*blink*

[kickaha]

Apple announced earnings tonight.

2.1M Macs sold this past quarter.

According to this here article at the NY Times yesterday, "Gartner forecast that Apple would grow more than 37 percent based on expected shipments of 1.3 million computers, for an 8.1 percent share of the domestic market."

Let's adjust, assuming Gartner's estimate of total sales is accurate...

8.1% = 1.3M/X

X = 16.05M

2.1/16.05M = 13.1%


...


Wow. They broke 10%, and handily. I've said for years, that I'd be thrilled if Apple had 10% of the US market, and stayed there. Now, 20% doesn't look out of the realm of reason. Dayum.

Take out massitude bottom-budget cubicle-filling PC orders, and... that's a serious chunk of the consumer market.

Just, wow.


Edit: If today's after-hours nearly 7% boost to AAPL holds, when the market opens in the morning, Apple will have a larger market cap than IBM or Intel.

Jeebus.

Comments

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Gartner's figures from the beginning of the quarter had projected sales of Macs *and* projected total sales of PCs. When you update to actual sales of Macs, you gotta update to actual total sales as well.

Granted, total PC sales aren't included in the Apple article, and neither IDC nor Gartner is providing those numbers yet to non-subscribers. But Dell's numbers were way up this quarter too, which suggests to me that the overall market has grown at the same time as Apple's raw numbers.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations, extrapolating from IDC's* numbers here: http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/14535/dell_apple_see_computer_sales_gains

have a total US market of 17.85M units, giving Macs a market share for the quarter of 11.76%. Still pretty sweet, but 20% seems still out of the realm for now. OTOH, since Apple owns the OS as well as the hardware, their revenue market share is arouond twice their physical unit share, and there's your 20% right there.

*I used IDC's numbers because they looked more likely to have been updated with recent data than Gartner's, which looked eerily similar to their projections of three months ago. Also they supported my point better. :)

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

"you gotta update to actual total sales as well."

Hence my caveat that of *assuming* that Gartner's final sales numbers were correct. ;) (It's okay to wing it if you tell the audience you're doing so.)

My 20% was a long-term prediction, given that I didn't seriously think they'd hit *10%* for another couple of years. The growth curve in the past 18-24 months is just nuts. If it continues like this, or, god forbid, gains further steam, that 20% could happen in the timeframe that I expected them to hit 10%. (Not that I think that'll happen, to be honest, this curve should flatten out sometime. Really. Any day now.)

And oh yeah, when you're talking revenue %, they just stomp the playing field.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Ah, but I was calling you out *for* assuming Gartner's final sales numbers were correct, given how far off they were between their Mac projections versus actual. When you tell me you're winging it, you don't get to complain when I call you on it. :)

I'm actually waiting for total PC sales to start leveling off--it has been several years since hardware performance increases actually translated into an improved ability for Joe User to get his job done. Looks like Vista's insane hardware requirements prevented that from happening this year, but I bet it happens in the next couple, once everyone who *needs* Vista has it.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

WhatEVer... sheesh.

You seriously underestimate the ability of OS manufacturers (one in particular) to add wasted cycles, don't you? :D Agreed though, that for most users the current trend of "Oh look! Another toolbar!" is a pretty pathetic waste of the hardware. If we've got cycles to spare, they should be used for, oh, I dunno... constantly making incremental backups? Observing work patterns and creating live workspaces? Something *useful*?

Actually, I suspect that it will level off, in that gaming consoles have seriously intruded into the traditional high-end PC gaming realm, and it's that high-end gamer niche market that has driven a lot of the hardware churn for the past decade. As those folks are split between the insane-in-the-game PC group and the consolers, that niche is going to get even smaller. Heck, it's been proportionally shrinking for a while now, but I think it will accelerate.

Which means... who's left to drive HW needs? What segment of the general computing population will break out to be the next big group of whiners? :)

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

I don't make the rules of debate, dude. I just twist 'em to the breaking point. :)

No, I just think it's going to be another 3-5 years before there's another Windows client to up the HW bar yet again at the OS level.

Hell, the 360 and PS3 might even be near the top end of what the software manufacturers want to deliver, polygon- and framerate-wise. (Based on no evidence, I grant, but once you're approaching photorealism at 60 fps, who cares anymore?)

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

The real question, of course, is 'why do you care?' Beyond the 'I have stock' thing, I mean; I know for you it's more than that. :p

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is. Personally, it's nice to see elegance and competency actually get rewarded for once.

Somewhere in the last couple of years, the general consumer population went from "Computers are skary, fragile things" to "Wow, this actually works like a real tool." - and they're responding to form as a reflection of function. (It's never been an either/or issue, except to those who can't see the other side of the fence, and insist it's a chasm.)

This is a hellaciously good thing, IMO. It means that maybe, just maybe, we can start moving forward as an industry on actually getting somewhere, instead of just reinventing the wheel every couple of years in new contexts. Because really, that's lame.

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

Getting somewhere like where?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

How about a real, honest to god dynamic programming environment that offers live updating of code on the fly? (We had that in 1980: Smalltalk)

Or maybe a handheld computer that *isn't* trying to be a clone of a desktop OS, to the point that it is more or less a horrible hack that is barely usable as a remote access device?

