Report: Mac Spending Up Despite Poor Outlook for Consumer Electronics

[AppleInsider]

Changewave's latest customer surveys report that general consumer electronic spending is low and trending lower, but that Apple's Mac sales are up and rising by a significant margin.

The group surveyed 4,416 participants in August to find that only 15% report plans to spend more on electronics over the next 90 days, while 34% plan to spend less. Changewave's surveys are held monthly and serve as an accurate overall barometer of future spending.

When asked where they planned to spend their back to school money, 8% said they would spend more money at the online Apple Store than they did last year, while 4% said they would spend less money there. Changewave noted that made Apple "far and away the biggest winner" of the sites respondents mentioned.

The group said participants' plans to buy new PC remained weak, with just 8% saying they would buy a new laptop in the next three months, and only 5% planning to buy a new desktop, a drop of 2 points from a year ago.

Of those planning a purchase however, 34% of laptop buyers and 30% planning to get desktop computer said they would be getting a Mac. That marks a steady rise from around 18% in the 2006 back to school season and the 23% to 28% reported last year.

Apple beat out Dell in forecasted sales in the US consumer survey, with the top PC maker only getting 28% of planned laptops and 28% of planned desktop PC purchases. HP ranked with 20% for laptops and 17% for desktops.

A full 17% of iPhone 3G owners said they are now more likely to buy an Apple laptop or desktop based on their experience with the phone, compared to just 1% who reported they were less likely to consider a Mac in the future.

"The key takeaway from these survey results," Changewave noted, "is that consumer electronics spending will remain weak over the next 90 days. The one bright spot is Apple, whose Mac sales are outperforming and are poised to once again reach new all-time highs."

[Ireland]

Well I'm buying a lot of Apple crap lately, and I love it!

[captaincore]

Mac owners are usually the upscale/spendy crowd.

[iVlad]

Originally Posted by captaincore

Mac owners are usually the upscale/spendy crowd.

Yep, spendy and in debt.

[Ireland]

Originally Posted by iVlad

Yep, spendy and in debt.

I'd be in that group!

[solipsism]

Ars is reporting that Gartner has Apple as the #6 largest PC vendor in the world. Earlier this year Apple became the 4th largest PC vendor. If Apple ever beats out HP as the largest PC vendor in the world they will still only have a fourth of the OS marketshare of MS.

Originally Posted by iVlad

Yep, spendy and in debt.

I thought they had more of the disposable income crowd.

[SpamSandwich]

Originally Posted by Ireland

Well I'm buying a lot of Apple crap lately, and I love it!

Sellers of crap thank you!

[JeffDM]

I wouldn't be surprised. Apple has managed to quite handily beat the economic "softness" for the first two quarters of the year.

[shanmugam]

tomorrow Stocks will tank on Lehmann brothers bankruptcy worst is not over yet, this holiday/quarter it is hard for every company including Apple.

gas price still is the same even with large inventory... where is the end?

[bugsnw]

Originally Posted by JeffDM

I wouldn't be surprised. Apple has managed to quite handily beat the economic "softness" for the first two quarters of the year.

Exactly. And have you seen young kids today? They don't appear to be cutting back any. We have a new generation of spenders that should make us look like pikers.

That said, I eat at Apple's buffet as well. The iPod touch was too much to resist.

I think Apple is going to reap the rewards of all these small business/corporate sales. These are repeat customers who buy dozens/hundreds/thousands of Macs at a time and upgrade frequently. And some are even resistant to economic downturns.

Good times!

[Booga]

Originally Posted by solipsism

Ars is reporting that Gartner has Apple as the #6 largest PC vendor in the world. Earlier this year Apple became the 4th largest PC vendor. If Apple ever beats out HP as the largest PC vendor in the world they will still only have a fourth of the OS marketshare of MS.


I thought they had more of the disposable income crowd.

Let Microsoft have the rest. Apple already makes 1/4 the profit of Microsoft. If they had the kind of market share you suggest, they'd be much more profitable than Microsoft. With that kind of money, they could just keep improving the user experience until Microsoft becomes completely irrelevant.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by Booga

Let Microsoft have the rest. Apple already makes 1/4 the profit of Microsoft. If they had the kind of market share you suggest, they'd be much more profitable than Microsoft. With that kind of money, they could just keep improving the user experience until Microsoft becomes completely irrelevant.

