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more and more i wonder what the true install base is.

...do i hear 20%, 20 once, 20 twice, 21% to the lady in the back! 21 do i hear 22....

@shen,

20% seems a bit high for now. Considering Apple is selling under 20% in their top category (notebooks), with desktop Macs trailing, it would be hard to put Apple's overall market share above that mark. Sure Macs last longer as PCs (more than twice as long on average, I am told.) But it will take a while yet for that to translate into the big market share you covet.

If Apple continues win the minds and hearts of its consumer base as it appears to be doing, then that will increase the pressure on using macs in the workplace. A 10 % overall market share in the US is looking increasingly possible.

I'll bid 22.5...

17.6%? Are there really that many misinformed hippie losers? Whatever.

I'll continue to rock the cubicle jockey's weapon of choice: Magnificent Windows Vista on a Dell with Microsoft Office and seamless interconnectivity to the Exchange Server. Suck it, MAC lemmings.

Your potential. Our passion.™

Zune Tang, you are a sad, sad little girl. It's time to come out of the closet and just embrace your raging Mac envy.

You're like a closet homosexual who hangs out at gay bars but won't admit he's gay. Whatever, you'll come out when you're ready. In the meantime, you're providing great entertainment to the MDN regulars.

I work for a cable company in San Diego as a tech/installer. Within the last year and a half I've seen more and more Macs. I'd say about 30-40% of my customers have Macs - all newer models.

Also, realize that San Diego State and UCSD are in the area and a lot of my customers are students.

@Unfettered

it isn't a coveting of market share, though i do think a 25% install base would be a good healthy amount for the company, it is the realization of that longer lasting Mac combined with the "retail" aspect that interests me.

in my personal experience just talking to people, the instal base is certainly over 10% which is well over the market share. but saying more than "over 10%" is difficult.

i honestly wouldn't b shocked to find that it was anywhere from 8% to 20%. the numbers are just damn hard to filter.

that the perception is Mac install base is under 3% yet the reality seems to point to a range from 8 to 20 is just an interesting curiosity to me as philosopher... there are lot possible stories we can weave as to why the perception is so different from what appears to be reality, but it is a good idea to grasp the reality before you weave the story.

still, with twice the shelf (desk? lap?) life as other machines, you would expect the market share to be under the install, so i am not sure 20% is too out of line even with only 17% on the most popular line.

realistically, if i had to guess. 14%

...to pull a number out of my..... errr, anyway.

Gotta love Zune Tang !!!!

His closing tag line should read.

Our Software, Your problem

The University my Dad teaches at provides him with a Dell Latitude notebook. The poor guy had to dust it off this week to prepare for the returning students. He said it was excruciating having to use the Dell after using his new MacBook Pro for the summer. I was worried that I was overbuying when I got him the MBP but he's really taken to it and considering he'll be 70 in two weeks, that's a real testament to the friendliness of OS X.

Turns out you can teach old dogs new tricks. Who knew?

That's 17% of RETAIL sales. Dell doesn't sell retail and much of HP is not retail as well. shen may have it pegged, 10% to 20% of the installed consumer base ... given the longer expected life of Macs vs the rest.
ZT ... indeed, that IS the cubicle jockey's choice. Well, while in the cubicle.

Wouldn't web statistics give an idea of the installed base?

Those usually have Apple at < 5 %

@DLMeyer

Dell is almost exclusively direct sale, but I doubt that HP, Toshiba, Gateway, etc. sell a higher percentage of computers direct to consumers than Apple does. The biggest difference between the overall market share and the NPD stats is that NPD is almost exclusively consumers, while overall includes business and enterprise (and even dumb terminals and such). So NPD is a much better estimate of Apple's *consumer* market share.

Of course, this doesn't even touch on the question of composition of share. E.g., AOL Mail undoubtedly has a higher market share than Gmail, but do you really think that Google would want to trade Gmail's user base for AOL Mail's user base? Likewise, I doubt that Apple would have any interest in trading its 15% (or whatever) for a randomly selected 30% of Microsoft's share.

"Turns out you can teach old dogs new tricks."

Which is fine. It's the licking themselves in public habit that needs to stop.

@Paul Zune

Those stats are worldwide, so the 6% web share (July 2007) is more than double the installed base of Apple's reported ~2.5% worldwide market share. E.g., if it were possible to construct a US measure, you'd probably observe an installed of around 12-15%. And this is including a lot of computers used at businesses too.

Of course, Apple could probably sell more computers than it already does, but as Jobs said at the last event, there are some things they're just not prepared to do and that includes putting their name on trashy hardware.

We've got Dell and Gateway for that.

@DogGone,
I predict a 10% installed base (consumer only) by 2010. I think the people above claiming 30-40% of consumers are victims of a selection bias. My guess is that here in Philly, with the younger crowd, it probably is already > 10%. However, you need to factor in all the older people out there and places like the Midwest where Mac penetration (heheheh......I said penetration) is much less.

@TMF

LOL! That reminds me of a joke:

Two old men are walking home, late one night, from the pub when they come up on a dog laying in the middle of the street. The dog has one leg hiked up and is licking himself with fervor. One old man chuckles, elbows his friend and say, "Boy, I wish I could do that!" The other old man says, "Oh no, that dog will bite you!"

