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[jmone]

FYI there are many different stats our there on market share but this one shows from this year what clients are being used when browings the WWW (as apposed to say the market share for servers).  Based on this, MC is not missing out on much of the client side market as it is!

[jmone]

Here is the breakdown for mobile devices

[glynor]

I know you said there were "lots of measures" out there, but those stats (particularly the second one) are not an accurate measure of the overall market.  But, you know, it is Digitimes.  They say lots of crazy things.

In any case, yes, there is an (aging) massive installed base of existing low-end and corporate Windows PCs.  But you can't ignore those trend lines, or the disruption the iPad is causing.  Apple has been (often dramatically) outperforming the growth of PC shipments for something like 22 consecutive quarters now.  For example, in Q4 of last year (Christmas quarter), Apple's Mac sales growth was 20.7%.  HP's was -26.1%, Dell's was -4.5%, and Acer's was -11.4.  And if you look at only "Premium PCs" (costing over $1000), Apple commands north of 90% of the market share in shipments now.

Apple "won" the high end of the PC market years ago.  Now, the iPad is clearly disrupting the low-end of the PC market.  They "call" the iPad a separate category, but the scale of the growth in the iPad is unbelievable, and people are clearly choosing it over the low-end PC or netbook they'd have bought just a few years ago.  That's why every other PC manufacturer is in trouble, and are scrambling.

Because if you drop the pretense, and you call the iPad a "computer", then this is how things look: http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/16/apple-is-the-top-personal-computer-vendor/

[jmone]

And if you look at only "Premium PCs" (costing over $1000), Apple commands north of 90% of the market share in shipments now.  Apple "won" the high end of the PC market years ago. 

?  Really 90%+ OSX marketshare ROFLMAO...got get me some of what your smoking

[jmone]

According to wikipedia, overall OS marketshare is as follows but more details by segment is listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems:

[glynor]

?  Really 90%+ OSX marketshare ROFLMAO...got get me some of what your smoking

Read what i said above.  Among premium PCs, it is, and has been since 2010 or so (depending on how you count it), in the US anyway.

Among "premium PCs" (those over $1k retail) NPD has them at 66% unit share at retail fronts as of May (PCs sold in stores in person), and they hit 91% total sales in that category (including online sales which are harder to track) way back in June 2010.  Their revenue-share among premium PCs was in the 90s since 2008.  All the other vendors stopped reporting online unit shipments by category after that, though, so details for total shipments are very sketchy.  Apple had a rough quarter (though still up y/y) in Mac sales this last time, since they hadn't launched anything new until this month, and everyone knew it, but...  You got to figure if things had changed dramatically, they'd have been yelling about it to the high heavens.

That's what Ultrabooks are about.  All the PC vendors were getting killed by the race to the bottom from the netbook market, and Apple walked in and sucked all the profit out of the high end.  That's why all those OEMs have been bleeding cash, and why Leo wanted out of the PC market.

Ultrabooks were the plan to compete with Apple and get the average selling price (and therefore, profit, since the margins are basically fixed for everyone but Apple) back up.

Yes, their overall share is still "only" between 10-15%, depending on whose numbers you believe.  But they're taking ALL of the profitable sales, and have been for a long time.

And then, there's the iPad, that caused the bottom to fall out even on the low end netbook market.

[JimH]

Among "premium PCs" (those over $1k retail) NPD has them at 66% unit share at retail fronts as of May (PCs sold in stores in person), and they hit 91% total sales in that category (including online sales which are harder to track) way back in June 2010.

It makes sense since Macs seem to cost 50% for the same equipment.  A PC for $700 and a Mac for $1100.

It also doesn't account for owner built PC's and servers.

"Retail store" also would not include Dell, HP, or Amazon.

[glynor]

It makes sense since Macs seem to cost 50% for the same equipment.  A PC for $700 and a Mac for $1100.

I don't think the price difference is anywhere near that extreme, for similarly equipped systems.  No one else seems to be able to match the Macbook Air price/performance ratio.  I could look up analysis if I cared to, but I don't.  Your numbers are made up.