I agree, but too many people 'round these here parts think that MS will be falling in a few years. If my rough calculations are anywhere near accurate Apple would have about 3x the unit share of the #2 PC OEM and probably about 6x the market cap of MS before they'd have more OS marketshare than MS.

[nagromme]

iPhone satisfaction is unheard of! I wonder if the early 3G hiccups (AT&T and App Store related) apply to the time period surveyed? It would seem so since they specifically say iPhone 3G.

[S10]

Originally Posted by nagromme

iPhone satisfaction is unheard of! I wonder if the early 3G hiccups (AT&T and App Store related) apply to the time period surveyed? It would seem so since they specifically say iPhone 3G.

You read to many blogs and forums. They give a distorted view on the reality of things: Most people (99,99%), especially when satisfied, have no need nor desire to read or write on blogs/forums.
Therefore what may seem like a huge problem, in reality is almost not noticeable.

[wraithofwonder]

Originally Posted by captaincore

Mac owners are usually the upscale/spendy crowd.

I, err, must be the exception. I am anything but this.

[cameronj]

Originally Posted by nagromme

iPhone satisfaction is unheard of! I wonder if the early 3G hiccups (AT&T and App Store related) apply to the time period surveyed? It would seem so since they specifically say iPhone 3G.

Heh. If you spend your time reading web sites where people go to complain about things, of course you think no one is happy. But if you don't realize that those type of forums are not the average user, well, you need to adjust your data sources.

[MacTel]

Call me crazy but I'm liking the new systems from Dell. The mini laptop and their mini desktop are nice systems.

Apple's Mac Mini is looking pretty old and uninspiring at this point in time. Even with the Macbook Air Apple really has no mini laptop utilizing the Atom processor. Will we see one soon?

I see a Mac Mini form factor update and and mini laptop entry as pushing Apple's numbers further or at least sustaining their current growth rate.

[hittrj01]

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

Apple has had 25 years to gain that Market Share. The Lisa was revolutionary.

It's Apple's constant grip on Secrecy and Control that has held them back.

I love Apple for their products...

But I dislike their complete lack of tolerance for anyone that happens to stand in Steve's way.

IMHO this is why we don't have the market share we deserve today.

It was proven again this weekend for Apple to not let a Podcast software in it store. Complete lacks of freedom to program as you wish even when you stay within Apple's SDK agreement.

Apple (FOR THE FIRST TIME) has competition at its front doors with an open platform and they proceed with business as usual. Programmers will start to migrate to the other App Stores popping up and we'll be left with GPS that does nothing than give us a dot to show us where we are.

That is not why i purchased my iPhone 3G.

Rip me apart but it's the truth.

I disagree. Look at what happened to Apple when Steve left. They went in the tank, and had to be bailed out by none other than Microsoft to even stay afloat. Since Steve has come back, Apple has been thriving.

I would say that Apple has done a good job at chipping away at MS's market share. Microsoft had/has a near monopoly of the entire market, without a clear competitor for the longest time. I think we are starting to see a shift in thinking and less tolerance of less-than-stellar products. People are migrating to Apple products because they are simply better, but it is difficult to make up so much ground so quickly, it takes time, but I am confident Apple is up to the task.

P.S. About the GPS on the iPhone, TomTom and TeleNav are both working on true turn-by-turn GPS for the iPhone, and allegedly TomTom is working directly with Apple, but that has neither been confirmed nor denied, so who knows. Regardless, we should have more than just a blue dot relatively soon!

[NasserAE]

Originally Posted by iVlad

Yep, spendy and in debt.

Currently I am in the Apple spendy group. I will be joining the in debt before this year end though

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

IMHO this is why we don't have the market share we deserve today.

Apple is the 4th largest vendor in the US and their sales average 2x as much as other vendors. I think their marketshare is fine.

[Abster2core]

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

Apple has had 25 years to gain that Market Share. The Lisa was revolutionary.

It's Apple's constant grip on Secrecy and Control that has held them back.

And what major company has an open door policy?

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

I love Apple for their products...

But I dislike their complete lack of tolerance for anyone that happens to stand in Steve's way.

IMHO this is why we don't have the market share we deserve today.

I guess you were asleep for the past 25 years. And what right do you have to the use of the first-person personal pronoun?

