Mac Growth Outpaces Market for 19th Straight Quarter

The Mac has been on a growth tear for a few years now, outperforming the broader PC market in most every sector. Indeed, December 2010 marked the 19th consecutive quarter that it did so. Mac shipments grew 23.5 percent for the month–a near seven-time multiple of the PC market’s growth rate of 3.4 percent.

An astonishing spike. And it’s even more astonishing when you break it down by sector. In the global home or consumer market, the Mac posted shipment growth of 17.1 percent, while the broader market posted a decline of .6 percent. In the business market, Mac shipments grew 65.4 percent compared to the market growth rate of 9.7 percent. 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…

So what’s the engine for all this growth? Needham analyst Charlie Wolf thinks it’s a halo effect from Apple’s iOS device trinity–the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad–particularly, the latter two, which are gaining lots of traction in both the home and business markets (Oddly, Apple suffered a decline in the education segment, where it has traditionally been pretty strong).

“The surge in Mac sales in the business market coincided with the introduction of the iPad in the second quarter of 2010,” says Wolf. “It would be foolish to assign a cause and effect connection between the two events. However, in less than a year, the iPad has been deployed or piloted in 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, and it’s reasonable to assume the device has invaded smaller businesses at a similar pace. It’s likely, then, that the halo effect emanating from the iPad will be far stronger than the iPhone halo effect in the business market if only because the iPad is a kissing cousin of Apple’s family of notebook computers.”