Mac sales to US businesses grow nearly 50%
Sales of Mac hardware to U.S. businesses grew by 49.4 percent year over year in the September quarter, posting continued growth while PC sales shrank.
Charlie Wolf of Needham & Company highlighted Apple's success in the enterprise as the "big story" regarding Mac sales in the September quarter. With PC sales to U.S. businesses declining 13.3 percent year over year, Apple had a 62.7 percentage point difference.
Overall, the Mac's unit share of the U.S. business market was 9.3 percent in the September quarter. That was up from 5.9 percent of total sales in June, and 5.4 percent in September of 2011.
Apple had an even bigger share of revenue of PC sales to U.S. businesses, accounting for 17.4 percent. That was also up from an 11.5 percent share in June, and 10.7 percent share a year prior.
Wolf believes Apple's success has come from a focus on adding features to OS X to make it more compatible with Windows infrastructures. He also feels a key step was the 2006 introduction of BootCamp to run Windows on Intel-based Mac hardware.
"For its part, Microsoft added features to exchange and its other network products that more effortlessly accommodated other operating systems, including Apple's OS X operating system," he said. "These steps enabled the Mac to become a more responsible, if not first-class, citizen in Microsoft's network environment."
But the most important factor for businesses has been the "halo effect" of the iPhone and iPad. As businesses have embraced Apple's iOS devices, he believes they've become more likely to place Macs in the workplace as well.
Apple sold a total of 4.9 million Macs in its September quarter, which represented a new quarterly record for the company. Mac sales slightly edged the same three-month span from a year prior, growing 1 percent.
But while Mac sales were up slightly year over year, the overall PC market continued to slump. Total worldwide PC sales were down 8 percent from 2011, making it 26 straight quarters that Mac sales outgrew PC shipments.
Charlie Wolf of Needham & Company highlighted Apple's success in the enterprise as the "big story" regarding Mac sales in the September quarter. With PC sales to U.S. businesses declining 13.3 percent year over year, Apple had a 62.7 percentage point difference.
Overall, the Mac's unit share of the U.S. business market was 9.3 percent in the September quarter. That was up from 5.9 percent of total sales in June, and 5.4 percent in September of 2011.
Apple had an even bigger share of revenue of PC sales to U.S. businesses, accounting for 17.4 percent. That was also up from an 11.5 percent share in June, and 10.7 percent share a year prior.
Wolf believes Apple's success has come from a focus on adding features to OS X to make it more compatible with Windows infrastructures. He also feels a key step was the 2006 introduction of BootCamp to run Windows on Intel-based Mac hardware.
"For its part, Microsoft added features to exchange and its other network products that more effortlessly accommodated other operating systems, including Apple's OS X operating system," he said. "These steps enabled the Mac to become a more responsible, if not first-class, citizen in Microsoft's network environment."
But the most important factor for businesses has been the "halo effect" of the iPhone and iPad. As businesses have embraced Apple's iOS devices, he believes they've become more likely to place Macs in the workplace as well.
Apple sold a total of 4.9 million Macs in its September quarter, which represented a new quarterly record for the company. Mac sales slightly edged the same three-month span from a year prior, growing 1 percent.
But while Mac sales were up slightly year over year, the overall PC market continued to slump. Total worldwide PC sales were down 8 percent from 2011, making it 26 straight quarters that Mac sales outgrew PC shipments.
Comments
I hope this trend continues. Unix deserves to win.
That education chart must reflect the consensus that iPads are the future in the education market not PC/Macs.
And Microsoft's last bastion breaks like a liquid nitrogen banana.
Hmm, actually, no, I'd need to buy one cause I damn sure am not going to haul a 18kg Mac Pro into the office.
PS: I like to dream that Apple is securely building up their enterprise server platform but unfortunately I think the reality is very different.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
That education chart must reflect the consensus that iPads are the future in the education market not PC/Macs.
It also reflects that the September quarter is not when Education makes their classroom purchases.
But notice that the government is the only segment where PCs did better than Macs.
We all know how intelligent the government is about spending its money......
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
This is great but Windows in the workplace is still very entrenched and I haven't seen anything that will break that apart... yet. Windows desktop connects to Windows Server in ways that are very "easy" compared to what you can currently do with a Mac desktop and Linux Server setup. Buying refurbished $100 PCs that run WinXP is still very common. Mac can't won't compete with that, nor should they. I do think we'll see more Apple products in the workplace but it's not going to be the same rush we've seen from Apple in the PMP, smartphone and tablet markets.
PS: I like to dream that Apple is securely building up their enterprise server platform but unfortunately I think the reality is very different.
In marketing these is a thing called the "bridge effect" that kicks in at about 17%. Apple is in that territory and if history repeats itself Apple is about to bridge rapidly beyond where it has been relegated for decades.
