After a Decade, Mac Sales Again Top 10% 410
GMGruman writes "The last time Apple's Mac sales accounted for more than 10 percent of the U.S. PC market was 1991. This spring, Apple finally returned to that market share high, with 10.7 percent of all U.S. PC sales, according to both IDC and Gartner. That's a major reversal from its 2004 share of under 2 percent. The sales report comes after some other good news this week for Apple: A third of big businesses now let employees choose a Mac as their PC — and more than half choose the Mac."
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Re:Clueless (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, nothing says "locked down" more than bundling an IDE with your OS, along with GCC, LLVM, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby...
Re:2011 - 1991 = 20. (Score:2, Informative)
For large enough businesses you would just get one or two guys trained as certified Apple techs and they can then order replacement parts, direct from Apple to have on hand. It's not that big a deal. I investigated doing just this for a smaller firm I was a part of, but when an Apple store opened up less than a mile away it didn't make sense anymore.
http://www.apple.com/support/programs/
Re:Of course, back in the early 90s (Score:5, Informative)
They were marketing some of their Macs/Powerbooks as if they could run MS-DOS programs. This somewhat helped. That was false.
You are mistaken. In the 90s some Macs came with a x86 coprocessor card, it was basically a PC in a slot. So yes, Apple did have Macs that could run MS-DOS and Windows just fine back in the 90s.
Fast forward to now, since the x86 macs, they can finally actually run MS-DOS programs. (boot disk of course)
That is also mistaken. You can dual boot or use a virtual machine. As a matter of fact the virtual machine software on the Mac can run Windows from that dual boot partition or a more typical VM filesystem file(s). So if you want to conveniently run some office type app on the Mac desktop you can do so, and when you want to run a game and get full performance you can dual boot rather than emulate.
Re:When you don't have as much, buy for durability (Score:0, Informative)
I'm sorry are you talking about things like iMACs? We have about 400 on our campus and over the past 3 years we've had a failure rate of about 32%, compared with a failure rate of about 30% for our 7-8 year old dell 270s. Apple makes shitty hardware which is prone to heat failure and cost a butt load to fix and replace.
I've submitted several reports to my manger and directors regarding the MASSIVE costs of supporting MACs in the classroom and the best response I've gotten back is "Ohhhh, shinny" or "It's a mac they never fail." Yeah, bullshit.
Re:It's not as impressive as it seems... (Score:4, Informative)
It would be interesting to see how Apple stacks up in Asia, where the PC market is still growing at 12% per year..
They are selling like hotcakes:
Overseas growth driving Mac sales as US consumers hold out for new models [appleinsider.com]
In the March quarter, Apple reported 28 percent growth in Mac sales for a total of 3.76 million units. In the Asia Pacific region, Mac sales grew 76 percent year over year.
Asia becomes fastest-growing Mac market [e27.sg]
The company reported a 160% year-on-year jump in Asian Mac sales after selling a record-breaking 3.47 million computers in its third quarter ended June 26.