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PC versus Mac Summary :
MacDailyNews is reporting some very odd numbers when they write
that the Mac has a 16% installed user base. Since the beginning of 1997 the Mac has sold
just over 27 million units and the PC has sold 1,112,000,000 units
(1.11 billion) giving the Mac an average annual market share of 2.44% over the last
8.25 years. Mac users would have to keep their Macs a really long
time and PC users would need to put their machines in the landfill at an
incredible clip to turn 2.44% annually into a current 16% installed base. In
other words, it simply isn't true. The Mac has never had better than a
11.2% share of
annual sales.
If it were true, I would feel sorry for Mac users still cooking along on
older OS 7.6 and OS 8 considering it is rare indeed to see either
software or peripherals still made for those OS's. Support on the PC
side has faded substantially for NT 4 and Windows 98, but do the test
yourself sometime and look at system requirements on boxes just for the
fun of it and note how much is still made that is compatible with those
older Windows versions (not to mention you can still easily buy parallel
port printers, PS/2 mice and keyboards, etc....ADB has gone the way of
the Dodo).
Note that thus far in 2005 Apple is on track to finally equal Mac sales
they had back in 2000 (as long as the Intel move doesn't dampen sales in
the second half of the year). For all the talk of Apple's surging
Mac sales and the halo effect of the iPod, it sure seems funny that
Apple struggles to sell as many Macs as they did five years ago.
Meanwhile the PC market has grown by 66% since 2000.
Something else I noticed that is quite interesting. Now that the PC
industry is selling about 50 million PCs every three months (this will
only keep going up too), the PC world equals all of the Macs ever sold
in that short time span. Three months of PC sales now equals twenty-one
years of Mac sales!
posted
06-05-05; updated 04-07 |