proud math graduate of a US public school. How can market share be impacted by changes in accounting procedures? Market share is based on shipped boxes irrespective of price. If you were to look at percentages of revenue, Apple has a much bigger slice of the pie because they don't sell piles of sh*t like Dull do.

First, I was being sarcastic (to the usual "stock options" talk that comes up when Apple announces earnings. Sorry if that was too far over your heads.

Second, percentage of revenue is meaningless in terms of share. Dell sells 4 times as many computers for the money Apple makes, because Apple's margins are MUCH, MUCH higher per machine. I guess this is how low it gets, ignore market share because its not climbing, but rather look at revenue share.

Third, it actually could be argued that expensing stock options could have an effect. If apple expensed stock options, they'd be lined up for a loss in the quarter (certainly less profit), rather than the $67 million they gained. As such, they'd be under more pressure to raise margins, cut costs, etc. Raising margins invoke higher prices for computers, which cuts sales. Cutting costs can mean cutting back on manufacturing (leaving themselves even MORE susceptible to supply problems), or cutting R&D projects (which means the iPod might never have been made, and the next big unknown thing gets swept under the cost-cutters scythe. This leads to less innovative and stylistic products (a more clunky notebook, like a Dell, for example), which hurts sales, and thus market share.

Or, more easily, Apple expenses options, stock tumbles due to 'losses' (which were already there, just not made during the announcements) and blown up EPS (like people really care about that, I'm sure those buying Cisco at $650 a share saw the EPS and thought it was OK), the investors kick out Jobs, and bring back Scully, or, heaven forbid, Amellio and Schindler in a dual-CEO role!

BTW, 770 out of 800 on my math SATs, so don't be dissing my math skills. I can integrate with the best of them (or at least I could before senility sunk in).


Fortunately for you, the constitution protects your right to be a wrong dumb as*!

Damn straight! otherwise GWB would be arrested by now. (Ouch, like that, I've taken a market share argument and turned it into one of those politcal bashing threads! Out of the blue! Now its a load of flip-flop Kerry vs. "See this old trailer! Its a mobile weapons lab!" Bush vs "I have no idea how to run a business, let alone a country, but I'm running for president just to make a mess of things" Nader. Damn, all we need is that wacko Perot and this would be set!).

...is always going to be less for Apple officially than what it really is because they don't count legacy machines that are still chugging away productively. We all know there's probably not a single DULL machine older than two years doing anything but drizzling toxic waste into the water table beneath a landfill.

This has always been the argument, but I think the true argument is "People upgrade their Dells every two years because they can, while Mac users need to save up for at least four years to afford to buy another Mac". I've got a Beige G3 (with a G4 card, upgrades here and there) that I've been looking to upgrade for over a year, but can't bring myself to spend the $$$$ needed for a new tower, and I don't want an AIO computer (no expandibilty and I don't want a built-in monitor). The low-cost tower. Upgradable graphics, plus a PCI slot. That's what I (and many, many, many Mac and potential Mac users) are looking for. That's what the PC users can get, which means they have no problem upgrading every couple of years. For Mac users, its a question of timing. You need to find a computer you think will last for the 5 years you'll own it saving up money for the next overpriced mac you want to buy.

Oh, and sure, you could get an iMac, but your putting half of your purchase price into a monitor that you can't use once you need to upgrade. For an eMac, that's no big deal (its a $50 monitor). But for a flat-panel iMac, its a waste of a good screen.

"People upgrade their Dells every two years because they can, while Mac users need to save up for at least four years to afford to buy another Mac"

It's more likely people upgrade because MS and game companies push for higher speeds, graphics, hard disk requirements, forcing people to put more and more $$$ in their PCs. If you want to stay current, you really have to upgrade your hardware more often.

Apple doesn't typically do that. Every couple of years they introduct a new thing that requires a big change in hardware speed (e.g. DVD movie burning), but it stays current for a longer period of time.

I wish Apple had 5% marketshare, selling 5million Macs a year, and stayed among the top 5 computer sellers.

It always seems to be something every quarter: No 15" aluminium PowerBook, or no G5 releaed, or no G5 actually shipping, or no iMac available to sell. One quarter, when all these get fixed at once, then Apple sales should go gangbusters.

[...] but I think the true argument is "People upgrade their Dells every two years because they can, while Mac users need to save up for at least four years to afford to buy another Mac".

Try, "My 2 1/2 year-old Dual-GHz G4 Quicksilver is still performing wonderfully for all the tasks I ask of it, so I have no pressing need to upgrade as of yet."

