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Apple approaches 3% market share

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On December 14, 2006, 11:31 AM EST

Is Apple's odd and sometimes confusing marketing getting the job done? According to the IDC, it is. Factoring in many things, such as Apple's switch to Intel processors, the immense popularity of the iPod, easier developer adoption of OS X and many others, Apple is seeing good market gains. By the end of this year, they'll have around a 3% stake in the desktop market, perhaps rising to 4% a year from now. While that number is pretty small, Apple saw a long slump in which adoption of Macs was almost non existent. The recent surge in sales isn't going unnoticed by anyone, especially not Apple:

In announcing Apple's fourth-quarter earnings, Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, said that the company had seen an "unprecedented demand" for its Mac line in the fourth quarter, selling 1.61 million Macs—the most ever in a single quarter.
The gap between PCs and Macs has been narrowing rapidly the past year, and is likely to continue to close. Given the near fanaticism that many Mac users have, Apple's biggest challenge is convincing PC users to “switch”. Their commercials and other propaganda, while often appearing condescending to many, seem to be working. More competition is always a good thing.

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black_death
on December 14, 2006
4:10 PM
"Given the near fanaticism that many Mac users have, Apple's biggest challenge is convincing PC users to “switch”. Their commercials and other propaganda, while often appearing condescending to many, seem to be working."Most of Apple's commercials make claims that it's easier to do stuff with OSX, I may not have all the intelligence and expertise of Apple's marketing team that has gotten them 1% more marketshare over a year by going out of their way to bad mouth Microsoft but if your commercials for an Operating System talk about it's applications rather than its features then maybe you truely have nothing good to say about it? Not to quesiton Apple's logic or anything but Windows has exponentially more applications than Mac and if you have more companies making similar products then you have a greater chance of finding the right one rather than lets say your only options for software being Adobe and the same company that made your computer therefore really it's easier to make photo albums, home videos, etc. on Windows. Aren't there laws against false advertising?[Edited by black_death on 2006-12-14 17:29:17]

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peas
on December 16, 2006
2:34 AM
Apple has always used false advertising, all the way back to the 80's when they ran ads claiming that they had the best-selling computer. In fact, the Commodore Vic-20 and C64 outsold the Apple II by wide margins.That's the nature of marketing, telling half-truths and spinning the facts. To their credit, Apple has done a good Job (har har) at weasling more market share from the less-informed.

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