But, I totally agree, they do sell their stuff at a premium, because they can.  What matters more is that they don't sell a substantial amount of cheap systems.  Everyone screamed during the height of the "netbook boom" that Apple had to put out one to compete.  And they didn't, and now everyone who did is having financial trouble.

It also doesn't account for owner built PC's and servers.

True.  I do that, and some other nerds do, but those numbers are exponentially lower and don't substantially impact the bottom line for home-built systems, at least.

For servers you have a point (Google custom builds almost all of theirs), but those servers all run barebones Linux without even a GUI layer.  That's not the market for MC.

Windows servers are, by-and-large, still sold by OEMs and are included in the numbers.  They are VERY high profit margin, but also quite low volume.

"Retail store" also would not include Dell, HP, or Amazon.

Right.  Like I said, among retail sales they're at around 66%.  Among ALL sales (including online: Amazon, Dell, HP-direct, etc), they were at 91% the last time NPD could generate reliable numbers.  The PC vendors then all stopped reporting unit sales by category, so the only way to judge it is by surveying retail stores (where their numbers are better).

Again, this is ONLY among premium PCs.

But they're growing their total share.  Year after year, quarter after quarter.  And everyone else's shipments are down, year after year, quarter after quarter.  Their overall growth is slower (when you don't count the iPad as a PC) because they don't want the low-end/low-margin/high-volume segment.

Profit, not unit shipments, is the gasoline that powers the engine of business.  Back at the start of the PC wars, unit shipments mattered a lot because that was how you sustained the platform and kept developers committed.  But the PC market overall is now in decline, being eclipsed and replaced by mobile computing devices.  What profit is left is largely being sucked up by Apple.

IBM saw it coming years ago, and they got out.  HP thought about it and couldn't decide what to do.  The only OEM doing reasonably well still is Lenovo, largely due to their power in Asia.  But Apple is now doing VERY well in China (which is on-pace to be a bigger market for Apple than the US sometime next year, even in Mac sales).

[rjm]

Now, the iPad is clearly disrupting the low-end of the PC market.  They "call" the iPad a separate category, but the scale of the growth in the iPad is unbelievable, and people are clearly choosing it over the low-end PC or netbook they'd have bought just a few years ago.  That's why every other PC manufacturer is in trouble, and are scrambling.

I used to own a high end desktop and a high end laptop. Then my laptop died and I was given an iPad as a gift. I am not planning to buy a new laptop because the iPad meets my mobile needs. If I do buy a laptop it will be a $300 used model from Craigslist.

[steveklein]

glynor... are you serious about nobody matching the Macbook Air price/performance?

I can spend $1000 on a laptop and have it easily outperform a $1500 Macbook Air. The Air may be thinner, but the PC laptop might have things like blu ray and a larger screen.

macbook airs are cool, but to act like they are the sweet spot of price vs performance is straight up crazy.

for the record, i own a macbook air and love it. but i know what it is, and it isn't t value/performance champ.

[glynor]

glynor... are you serious about nobody matching the Macbook Air price/performance?

I can spend $1000 on a laptop and have it easily outperform a $1500 Macbook Air. The Air may be thinner, but the PC laptop might have things like blu ray and a larger screen.

What you're call performance isn't the same thing as what I was calling performance (weight, screen quality, and things like back-lighting on the keys count to me, more than 100MHz on a CPU).  But, you're right, I wasn't clear when I said that.

In that class, the other manufacturers have been having difficulty matching their pricing without sacrificing things like screen quality, SSDs, and CPU and GPU power.  I meant among the ultrabooks.

[jgreen]

Glynor my friend, where are you getting this?  I'm not aware Apple ever claimed to have 90% of ANYTHING (exepting maybe chutzpah).

Regarding the "high end PC" argument, the former Steve Jobs was a master of this.  PCs costing more than $1,000 are "high end", but not PCs costing more than $5,000.

[glynor]

Glynor my friend, where are you getting this?  I'm not aware Apple ever claimed to have 90% of ANYTHING (exepting maybe chutzpah).

Google, my friend.