@marko
Actually, as MDN puts it, it's "Your frustration. Our fault."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the research companies - IDC, NPD, etc, use a different set of metrics to arrive at their figures? By that I mean don't they look at PC sales and translate that into 'market share'? [Sales of cash registers, ATM terminals, etc, that also 'run' Windows, are being counted toward the sale/market share figures.]

If that's the case, then installed base is a completely different animal and shen maybe closer than we think...

OBill-Wan Kenobi: That's funny!
Dogs wouldn't do that as often if they could make a fist. But then, you would probably lose your seat in the recliner.

I never trust Newark Police Department figures.

I smell a new Microsoft.

There's Zune Tang; 5th one down, waiting to pounce, with his usual drivel.

No "cubicle jockey" makes a choice. The choice is ALWAYS made for them. They only have the ILLUSION of choice: "Which PC do you want? Dell? HP? Lenovo? Acer?"

Company: "Do you want this fat chick, or that fat chick, or that fat chick?"

Employee: "I want the bootylicious chick!! Why can't I have that?"

Company: "Uh, we don't DO bootylicious around here. Now, which fat chick do you want?"

The company's leadership/IT people don't yet include (bootylicious) Macs in the equation. I think a lot of companies these days would be shocked if they let their employees actually HAVE a choice.

That day is coming, and that's what bought-and-paid-for-M$-shill Zune Tang types are (rightly) afraid of.

Peace.
Olmecmystic :coolsmile

"I never trust Newark Police Department figures."

So true.
Especially considering their stolen laptop return rate.

iDon't: I smell a new Microsoft.

That's actually your upper lip. Shame on you. Now go wash.

Installed user base would be a much more useful statistic than "market share".

As we all know, Macs don't get thrown out when we upgrade, they are sold on, gifted to friends and relatives, donated to schools and community organisations - whatever we can do to give these workhorses a new life, over and over and over again. On top of that, they are kept by each owner for many more years, partly because it is such a robust architecture and also they always have been "objet d'art" and deserve a place in the home or office.

Take the 2000 model iMac DV (400MHz G3, 640 RAM, 30GB, 8MB VRAM) as an example:
Latest version of OS X 10.4.x? Check!
Latest version of MS Office? Check!
Recent iLife & iWork ('06)? Check!
Internet and email? Check!
Still runs at a decent speed? Check!
Beautiful design and looks fabulous on any desk? Check!

A Mac Tower can be used even longer with upgrades.

A PC, by contrast, will be lucky to have one second life. More often than not it will find itself in landfill or on a recycling scrap heap or sitting under the house gathering dust because you don't know what to do with the useless, unwieldy,ugly beast. A PC will be lucky to see it's third birthday before it simply becomes too painful to use. And today, anything but the most powerful PC from 12 months ago would choke on Vista.

So lets recap.
Lifecycle: Mac - minimum 7 years of life; PC - 30-36 months.
Untimely death outside warranty due to defective critical component: Mac - below the level of detection so we'll say 1 in 10,000; PC - 1 in 100 easily and in fact very generous when compared to the death rate of the Dells at work which is about 1 in 10.

What install base would that translate to? I'd venture 15+%.

MW Nature - it's the nature of things that quality outshines quantity.

"Wouldn't web statistics give an idea of the installed base?"

you would think so, but many people have pointed out that the sites generally used for those stats seem to have a bias.

also, how many people surf with a browser pretending to be IE so their bank or other sites work.

followed by the question, how much surfing is from homw and how much from work.

Stuart, i find my own lifecycle measurements to be about 5-6 for a Mac and 20-26 months for a PC. maybe i am hard on my equipment.

i wonder if any ISPs look for telltales about what their users and connecting with. would that be more useful than other web stats?

@OBill-Wan Kenobi

The punch line for that joke is: He'll probably let you if you pet him forst"

@ Denny

What's a forst?

But how many of those poor MacBooks/Pro's are running Windows?

You see, I watched Apple salespeople sell Mac's to Windows only users with the impression that they can go home with a Mac and install their present copy of Windows on it.

The virtues of Mac OS X are not even mentioned.

Of course later comes the problems when average Windows user has a problem installing Windows on a Mac, all the other complicated steps necessary.

These customers come back to the Apple Store to have the Geniuses get rid of Mac OS X for Windows. The problem gets worse because the Apple people are not allowed to address Windows issues.

Now these Windows users have to hire a Windows tech to put the OS on a Mac.

Wonderful ain't it?

@C1,
Newark makes, the world takes.

"that the perception is Mac install base is under 3% yet the reality seems to point to a range from 8 to 20 is just an interesting curiosity to me as philosopher... there are lot possible stories we can weave as to why the perception is so different from what appears to be reality, but it is a good idea to grasp the reality before you weave the story. "

The reason is because you're an idiot and confusing market share with installed base.

Market share is what you're selling as a percentage today,

Installed base is the total percentage you have of machines ever sold and still in use.

And there's no chance either is in the 8% to 20% range worldwide.

A large increase in market share takes a while to affect the installed base substantially.

Apple worldwide installed base is around 2-3% give or take, and worldwide market share around 4%.