Apple sales statistics

Apple's puckered up tighter than a frog's ass when it comes to getting that information.

Finding all the information is a PhD degree in itself...! Sorry, can't help you mate.

This they do break down.

In their quarterly report for three months ending 12/27/08

desktop unit sales = 728,000
portables unit sales = 1,796,000

In their quarterly report for three months ending 12/29/07(the previous year)

desktop unit sales = 977,000
protables unit sales = 1,342,000

desktops down
laptops up

Yep and the conclusion we can reach is that given how the rest of the industry is sitting at nearly even desktop and laptop sales (45% - 55% respectively), we can safely assume that Apple make great laptops and poor desktops. Apple will of course read the figures to mean that people are just moving to laptops when in fact Mac users are being coerced more to laptops. In much the same way that the next sales figures will reveal that 100% of Macbook and 15" Macbook Pro owners prefer the new look.

On the other hand, if Apple were offering quad core desktops, the figures would be a lot more evenly spread as they are on the PC side of things. Apple are doing this deliberately though because they know that any quad is a pretty high end processor. The low end Core i7 and Core 2 Quad are fairly evenly matched:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/simongreen_uk/3107114721/

This means that a very cheap quad desktop will come close to the Mac Pro performance (80-90%). Apple don't like this so they stick with dual core mobile chips on the consumer 'desktops' and produce an artificial barrier between pro and non-pro suggesting that by paying double the price, you can get over double the performance. The truth is that you can get double the performance for 2/3rds of the price.

A consumer would have to be pretty stupid to see quad core PCs for £550 and dual core iMacs for £700 and think they were getting a better deal with an iMac. The consumers I mean here are possible switchers. Now if this wasn't the case, the desktop sales would follow the industry trends more closely.

On the laptop side, you see horribly ugly plastic PC models that are really thick and heavy whose fans kick in often and make a lot of noise for maybe £500-600 and then you see similar spec laptops with magnetic clips and power adaptors, solid unibody aluminum shells, chiclet keyboard, built-in isight, gesture trackpad, easy upgradability for £930. Depending on the comparison model, it's 25-50% premium for far better quality.

Once they step up and do this on the desktop end, the sales figures will even out.

Maybe this is their strategy with the Macbook and the LED display. One day they will likely only sell laptops and Mac Pros. Where I work, people are doing this already and have probably added to the recent figures - they have the latest MBPs hooked up to 24" external matte screens instead of opting for the iMacs or Mac pros. Their reasoning is that if they are paying for mobile performance, they'd be as well getting mobility to go along with it so they can do their work at home. they can also be sold far more easily when new models come out while keeping the same quality of external screen.

Although they have the same problem with the internal screen replacement meaning sending the whole thing away, the drives can be removed so that their work doesn't go with them. After suffering broken displays on their iMacs, they have decided they won't ever buy one again and much prefer the laptop setup. An iMac screen is about $900 for the part no service and difficult to find. The MBP screen including repair is half that and very easy to find.

What's more likely is that this is your own personal interpretation of this information. To come to this conclusion you leave out many other factors.

Mainly that the general computer market targets many more sub-markets than Apple targets. A great many of the PC desktop sales are to business and enterprise. Apple primarily sells to consumers. Seeing as how Best Buy gives notebooks the prime shelf space and has desktops on the outer fringes. I'd bet consumer PC desktop/notebook sales look much like Apples.

I'm sure that Apple will always be excused based on any number of reasons. Businesses rarely upgrade machines, they make a big purchase at first and then stick with those machines for a long time. Also take into consideration students who are also in the consumer demographic but will most likely buy laptops due to the mobility - this accounted for a large spike (still only 57% though) in laptop sales in the back-to-school period. This does not give them an equal weight to a home user who is deciding between a desktop and laptop and doesn't indicate a voluntary shift for people who want a proper desktop being used as a desktop to a laptop system.

The fact that Apple does not compete in all the same markets as the general PC isn't an excuse its simply the truth.

It isn't as though all business are buying computers at the same time and keeping them the same length of time. Every quarter there is some business or organization somewhere in the world making a large computer purchase.

Their are ample stories that indicate as computer sales stall, the notebook sales remain the the relative strong segment.

I question your 36 months being a tradition and suggest that you are on the high end of the refresh cycle. In my own case (antidotal I know) I refresh at a 60 month cycle. I upgrade RAM and HD at 36 months and start looking at potential replacements after 48 months. And based on comments from many posters there are many other people that make me look like a fast replacer.

In my mind the 36 months your referring to come from the 90's when hardware was improving at a very fast rate and people were forced to replace their computers so that they could run a Y2K compliant Windows. (I'll never understand why Microsoft wasn't sued into non-existence for releasing a non-Y2K compliant Windows 95.) Once Y2K passed this need to quickly replacing their computers went away and we are back to a slower refresh cycle. -- This is what I believe caused the computer bust of '01 and '02. The industry expected continued replacements at the new 36 month rate whereas in reality two years worth of purchases were made early and the industry had to wait until the real refresh rate caught up. I wonder what the real computer refresh rate is.