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Second-Quarter Mac Sales Likely to Be Magical, Revolutionary

April 19, 2011 at 4:10 am PT

One more quick data point in advance of Apple’s second-quarter earnings report tomorrow: New estimates from the NPD Group show the company’s Mac business gathering considerable momentum.

In January, U.S. Mac sales were up 20 percent year-over-year. In February they were up 12 percent.

And in March?

Up 47 percent, year-over-year.

That’s an average increase of 27 percent for the quarter. An impressive surge–more so considering that growth slowed in February ahead of the debut of the new Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pro line. March was the first full month in which those new machines were available and, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, sales are tracking ahead of the Street’s expectations for 3.6 million Macs sold in the quarter.

As I said yesterday, expect Apple’s second-quarter earnings report Wednesday to be another barn burner.

Tagged with: Apple, digital, earnings, financial, Gene Munster, hardware, John Paczkowski, MacBook Pro, Macs, Piper Jaffray, ThunderBolt

comments so far. Add yours.

http://twitter.com/slowbutlearning Billy Joe

I hope your right from different periodicals sales for PC’s should be slowing from the growth of tablet sales and the first quarter sales of pc are normally the slowest. From Amazon Best Sellers list Mac is in 4th place.
w.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/ref=pd_dp_ts_pc_1

Gene Munster is the most out spoken analyst of aapl everyday he tell stories of aapl and only aapl is the answer.
Please try quoting some one new it’s getting old.
http://twitter.com/slowbutlearning Billy Joe

Gene has been pumping aapl everyday for weeks and he’s been wrong look at the chart.
Anonymous

For those of us who are not day traders, the issue is whether something fundamental has happened to cause people who in the past would not have considered a Mac to go out and buy one.

This is an issue because Mac sales are rising rapidly in a world where Wintel PC sales are tanking.

The obvious candidate for the cause of this phenomenon is the iPad, which Microsoft Munchkins claim is sold only to Apple’s current fans but which is selling in such volume that the Munchkins must be full of canal water. Instead it seems that many PC owners buy an iPad and discover that Apple makes some pretty good stuff. Then when it comes time to replace the aging PC they buy a Mac instead. Nothing else explains the numbers we’re seeing.
Anonymous

Or maybe people just realized that Macs are superior to WinPCs.
Anonymous

Apple has sold more Macs every quarter for 18 quarters now. You don’t have to read Gene Munster to know that. Your Amazon sales ranking as useful data is so dumb it is not even cute. They are not even close to the number one Apple seller.

PC sales are down because of iPad, but Mac sales are not. They were up during the first iPad quarter and up ever since. Even though half of iPad buyers are Mac users.

Macs are 90% of high-end PC’s since 2006, before Vista. The lack of high-end PC hardware to run on was a key problem for Vista, which was designed for high-end Intel that ended up running Mac OS.

You don’t even need numbers to tell you what is going on. Go to any campus, it is all Macs. Audio video production: all Macs. Google is 80% Macs, Genentech is 100% Macs.

What is getting old is the Windows PC and it’s incredibly high Total Cost of Ownership and incredibly low productivity.
Anonymous

Once you have something like an iPad or iPhone, you have less need for a low-end PC and more need for high-end, for a PC that does heavy lifting like video editing or pro photography, not just surfs the Web or runs Netflix. Macs are the vast majority of high-end PC’s. The need for low-end PC’s is down, the need for high-end PC’s is up.

iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Roku box … these all replace low-end Windows PC’s, not high-end Macs.