Market share is generally measured in dollar volume. Unit share is measured in units. So considering the higher dollar volume of the Apple items they would have a higher market share.

My 1 1/2 year-old 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 Dell is still performing wonderfully for all the tasks I ask of it, so I have no pressing need to upgrade as of yet. And yes, it was considerably cheaper than any comparable Mac at the time.

I like Macs and all, but why the intense hatred of Dell? It's just a computer company, same as Apple.

Maybe it's ancient history to some people, but Dell is usually singled out because way back when in 1997, when someone asked Michael Dell what would he do if he was the CEO of Apple, his response was:
"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,"
Since then Dell seems to try to copy whatever Apple does and try to take credit for it. Add to that, is the fact that, of all the Wintel manufacturers, Dell is probably the best of the absolute antithesis of Apple in that they innovate nothing, find the cheapest way to put together the lowest common denominator, and sell it as much as possible (nothing wrong with that approach, it's just quite different from perception of Apple's approach).

gateway. gtfoh.

Actually, if you look at the ROI of Dell machines in the corporate environment, they are absolutely terrible.

THe simple fact is this... Dell machines are "decent" quality machines at a very affordable price. That means all their parts are low cost. And they made a business out of making cheap systems using off-the-shelf products. That means Dell's overall quality is fairly low.

When it comes to IT departments, cost is the PRIMARY factor. So, you acquire all these cheap machines, and you "Save" the company money. ANd you look like a hero. BUT... when it comes to supporting the $#@!! machines and hiring the staff to support the $#@!! machines and trying to manage the nosy DEll sales people who come in and check how things are going. It becomes a nightmare... and your budget balloons.

I led corporate initiative to move every single system away from Dell and to IBM. I met with full resistance, but they could NOT argue with my ROI calculations. Even my "worst case" scenarios were still cheaper than Dell. I even played DEll off.. and quite simply, they jsut couldn't offer the full-service offerings IBM had at a lower cost. (Dell makes all their revenue on after-market service.)

So... Sorry Dell. You can fool corporate AMerica for only so long, before they realize that the ROI on Dell machines and the cost of support and all the hassles far outweigh the initial cost of purchase. THey're gonna move to HP or IBM.

Now there are those that have been talking about a headless iMac for sub-1000s. Now I really never cared much for the argument, but if they were to make a headless box for under $1000 with a DVI port, then I think Apple can make make marketshare climb high and potentially knock out IBM in the ratings.

The iMac can stay in its place with the head, but perhaps we could make a G5-lite of sorts.

10+% overall growth, but Apple in a less than average 9.3%. Worldwide sales non-existent. Doesn't seem like much of a comeback, and will tilt way, way down next quarter, as Apple fails to ship any imacs, and the G5s still constrained.


iMac sales appear to be neglible. Apple reported 60k G4 iMac sales during the previous quarter. This will only effect total revenues by approximately 5% assuming that the potential market doesn't opt to purchase an eMac or notebook instead. Personally after purchashing my PowerBook this spring, I've come to the conclusion I would have been better by purchasing it instead of my summer 2003 model iMac. Although the 17" screen on a PowerBook was out of my budget at that time.

The constraint of the tower G5 shipments is yet to be seen. We are seeing a prerefresh lull with last quarter's sales. It will be interesting to see how next quarter pans out with the refreshed top end towers. My guess is they will slightly exceed their stated goal of 200,000 Power Macs provided that IBM can deliver.

Has Apple as a company made a comeback? No. They still have a long way to go to get back to a 5% market share. However, they are growing at roughly the same rate as everyone else and did not loose ground this quarter. Nor do I expect them to fall further behind in the next.

I don't really understand this market share thing. know more people who now own macs than ever before. Many of my friends and relatives own Macs, yet two years ago I knew only two.

Most web sites count about 5% of hits are with a Mac based browser, which goes to show that apple achines out-live their Windows counterparts and thus the proportion of Macs/PC's in use is higher than the market share of new sales. I believe this wil change as we are reaching the point where PC's are so farst that the upgrade cultur will change.

Alas, for my site, it's only 3.4% Mac, and 84% Windows. Linux is at 0.7% and the rest are unknown... so I guess it's possible that there are more Macs than my logs are recording...

What's scary is I've had 68 visits from WebTV in the last month... I didn't know anyone still used them! It's not enough to even register 0.1% on the counter, but still worrying :)

Browser based, IE is 77%. It's nice to see Safari is higher than Omniweb (I use Omni) - so obviously I'm not responsible for all the Mac related hits :)