Apple's U.S. marketshare has grown from 4.4% to 4.8% year-over-year. They aren't doing nearly that well worldwide, but even I'm surprised by how strong sales have been during an architectural transition. I expected developer revolt, sales slowdowns, and marketshare reductions while the switch was going on, possibly continuing after it if the switch proved ineffective at reversing the downward marketshare trend. I seem to have been completely wrong. The one positive in all of this is that there's no way Apple will go out of the computer business by 2007, which means you will almost certainly owe me a Coke at that time.
It's still too early to predict the effect of the transition on Apple's long-term future. I think that will become more clear in 2007-2008, when the Intel Mac lineup ought to have the first-revision kinks worked out. I'm very surprised by how well it's going so far, and am curious to see what they'll release at WWDC next month to render my dual G5 obsolete.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:The one positive in all of this is that there's no way Apple will go out of the computer business by 2007, which means you will almost certainly owe me a Coke at that time.
I said long ago that my time table was probably too early, especially given the fact that I didn't take Apple's smaller-than-industry-average announcement-release gap into account. I still think I'm right long term.
Not that that changes the bet, of course.
To restate for those who have no idea what we're talking about, I bet twinky a Coke that by the end of the Apple expo thingy in summer(??) 2007, Apple would announce a version of OSX for non-Apple computers.
An interesting thing to watch for: Apple's shareholders have been increasingly vocal about Apple's refusal to provide financial results by business line. If this agitation is successful, we'll get to see the individual profitability of the computer business, the iPod business, and the iTunes business. That will be interesting.
I wonder when Apple will announce a computer based on the new Intel Core 2 Duo quad-core processors? Those will be worth holding out for, I think.
Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :
The commercials are annoying me, though.
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee:
quote:The one positive in all of this is that there's no way Apple will go out of the computer business by 2007, which means you will almost certainly owe me a Coke at that time.
I said long ago that my time table was probably too early, especially given the fact that I didn't take Apple's smaller-than-industry-average announcement-release gap into account.
Yup, I remember. I was just surprised by these marketshare numbers and thought I'd mention it.
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: I still think I'm right long term.
To some degree I agreed with that when we first had this discussion -- I thought the Intel transition would be protracted and awkward in the same way that the OS X transition was. I forgot that the PPC transition in the 90s was easy by comparison, and that's the example I should have been looking at.
I was never convinced that Apple would ultimately go out of the computer business, but I did think that such an outcome was a strong possibility if the Intel transition didn't reverse the marketshare trend. As I said, I still think it's too early to call, but I'm very surprised to see an increase in American marketshare during a massive architectural transition. I think that's a good sign for Apple's computer business.
I also think that if Apple does go out of the computer hardware business, it won't retain its operating system business -- in other words, if you're right, I think it will ultimately abandon computing entirely in favour of gadgets.
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Not that that changes the bet, of course.
To restate for those who have no idea what we're talking about, I bet twinky a Coke that by the end of the Apple expo thingy in summer(??) 2007, Apple would announce a version of OSX for non-Apple computers.
An interesting thing to watch for: Apple's shareholders have been increasingly vocal about Apple's refusal to provide financial results by business line. If this agitation is successful, we'll get to see the individual profitability of the computer business, the iPod business, and the iTunes business. That will be interesting.
Can't we already see those figures? I thought Apple was refusing to release figures within each business line, but that software, gadgets, and Mac numbers were still available separately. I mean, they certainly release sales figures separately, so we know how many iPods and how many Macs Apple sold, and we know that total sales and marketshare of both lines are growing.
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: I wonder when Apple will announce a computer based on the new Intel Core 2 Duo quad-core processors? Those will be worth holding out for, I think.
Given that the Power Mac G5 is already available in a dual-core, dual-processor configuration, I think it's entirely possible that we'll see a dual-core, dual-processor Xeon "Mac Pro" at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference next month.
It looks like Intel has bumped up the release of it's four-core-on-one-die processors to late this year, but who knows what Apple will do.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
*concentrates very hard so he will remember to contact Dagonee and get his perspective on apple's continued lack of a commodity OS in 2010*
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:I also think that if Apple does go out of the computer hardware business, it won't retain its operating system business -- in other words, if you're right, I think it will ultimately abandon computing entirely in favour of gadgets.
I don't think they'll abandon their computer hardware business.
quote:Can't we already see those figures? I thought Apple was refusing to release figures within each business line, but that software, gadgets, and Mac numbers were still available separately. I mean, they certainly release sales figures separately, so we know how many iPods and how many Macs Apple sold, and we know that total sales and marketshare of both lines are growing.
The question is how much one is subsidizing the other. It's of more than passing interest to investors, because the high growth rate of iPods must slow down at some point, and if iPods are subsidizing computers, the effects of the slowdown will be worse.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
quote:I also think that if Apple does go out of the computer hardware business, it won't retain its operating system business -- in other words, if you're right, I think it will ultimately abandon computing entirely in favour of gadgets.
I don't think they'll abandon their computer hardware business.
Hm. Do you think they'll sell Windows, Linux, or computers with no OS? Where do you see Microsoft in five or six years?
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee:
quote:Can't we already see those figures? I thought Apple was refusing to release figures within each business line, but that software, gadgets, and Mac numbers were still available separately. I mean, they certainly release sales figures separately, so we know how many iPods and how many Macs Apple sold, and we know that total sales and marketshare of both lines are growing.
The question is how much one is subsidizing the other. It's of more than passing interest to investors, because the high growth rate of iPods must slow down at some point, and if iPods are subsidizing computers, the effects of the slowdown will be worse.
I'm not sure I see what you mean by "subsidize" in this context. This isn't like Microsoft taking a hit on console sales and "making up for it" in software sales and licensing, because Apple has high hardware margins. So I don't quite follow you. Do you mean that iPod profits help pay for Mac hardware and software R&D?
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
fugu, those numbers don't include costs, which means they don't allow calculation of profitability.
Apple does offer gross margins, though. Once the entire Mac lineup transitions to Intel processors, it'll be quite a bit easier to estimate what Apple's Mac margins are (and consequently what their impact is on gross margin).
I'm not convinced that Apple should be as transparent as you suggest, but I'm not convinced that they shouldn't be, either.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
It looks like the gross margin is company wide, not by business line.
I'm not suggesting how transparent they should be - I was reporting it as something interesting.
I don't really care, myself, as I'm in index funds only, and have no real opinion as to which is better.
![[Blushing]](graemlins/blushing.gif)
The one positive in all of this is that there's no way Apple will go out of the computer business by 2007, which means you will almost certainly owe me a Coke at that time. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)