Here's one of many news stories about the 2010 numbers from NPD:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10293876-37.html

There are also lots of stories about Revenue Share (which is NOT the same thing as unit share, but is still a pretty important number) from earlier.  Search around and you can read about the ratio climbing from around 16% in 2005 to 66% in 2008 to 91% in 2010.  Like I said, numbers get tough to discern after that.

To reiterate, though, those are NPD numbers (they are an oft-cited market research firm that tracks sales and market shares of everything from dumbphones to video games).  They track only US sales, not worldwide.

[glynor]

If you're curious about the profit share stuff, this is a fascinating piece:
http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/28/the-value-of-the-os-x-monopoly/

[glynor]

Also, I should add... I only pointed those numbers out to point out that "raw market share" numbers aren't always as cut-and-dried as they may seem.  Certainly, if you just look around, you can see a TON of Macs (at least here in the US) where you didn't before.  And they're all high-end.

I go to two different major "tech" conferences every so often (one developer-focused and one media-focused).  I can tell you that I've watched the change.  At the developer conference (which is mostly web technology development, not Mac-focused in any way), it was once almost 100% Windows laptops (with a bunch of people running Red Hat and Ubuntu).  Now, there are Mac laptops everywhere (some of them still running Red Hat or Ubuntu, and some running Windows).  There's still a smattering of Lenovos and HPs and whatnot, but they're almost all low-end (and older) machines.  At NABShow, you seriously have to look VERY HARD to find someone with something other than a Macbook anymore.  Even people cutting on the Windows version of AVID, are carrying Macbook Pros set to boot to Windows by default.

I remember I was sitting on the bus with someone running Windows on my older Macbook (the one I squished).  He looked over and asked how it worked as a Windows laptop.  I said it was the best Windows laptop I'd ever had.  He pulled out his giant HP boat anchor and said he really wished his company would buy him one of those instead, but he was stuck with that 2-year-old beast.  That was three years ago.  Think he's still using an HP now?

One of the most interesting recent anecdotes I read was Gizmodo's coverage of the Microsoft Surface launch event (and Gizmodo is certainly no friend to Apple), and it matches what I see too:

There was a security guard at the Microsoft event who pointed at my Macbook Air and asked me "is is (sic) true that once you go Mac you never go back?"  Like most every other journalist at the Surface launch, I was on a Macbook Air.  It's not a conspiracy, there's a simple explanation: Journalists have to type lots of words in places that aren't our office, and the Macbook Air is the best for that because it's incredibly small and portable, but still powerful and (maybe most importantly) easy to type on.  I do go back, but for me Windows has become a desktop OS, because the Macbook Air so completely owns portable computing.

Like I said in the other thread, anecdotal evidence isn't evidence at all.  But if you watch the numbers, and watch the growth rates, there is something there.  All I was trying to point out is that MC is a premium product.  It competes with free, after all.  It might make sense to be on the platform where many (even if you reject that it is most, it is certainly a LARGE proportion) of those premium customers are now.  Raw market share doesn't matter at all to JRiver.  It is the share of the market of people who are their potential customers.

Someone on an aging Pentium 4 PC running Windows XP, or a work-provided Dell desktop that runs only Excel and IE6, are NOT potential customers.  All those shiny new Macbooks you see at Starbucks, and the Library, and at the Airport?  They are.

[Visth]

So true. My business critical laptop is a mac. First laptop in a series of medium to high end laptops that is still working and has not given out on me within two years. Broke the screen abroad, had it fixed in two hours at a local apple place. 

Not a fun game or geek machine, but the balanced hardware and software (and I run windows in bootcamp as well) makes it a sure fire winner).  Windows 7 on a MacBook pro works a whole lot better than windows 7 on my pimp Sony laptop because it never ever crashes. 

This balance between hardware and software is the sweet spot that drives the increasing market share amongst professionals.

[HTPC4ME]

Windows 7 on a MacBook pro works a whole lot better than windows 7 on my pimp Sony laptop because it never ever crashes. 

never heard such a thing...
is that for desktops as well?
How come?

