In other words, there's a lot of room for Apple to expand without gouging Microsoft and Windows PC makers, which will also probably keep growing, albeit at a slower pace from a larger base.įinally, Apple's software could turn the Mac into a phenomenon again, perhaps even in corporations. A tiny nick to Dell and HP is gravy for Jobs. PC market is so large - 65.5 million were sold in 2006 - that picking up a percentage point of share for Apple, which last year sold about 3.1 million Macs, means its unit sales would jump 20 to 25 percent.Īnd the Mac business is already quite profitable, so the incremental sales yield even better margins.

Having its own flashy stores helps, of course, as does its clever advertising.īut more important, you also can see why even modest gains translate into outsized growth in Cupertino. Apple has a 15 percent market share of PCs sold at retail and online, according to NPD.

The bulk of Macs are purchased by consumers and students who make their own buying decisions rather than take what an employer issues. Nor has it ever targeted big business, other than publishers and creative departments. Apple ( Charts, Fortune 500) has always pitched them primarily as consumer products, and they're designed with the creative individual - not the corporate IT department - in mind.Īpple doesn't even pretend to compete for the corporate servers that are technically considered PCs because of their internal design those account for about a fifth of the market. 'A market share in the mid single digits isn't even table scraps compared to the combined force of all those Windows PC makers.' But if you parse the market, you realize that Apple's seemingly min-uscule share is much, much greater in the slices it has targeted.įor one thing, Apple's PCs are truly personal. Mac sales have grown at triple the rate of the rest of the PC industry since last fall, propelling it into third place in the U.S., behind Dell ( Charts, Fortune 500) and Hewlett-Packard ( Charts, Fortune 500). It roared back in the quarter that ended in June to reclaim its status as the company's largest revenue source and, at long last, break that 5 percent share barrier, according to IDC. While Apple has been firing on all cylinders, and the iPhone is selling hundreds of thousands of units a month, its Macintosh business is the hottest line of all. After all, the stripling iPod and iTunes Music Store were holding almost Microsoftian sway in their realms, and the iPhone already was the most ballyhooed new gadget since the transistor radio.īut a funny thing has happened over the past couple of quarters. market (nor more than 3 percent worldwide), would no longer be front and center. The new name seemed to concede the obvious: The company's PC business, which for well over a decade couldn't garner even 5 percent of the U.S.

Mac computers 2007