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2% of an Apple is better than no Apple at all

schwern on 2004-10-08T20:44:44

I'm reading a Month with a Mac and the "Apple has 2% of the market" pseudo-fact has come up again. Folks sure like to toss this around. Does this have any basis in fact? I've heard it for years and years and years no matter if Apple is doing well or not, so I doubt it. Or is it that even if Apple doubles its sales they're so small compared to Windows that it doesn't even make a dent? Can this sort of thing even be accurately measured? If so, who does the measuring? Are they just looking at what gets sold? Browser stats (in which case it does appear that it is true)? What if it was broken down by communities (thinking of the rapidly growing number of Apple laptops at OSCON)? What if you removed people who have no choice in what they use (ie. work machines)? What if you removed machines that predate Apple's most recent resurgance? Inquiring minds want to know!

But what are everyone else's numbers?

brian_d_foy on 2004-10-08T21:40:33

Last time I ran into this (a couple years ago), I actually looked up the numbers. I forget the source. Apple was somewhere around 4%, and was the sixth largest computer maker. You also have to consider that Microsoft, selling no computers, is 0%. The remaining market was split between five big names (Dell, HP, Toshiba, Gateway, Compaq, IBM, I think), so no one had over something like 15%.

Re:But what are everyone else's numbers?

ziggy on 2004-10-09T05:09:58

You also have to consider that Microsoft, selling no computers, is 0%.
That's a bit disingenuous. They may not sell boxen, but they still own the platforms -- the OS, the development platform, and the office productivity platform. And, through events like WinHEC, they also dictate the components on the platform that those six vendors commoditize.

Re:But what are everyone else's numbers?

pudge on 2004-10-12T21:38:00

Yes, but it is also a bit disingenuous to say that Microsoft is #1, which I think was the point.

Sales vs. Market size

ziggy on 2004-10-09T05:35:10

The biggest argument against the "single digit market share" myth I've come across is simple deconstruction of that oft-cited yet meaningless statistic.

The single digit market share is based on sales volume. In terms of units shipped, Macs make up a small share of sales in any given period. But that's not particularly interesting. Some better questions are, "so what?", and "what's different about Macs and Mac buyers?" (For example, many have argued that Mac users buy machines less frequently than PC users, and user their machines much longer than PC users do. So there is less churn to drive Apple's sales compared to, say, Dell, as reflected by this 2% stat.)

The only number that's really useful is the size of the market for Macs, not the percentage of Mac sales as measured by the total number of Mac+PC sales. Since we can't measure the one, we measure the other as a best guess. But that's like measuring lines of source code as a proxy to measure code complexity. Sure, there may be a relationship there, but it's tangential at best.

The 2% figure is not indefensible

btilly on 2004-10-09T16:49:45

In browser statistics for years, I've seen figures for Macs that are close to 2%. A couple of years ago it was below 2%. Now it is above. Are these figures really accurate? Not entirely, and they'll vary significantly from site to site. But the consistency with which they are close to 2% strongly suggests that somewhere near 2% of web browsers (which should be a pretty good cross-section of computer users) are on macs.

For the first example that I found through Google, take a look at who visits w3schools. You'll find that from March 2003 to the end of 2003, mac usage there climbed from 1.8% to 2.3%. This year it has climbed from 2.4% to 2.6%. If it continues that, and that reflects the whole market accurately, perhaps some day people will call it 3% of the market. (Though people's views have inertia - probably won't happen until well after it is true.)

Another random example gives 2.4%. I don't know what we get at work, but I think that it was near 2%. And then these guys claim to get 3%, I don't know what their traffic looks like though.