[jmone]

Well sort of but not really.  I wanted a small tough ultra portable and the Mac Book Air 11" was exactly what I needed so I made my first Apple purchase and on Day 1 scrubbed off OSX and just run a single Win7 partition (so it really is a Win Book Air).  It's fine as a Win7 Box but keep in mind that as Windows is not Apples focus you come across a few niggles:
1) Key Mapping - It's just different and you have to try to remember what some of the combos are to get say PrtScrn
2) Drivers - Apple really does not keep the drivers pumping out for Windows so for the GPU (nvidia in my case) you need to dig around to find compatible drivers or hack the install scripts and then put up with the instability this can bring (for a while my MBA would BSOD the PC on all YouTube videos for some reason).  Another example is the TouchPad (HW or driver?) sends me spare and goes "odd" needing a reboot from time to time.

Apart from these niggles, the MBA is a great piece of industrial design, but now that other mfr have produced similar designs I'd buy one of these instead.  It not that you can't do it, its just you are better off buying stuff designed for Windows if that is what you want to run.

[InflatableMouse]

What is not in any of these stats are the (home built) NAS's, HTPC's or home servers running Linux because they never browse the web or are in any other way counted as 'market share'. They are invisible unless someone runs a poll asking about those specifically.

If you look at those segments specifically, they are running Linux mostly and that is a large market currently untapped.

[Visth]

never heard such a thing...
is that for desktops as well?
How come?

Hardware is stable on the MacBook pro. The endless list of drivers on my Sony caused various issues, including crashes. Temperature on my Sony would go up to fried egg ranges with intensive use of the dual graphic cards. I would see some kind of blue screen of death type crash once a week initially, then once a month after some driver updates. Now, after my second graphics card in the Sony has died, I can only run the on board graphics which suck. It still crashes. Could be just this laptop of course, but when researching this online, I found hundreds of people with similar complaints.  It has likely to do with the lack off thorough testing of the hardware they put together. That is exactly the strength of MacBooks.  They are all the same.

Desktops? I dunno. I run windows 7 regularly on my iMac in bootcamp as well. Runs great, never crashes. Is that what you were asking?

Touch pad is a bit weird to use in windows. I use a mouse. Keyboard mapping is fixed in windows itself, never gives me issues. Prtscr, I have not used in a while...  Graphic cards work fine (nvidea), but the air might have something special.

[JimH]

Statcounter reports that Win7 now has a 50% market share, WinXP about 30%, and OSX still under 10%.

Via Engadget and CNET:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1045_3-57464649/windows-7-on-majority-of-pcs-for-the-first-time/

[jgreen]

I'm still running a laptop with XP (sp2) and still use it from time to time.  Interestingly (to me), seven years of performance enhancements in MC have made a HUGE difference when running v17 on this old machine.  Biggest shortcoming is it won't read 3gb GPT volumes.

[BartMan01]

Glynor my friend, where are you getting this?  I'm not aware Apple ever claimed to have 90% of ANYTHING (exepting maybe chutzpah).

Regarding the "high end PC" argument, the former Steve Jobs was a master of this.  PCs costing more than $1,000 are "high end", but not PCs costing more than $5,000.

What you have to consider here is how the market is sliced and diced.  You can barely touch a mac for less than $1000 (was even harder back in 2010), while at the same time most PC's are (as Glynor put it), in a race to the bottom.  Most of what are selling are priced below 1k.  Apple wins the over 1k category by being the only company able to convince the average home user to stand in line to cough up over 1k on a personal machine.  The 'non average' users with over 1k machines are building their own and aren't being counted, and business only spend that much on a comparatively handful of users that really need a power house workstation (or the higher-ups that want bragging rights).

As to the 'Apple tax', if you truly spec-ed out an identical system the extra you pay for a Mac isn't that high on day of release.  Where they get you is when over time the cost of the parts continues to fall, Apple holds their price at what was competitive initially and does not usually adjust for what is competitive now.  They typically only price adjust when the next model is released.  The Mac Pros are the worst about this as they use parts with higher initial cost that devalue significantly over time.

[JimH]

Apple still around 7%.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41176916