Apple computers' popularity growing at colleges and universities

For anyone trying to figure out Apple's recent boom in Macintosh popularity, look no farther than your local college or university. This article in the Pioneer Press notes repeated instances of Macs growing on campuses from 5% or less five years ago to market shares of 10% to 36% with students today. A sidebar to the article listed even more examples, including Dartmouth (43% Macs), University of Virginia (30% Macs), Cornell (21%), and Wilkes University (planned to be 100% Apple by 2010). If you're an Apple investor or a Mac owner, it's all good -- and bodes well for Apple's fiscal Q4 earnings.



UPDATE: The Register today notes the same phenomenon occurring in the open source industry. And it cites a remarkable number that perhaps I don't really understand, but I'll cite it anyway: that 20% of Office revenue now comes from Macs (probably because Office for Mac has no huge quantity or bundle discounts like the Windows version does)? Yikes!

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Macintosh

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macintosh

2.35 million Macs in Q4FY07?

Scott Moritz at TheStreet.com claims he has heard from a mole inside Apple that the company will sell about 2.35 million Macs this quarter, which is about 400,000 more than analyst estimates. That's 210,000 above what my model says too. Wow.

When a window of Mac opportunity closes, several doors open

[Photo featured on the front of Sunday's New York Times]

This weekend's New York Times had what I thought was a seriously flawed article written by Randall Stross titled, A Window of Opportunity for Macs, Soon to Close. In that article, Stross trots out the old canard of Apple's three percent market share in the PC industry, and blames it all on Apple missing an opportunity to distribute its wares through Best Buy and other big box retailers when Windows Vista was sucking wind (i.e., most of this year). He also adds the following throw-away:

Apple has not even begun to try to re-enter another domain from which it had withdrawn its Mac sales teams: large corporations. Given such strategic decisions, the Mac has limited room to expand.

With that out of the way, Stross declares that that improvements in Vista will soon lock Apple out of the market because it will become unstoppable. Cue the Darth Vader theme, end of story.

So I was most amused this morning to read a series of headlines that seem to refute this screed, I'll just run down three of them:

• Apple's market share is rising. Ars Technica notes recent studies that say Apple's US notebook computer market share was 17% in the last quarter, and 28% of prospective buyers are planning to buy an Apple notebook in the next 90 days. That doesn't sound like retail channels are standing in the way of those buyers.


• Switching trends are getting stronger. Jason Fry over at the Wall Street Journal considered switching to a Mac last week and asked for reader feedback. This week, he writes that readers pushed him overwhelmingly to make the switch -- and in the process cited Vista as the final straw that was pushing them out of the Microsoft camp.


• Corporate use is growing despite Stross's arguments. Roger Ehrenberg at Information Arbitrage notes that consumers are forcing IT to accept Macs as corporate platforms because they just work better, in contrast to the typical "Do only what we let you, otherwise it might break!" IT philosophy. He concludes saying that corporate Mac adoption is "nothing if not inevitable."

But the first and best rebuttal to Stross's article came when I opened the Times newspaper on Sunday, and I was greeted with a large front page photo of a woman considering preventive surgery for possible future cancer. The article wasn't about computers or technology, but the photo (shown at the top of this article) told a very compelling story about Apple's increasing influence with consumers: she was using a MacBook Pro to do her research.

Technorati Tags:
Apple, Marketing, Randall Stross, New York Times, Roger Ehrenberg, Macintosh

Apple blows out estimates again

UPDATE: Well, for once I overestimated iPod sales, but only as the result of the NPD market share update on January 4. Apple, Inc. reported earnings after the stock market close, and they actually only sold a few more than 21 million iPods (for very large values of only). That's up 50% year over year in units and a 24% increase in revenue. I also missed on computer units, overestimating notebook sales by 300,000 or so. But my biggest surprise was the increase in net margin to over a billion dollars, which rose from 9% of revenues to 14%, causing my estimate of $796 million to look positively gutless.

So what does it all mean? Well, here's a fairly mind-blowing thought: Apple sold nearly one-quarter of the 86 million iPods in the world today just in the fourth quarter. No matter what Business 2.0 asserts, that's not slowing growth. And while we'll undoubtedly see some change in mix with the introduction of the iPhone in very late Q2 (more likely Q3), I wouldn't bet on growth slowing soon. After all, while the iPhone may need a lot of refining to meet FCC and Cingular requirements, Apple has no such restrictions on marketing a WiFi-enabled touch-screen iPod without cell phone capabilities. And the year has just gotten started.

Full disclosure: I own some Apple stock.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Financial analysis, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, MacBook, Macintosh