Remember how RIMM felt so safe with its huge market dominance in enterprise?? Once the iPhone hit the "bridge" gap, it rapidly ate RIMM's lunch. Now, with RIMM down in the single digits it needs to rebuild to the "Bridge Effect" level to have any chance of being able to retake or threaten to retake it's relevancy again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
PS: I like to dream that Apple is securely building up their enterprise server platform but unfortunately I think the reality is very different.
I like to dream too. iCloud is where they need to concentrate. Perhaps one day small - medium sized businesses will wake up and discover that running their own Exchange server is just an unnecessary headache. Since iCould works with Windows and Mac as long as you have an iPhone/iPad why not just let Apple deal with the synchronization, security and updates. At that point Apple can chip away at one of the last MS strongholds. But in light of the fact that Apple has not shown much interest in updating iWork to be more on par with Office, I'm not sure they really want the enterprise market. They may prefer to let enterprise change their work flow model to align with Apple rather than Apple trying to cater to business.
This is really good news for Apple and I think the trend will continue. Pre iPhone Macs were tough to justify because of their substantially higher price and lack of comparable software made people scratch their heads and wonder why anyone would even buy one. I think there's an effect where the iPhone's success really carried over and made people consider Macs at the personal level. Once its in their homes the business leaders can see it in action and, combined with the much larger software ecosystem- they are really starting to see Macs as viable in the workplace.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifij775
This is good to see. I think businesses are the most likely to value a quality product in terms of total cost of ownership.
The Mac has been shown to be a better value to businesses for the past twenty years. However until recently the IT department had total control over what they allowed to exist within the corporate environment. IT preferred Windows machines because their buggy and convoluted networking issues meant job security and kingdom building.
It wasn't until the MBA that top-level management began to insist their wants be addressed. Typical scenario would be the head of marketing, usually a "C" suite executive would hand the boss of the IT manager a MBA and say, "Make it work with our system, no excuses." Since initially there was no equal available in Windows XP or Win 7, there was no way to switch and Apple entered the corporate culture from the top-down. It's fair to say that with or a similar package means that many of the Apple laptops are often running Windows, not OSX.
Other reasons that Apple was able to penetrate the enterprise market are, of course, the usefulness of the iPad for business uses, and the submergence of the IT department lower in the corporate structure. In the 1960s the MIS manager answered directly to the CFO and had a lot of power. "If you want that report, I'll need more HD drives and an extra full-time programmer." In today's corporate structure the IT department is often part of the plant management division and removed from directly influencing the "C" suite as earlier.
I have started to see Macs in a number of offices, and hotels.
Most of them are running a form of Windows, often XP.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
I like to dream too. iCloud is where they need to concentrate. Perhaps one day small - medium sized businesses will wake up and discover that running their own Exchange server is just an unnecessary headache. Since iCould works with Windows and Mac as long as you have an iPhone/iPad why not just let Apple deal with the synchronization, security and updates. At that point Apple can chip away at one of the last MS strongholds. But in light of the fact that Apple has not shown much interest in updating iWork to be more on par with Office, I'm not sure they really want the enterprise market. They may prefer to let enterprise change their work flow model to align with Apple rather than Apple trying to cater to business.
I'd like to see Apple upgrade the iWork suite too. However, since MSFT has recently jerked a boatload of features out of their Office RT version, I think the playing field has been leveled to a great extent. In addition, a lot of the Office features are difficult to implement with a touch interface (and MSFT is hell-bent on adding touch to everything) They may come to be less utilized in the future.
Finally, enterprise users are finding iWork on the iPad to be "adequate" to most of their needs. These last 6 years where MSFT had no answer to the phone and tablet by Apple may have cost them the game in many ways.
We already use Trend Micro to filter all our external mail so it's not that hard to imagine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PhilBoogie
Some will say that even with a 50% business market share increase they still are in the single digit range
Last year Apple sold 100 computers to enterprise buyers. This year they sold 150. That's a 50% increase! Yay.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cameronj
LOL… So he thinks a decision to enable boot camp was critical to Apple's success in business in the recent year?
So your graphics department doesn't need to run 3dMax, huh? Ours does.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
[...] But in light of the fact that Apple has not shown much interest in updating iWork to be more on par with Office, I'm not sure they really want the enterprise market.
Is MS Office a big part of life in a typical business anymore? I'm genuinely curious. The business I work in is large but somewhat specialized so I don't have a good sense of what office life is like for other people.
In our place Office is obviously used, but I don't think Word, Powerpoint or Excel matter much to those outside the executive and bean counting suites. What I see around our place is Outlook, industry-specific software from a third-party supplier and a few custom intranet web apps.
Do people use Word, Powerpoint and Excel a lot where any of you work? Would your workforce be likely to care much if they were replaced with an equivalent from another supplier (like iWork or OpenOffice or whatever)?
Quote:
Originally Posted by v5v
So your graphics department doesn't need to run 3dMax, huh? Ours does.
According to the website, "3dMax" runs in Boot Camp or Parallels. The lack of a Mac version is a decision by Autodesk, as they do sell Mac software, such as "AutoCAD".
Cheers