Windows is, simply put, a shoddy UI over a crappy OS running on budget hardware produced by manufacturers racing to the bottom. The fact that much of the Windows 'ecosystem' is comprised of creating solutions for problems that Windows *creates* should say something. Think about what might be arriving in the market if all those folks and resources were freed up to do something *new* instead of just trying to plug the holes in the Titanic. It's just a colossal waste of time and money.

Consumers are finally figuring out that computers *don't* have to be virus-ridden, fragile, OMG-don't-touch-that-you-don't-know-what-will-break products. I have literally had people tell me, quite seriously, that Windows *must* be the technological pinnacle, because if MS, with all its resources, couldn't produce better, no one could.

Well, now they're waking up, and realizing that is complete BS. There are options out there. Apple is *one* of them, (Ubuntu is a rather nice distro for folks looking for a free OS, IMO) but in my experience and opinion, it's simply the one that works, and lets me do my job.

Which is, of course, making new things. ;)

So yeah, I have a vested interest in seeing the industry steer away from the mutual masturbation quagmire that MS has put it into, and start looking up a bit to see what's possible when you're not bogged down in fixing the basics.

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

Hehe, someone wanted a rant, I could tell. ;)

And I've never had the "virus-ridden, fragile, OMG-don't-touch-that-you-don't-know-what-will-break" experience, to be honest. I think that kind of thing is related to the popularity of the platform (viruses) and the idiocy of the users, which is something that could still affect Macs.

And the programming environment isn't really going to affect anything outside of the programming community. I'm kind of surprised you still bring it up, as I'm sure you know it doesn't affect the vast majority of users. ;)

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Naw, no rant wanted, but since you *asked*... ;)

I know you probably haven't had that experience - you're a *techie*. Most people are like my landlord - he bought his machine, he tried to keep it up to date (and really, why should you have to even do that?), and it just got worse and worse, until he decided to buy a new one. I took a look at it, and dear god it was bad. I asked him why he hadn't run a particular update "Because I was afraid it would break it worse." Valid fear, given my experiences at work.

And you're dead wrong - imagine no DLL hell, no reboots to update critical system resources, and apps that automatically gain new functionality as the underlying libraries are updated, no recompile needed. Those *directly* affect every user out there. (And most of that is available now on the Mac...)

Thinking that an improved programming environment won't affect the end users is thinking too small - I'm not talking about small, incremental changes to an IDE, I'm talking about completely rethinking how an OS and user space work, and directly supporting them in the languages. .NET is, on paper, an attempt to do this, but they're so hobbled by backwards compatibility that if they ever manage to pull it off in a meaningful way, it'll take another decade. They're their own anchor, as well as everyone else's.

Well, almost everyone's. ;)

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'DLL hell.' And honestly reboots are technically not neccessary to update, at least since XP, but they tend to require them anyway because...well, because they can't really program well enough to be sure it works without a reboot. That does annoy me. :p

I would HATE a machine or software that automatically updated everything in the background. Hate. I want total control over my machine, which is why Google's plan for the future of computing makes me very angry (not to mention the reason for it). I tend to think most users would be confused by a new feature suddenly appearing in their software.

So what's your reimagining of OSs? :)

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

DLL Hell: when you end up with multiple versions of the same dynamic library, and the system can't keep them straight without, for instance, embedding the version number into the name... which essentially makes it a static linker with shared file space. Or, you upgrade a library, and no existing application can take advantage of the bug fixes without a recompile, or at least, a relinking. Lame.

And no, what I mean by automatic updating is things like: I can upgrade, replace, or downgrade the HTML core of my web browser, and all apps that use it get the same behavior for free, no work needed. Or, Apple can upgrade a system library, say for instance, the font panel, and *every* application gets the new behavior for free. (This is one reason why every MacOS X upgrade has gotten *faster* than the previous release - as the core pieces are optimized, every single app gets the added speed boost, without the developers having to do anything, or the users having to go get a new version.)

Now here's where it gets fun - say the new version of the library introduces some incompatibility with the old library. No problem - the versioning is intelligent at the loader, and it grabs the appropriate compatible library version. Apps that don't rely on a specific version level get the newest library - those that require a specific version get the one they need. All automatically. The user doesn't have to do squat, but install the upgrades they choose, and the developer doesn't have to do anything but say which library and version level they need - everything *else* is handled automatically.

OS reimagining? Hmm - I really miss the NewtOS's concept of a data soup - there were no files, just a database of data that was tagged with datatypes, keywords, etc... ie, it was metadata before metadata was cool. Any app could request data that it could handle, and would get access to it. We're starting to see bits and pieces of this in other OSs now, a decade+ later, but it was pretty slick.

IIRC, it was Plan9 that had the processor cloud, where the microkernel could be ported to a ton of different architectures, and they could share in the workload across devices, the network, whatever. Neat concept, with some obvious blocks, but some definite advantages.

As for the UI, while I like the noun/verb approach currently in use (when applied methodically, and not ad hoc), gestures have a bright future, methinks, particularly on dedicated devices or units where input methods are constrained.

In the language level, we *seriously* need to stop dicking around with half-assed solutions like Java, and just get our asses over to a fully dynamic language. The only thing that's been preventing is developer inertia of not wanting to learn a new methodology. We have the cycles. Let's use them.

I'm sure I could come up with more... :)