”.

That’s truly bizarre.

I can understand if some poorly coded programs crash, but the actual iOS crashing is definitely unusual. Unless of course your iPad is jailbroken; then all bets are off.

You can try doing a restore to the latest version of iOS. If your iPad still crashes, have one of the Geniuses at the Apple Store take a look at it.

As for not moving to Mac as a result of your bad experience with your iPad. I would say, do yourself a favor and check out a Mac when you get a chance. It may not be for you (it’s certainly not for everyone). But I’d be surprised if you don’t love the Mac experience though.

Cheers!

Deon Robinson
Author of: ‘So You Got An iPad. Now What?”

“And the biggest headache I have on my PC is iTunes”

Are you sure it’s not the registry? or a missing driver? or a virus? or malware? or BSD? or an ever-growing Swap file that fragments your C drive? or the archaic use of letters for drives? or a printer that won’t show up? or the 10 row ribbon in Word 2012? or a cursor that moves with a noticeable delay after you move your mouse? or having to type Alt+### to get a diacritical? or a menu on top of EVERY window? or non-conformist applications that have NO menu? or cheap PSUs that fail conveniently 1 month after the warranty runs out on your HP/Dell/Gateway? or a rootkit installed by Sony? or the CLI being burried in an ever changing Start menu? or an interface so badly designed that it has changed with every successive release of the OS? or a Bluetooth/Wifi driver that over taxes the CPU? or short battery life if you are on a laptop? or a security protocol that pretty much relies solely on asking you, “are you sure you want to do that?” before it does anything?

Just saying, maybe you should enumerate your PC headaches because blaming it all on iTunes (agreed, it’s bloated and taxes my PC more than it should for an MP3 player) might cause you to misdiagnose your migraines.

In honesty, there’s lots to complain about Apple products, but shoddy quality or poor programming just isn’t one of the reasons. If anything, they adopt new technology too quickly and even though it’s well implemented, even if you just bought the latest greatest, you feel left behind by summer.

“As for their increase in sales numbers, it’s easier to have a 50% increase in sales if you sold two last year and three this year.”

What if you sold 7.3 MILLION of them?

But, to apply some myopic analysis, 4.3 MILLION were sold in the first 30 days, so I guess they’re already on the deline, eh!

Side note, it must be an absolute rush to be a purchasing agent for Apple, placing orders in the MILLIONS – imagine the economies of scale and the cost savings!

Are you referring to the $150M MSFT injected in apple ? Cause if that is the case, then their investment would represent at most $5B not $50B…

“at most $5B not $50B”

Thank you for correcting my mistake, I guess I got over-zealous with one too many zeros in my original calculation. It was $150,000,000 invested in 1997 (Aug 7 at MacWorld Boston). Microsoft received 150,000 AAPL preferred A Series non-voting shares while anyone could have bought AAPL on the open market for $7.30/share. That $150M investment (150,000,000 shares) was convertible to common stock at $8.25/share (which could be sold after August 2000). Between 2000 and 2001, Microsoft converted all 150K preferred shares into 18.2M common shares, and by 2003 had sold all AAPL holdings.

If they had held on, would be worth $360 x 18.2M or $6.55B a gain of $6.4B. Not too shabby.

Unfortunately, rather than keep the shares, MSFT divested of them and for all intents and purposes, invested the $ into projects like Zune. MSFT stock price is actually 60% of it’s 2000 levels while AAPL is trading over 10X from the same period.

I don’t know when in 2003 they sold their lot, but the range in 2003 was $6.57 and $12.41 (split adjusted). Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they sold at a high, the most they grossed was $225M (which would still be a really good return for holding the stock for only 6 years, though it’s more likely they captured returns somewhere near the median price which is in the $9~10 range, or $163M. The worst case is they lost some money, but no more than $20M of the original investment.But even in the best case, they missed out on
$6B of growth in AAPL, while spending a large amount of $R&D on loser projects like Zune, Kin, and now Windows Mobile 7. We can argue technical aspects of iOS v Windows Mobile, or Zune v iPod, but as far as the impact of these business units, the proof is in the pudding, AAPL grew almost 1400% since the turn of the millennium and MSFT shrunk by 40%.

That brings up the question as to whether resisting a business split under charges of anti-trust in 1997 would have generated more wealth than keeping a hobbled monopoly together. Other than Gates and Balmer’s egos, it’s hard to see where the benefit was…