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

It was proven again this weekend for Apple to not let a Podcast software in it store. Complete lacks of freedom to program as you wish even when you stay within Apple's SDK agreement.

Why would Apple allow something that they themselves have specifically not allowed, and for very good reasons? Perhaps you should look at the iPHone SDK License a bit more closely. Podcaster does not comply!

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

Apple (FOR THE FIRST TIME) has competition at its front doors with an open platform and they proceed with business as usual. Programmers will start to migrate to the other App Stores popping up and we'll be left with GPS that does nothing than give us a dot to show us where we are.

Name the stores. As for GPS, guess you have been asleep when those announcements were made.

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

That is not why i purchased my iPhone 3G.

So why did you?

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by Abster2core

Why would Apple allow something that they themselves have specifically not allowed, and for very good reasons? Perhaps you should look at the iPHone SDK License a bit more closely. Podcaster does not comply!

It should be noted that podcaster doesn't appear to be banned because it manages podcasts, but because it downloads podcasts. Apple's SDK has specifically forbade apps that use excessive bandwidth over the carrier's network. Even the App Store will not DL programs exceeding 10MB if you are using the carrier's network.

I pulled this from Roughly Drafted because I can't find a public copy of the iPhone SDk rules online myself:

When using cellular data, failure to ‘comply with Apple’s best practices and other guidelines on how Applications should access and use the cellular network [...] in Apple’s reasonable judgment excessively use or unduly burden network capacity or bandwidth [...] have Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality [over cellular networks]

I don't mind speculation as to the reasons why a secretive company did this or that, but every tech news site seems to heave stated as fact that Apple put the kibosh on Podcaster because it felt threatened by another Podcast manager.

[Pascal007]

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

Apple has had 25 years to gain that Market Share. The Lisa was revolutionary.

It's Apple's constant grip on Secrecy and Control that has held them back.

I love Apple for their products...

But I dislike their complete lack of tolerance for anyone that happens to stand in Steve's way.

IMHO this is why we don't have the market share we deserve today.

It was proven again this weekend for Apple to not let a Podcast software in it store. Complete lacks of freedom to program as you wish even when you stay within Apple's SDK agreement.

Apple (FOR THE FIRST TIME) has competition at its front doors with an open platform and they proceed with business as usual. Programmers will start to migrate to the other App Stores popping up and we'll be left with GPS that does nothing than give us a dot to show us where we are.

That is not why i purchased my iPhone 3G.

Rip me apart but it's the truth.

You are cutting corners here : at one point, Apple had 30 % of the market share, but of course this dwindled to an all-time low of 1 % back in 1998 or so. If you want to set your story straight, you should look from then on. If you start your analysis from 1984, you'd have to divide your analysis in chapters, one of them being "Of bloatware and misdirection (1989-1997)"

And for your analysis, this era shows that by being too public Apple almost killed itself : Pink, Taligent, Copland... and all the Mac prototypes we got to see. All of this promising "brilliant future" that never came and made new product look lacklustre, sending every one in Microsoft arms, a company who delivered on promises (at least this is what everybody thought in 1995, remember...) You might also remember that System 7 had built-in workarounds to allow applications to continue working without their third party editors having to reprogram anything (Word 5) despite these workarounds having a negative impact on usability. Apple even avoided changing the OS where it would have mattered to avoid killing third party software (Now Utilities). By doing so Apple almost killed itself (also... talk about being suicidal !)

Your description only applies to the current Apple (about 1997 to the present). Maybe Apple is being too protective, and I agree that this cannot be sustained forever... because at one point, too much secrecy will hamper market share growth. Unless Apple succeeds on transforming the computer market into a true appliance market. In this case, the future of a product will become irrelevant to the present buyer. Nobody thinks very much about the future when buying an iPod or a fridge. It is working now, it is useful now, and this is what we want in an appliance market. Computers are not appliances yet, however, hence Apple's "problem" with their current secretive strategy (notice the " " around the word problem !)

[Joseph_xxl]

It makes sense. If you don't have a lot of money to shell out, buy one product like a MAC that will LAST! No need to upgrade every 2-3 years like a lot of people do with PCs.
I'm givng my 3 year old iMac to my daughter and getting a new one but the old one runs just as well as it did 3 years ago. Not 1 single problem in 3 years.

[Abster2core]

Originally Posted by solipsism

It should be noted that podcaster doesn't appear to be banned because it manages podcasts, but because it downloads podcasts. Apple's SDK has specifically forbade apps that use excessive bandwidth over the carrier's network. Even the App Store will not DL programs exceeding 10MB if you are using the carrier's network.

I pulled this from Roughly Drafted because I can't find a public copy of the iPhone SDk rules online myself:

When using cellular data, failure to ‘comply with Apple’s best practices and other guidelines on how Applications should access and use the cellular network [...] in Apple’s reasonable judgment excessively use or unduly burden network capacity or bandwidth [...] have Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality [over cellular networks]

I don't mind speculation as to the reasons why a secretive company did this or that, but every tech news site seems to heave stated as fact that Apple put the kibosh on Podcaster because it felt threatened by another Podcast manager.

Right on.

Cellular Network:

3.3.15 If an Application requires or will have access to the cellular network, then additionally such Application:

- Must comply with Apple's best practices and other guidelines on how Applications should access and use the cellular network;

- Must not in Apple's reasonable judgment excessively use or unduly burden network capacity or bandwidth;

- May not have Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality. (Ref. iPhone SKD License)

In addition, the License specifically states, "You agree not to exploit any services provided by the SDK in any unauthorized way whatsoever, including but not limited to, by trespass or burdening network capacity."

What many fail to remember is Apple's concern about ensuring that the primary function of the iPhone is making phone calls, and their objective to keep users' costs down. That covers the need to control the use of apps that could have a detrimental effect on battery life, bandwidth, and thus their stated strategy to include Wi-Fi.

[monstrosity]

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

It's Apple's constant grip on Secrecy and Control that has held them back.

If you are an innovator, you have to keep stuff secret, simple. I have learnt this lesson the hard way.
And it's Apples 'control' that makes apples products, apple. If you need full control of your device there is always linux...
Are apple really "held back"? They dont behave like a company i would exactly describe as "held back"!
Apples 'control' is the 'third way', providing openness within a controlled environment, the best of both worlds IMO.

[elroth]

Originally Posted by captaincore

Mac owners are usually the upscale/spendy crowd.

Hey, captaincore, could you make the advertisement in your signature larger? I can't quite read it. And I love to read ads in people's posts. Thanks.

[McDave]

Originally Posted by MacOldTimer

Apple has had 25 years to gain that Market Share. The Lisa was revolutionary.

It's Apple's constant grip on Secrecy and Control that has held them back.

I love Apple for their products...

But I dislike their complete lack of tolerance for anyone that happens to stand in Steve's way.

IMHO this is why we don't have the market share we deserve today.

It was proven again this weekend for Apple to not let a Podcast software in it store. Complete lacks of freedom to program as you wish even when you stay within Apple's SDK agreement.

Apple (FOR THE FIRST TIME) has competition at its front doors with an open platform and they proceed with business as usual. Programmers will start to migrate to the other App Stores popping up and we'll be left with GPS that does nothing than give us a dot to show us where we are.

That is not why i purchased my iPhone 3G.

Rip me apart but it's the truth.

You're right, closed systems are the reason Apple doesn't have the marketshare it deserves. Just as NEC/Tosh put Sony away with their VHS openness and then, through the one of the biggest displays of commercial idiocy in recent times, allowed Sony to get back at them with the same mechanism (and a bit of brute force!) so MS have played that tactic since the mid 90s.

Unfortunately, while openness may be popular, the usefulness of the results are invariably lacking so though it has a spell of popularity that's a lot of people who are going to be very disappointed when they realise they've been had. Apples marketing is targeted at showing them just that.

It may be why Apple don't have the marketshare they deserve today but tomorrow's looking pretty good, though I'm afraid that global share is about to plummet. When the third-world cheap PCs start to roll out in force as that's not their market. All we have to decide is do we want good or popular? I think we've all made that decision some time ago.

McD

[Roger Knights]

"The key takeaway from these survey results," Changewave noted, "is that consumer electronics spending will remain weak over the next 90 days. The one bright spot is Apple, whose Mac sales are outperforming and are poised to once again reach new all-time highs."

Apple doesn't have to outrun the bear, it just has to outrun Microsoft.