Apple’s worldwide market share fell to 1.8% in the third quarter of this year from 2.1%, and dropped to 3.2% from 3.6% in the U.S., according to figures from research company Gartner. The numbers also showed dramatic declines in the quarter-to-quarter growth rate of Macs sold while Apple’s Windows-based competitors saw double digit increases in the U.S and an almost 10% rise worldwide.
Apple Global Market Share Falls to 1.8% as Competitors Post Gains
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Thanks for the well thought out and cogent post. I’d forgotten that happened on OS News : )
Personally, I feel some organisations have taken it a little too far (trying to make _EVERY_ application browser-based, which will work, but won’t work well). And it creates extra security risks. But until something better that is also “more open” comes along, Microsoft’s business clients – the clients that truly matter to them in the Windows market – will demand that integration remain, and where impressed by the Longhorn demonstrations, demand it go even deeper.
They could look at XUL and Firefox, which is becoming more mature and offers a lot of the same possibilities for integration. I think given the security problems with IE and the fact that XUL is an open standard, more and more corporate IT dept’s will be taking a good look at this. It removes the tie to one platform as well, which is good for keeping your options open. They’ve already been left with a bitter after-taste once from Active-X, will they swallow the same bitter pill with XAML?
Exactly, these so-called intelligent statistics! Everyone knows that one cannot trust statistics – just as one cannot trust a politician.
The one person I know who owned a mac decided to go with Linux (that was about a year ago). He loves Xandros and feels it is superior to the mac in every way possible.
Also, I’ve never seen a Mac running at a business. I’m not even aware of any POS, ERP/MRP, or hardcore accounting software for the platform. Granted, I haven’t looked very hard but there’s so many choices for PC that it’s difficult to NOT see several without even trying.
Plus, games are almost exclusively windows only (few, few exceptions). And the publishing industry is moving towards windows very rapidly: adobe isn’t even making some apps for the Mac any longer.
The last niche that the Mac has seems to be music/midi and with the release of Sonar 4 (which far eclipses even protools in features and functionality) the Mac is once again a 2nd rate platform.
I find it difficult to believe that Apple has even 1.8% marketshare. Who buys their stuff, only the super affluent in the large urban markets? Or is it like Harley’s with their poor poor performance but sells purely on the mystique of the brand? It certainly isn’t anyone who’s on tight budget.
I’m firmly in this camp as well — I’ve been using Macs for the past 17 years, and as long as Apple continues to make and improve the Macintosh, I will continue to buy them.
Better that I spend a little more cash up front to OWN the system, than have to spend twice as much if not more (in time as well as cash) dealing with all the problems that Windows users face on a daily basis. Price is totally a non-issue when compared with the serious threat windows users face daily. It has been posited that the average time for a Windows computer to become compromised after being connected to the ‘net is 20 minutes; easily LONG before even being able to download all the security patches for it.
NO THANKS. 🙂
I’ve got all the apps/games I will ever need and then some.
Darwinports now have reached a 2000-app milestone for open source applications ported to run on Macintosh. No software? Get with the times, man. heh. There is absolutely ZERO benefit to me to switch.
My present Mac is over 7 years old and still going — though I am due for a hardware upgrade, my financial situation precludes this. However once I have secured a full time job again, a Macintosh is my next major purchase. _without a doubt_
Let me suggest that you are not looking in the right places. You need to broaden your knowledge base. Try visiting a few design studios, newspapers, recording studios, and even some businesses. Your campus may be filled with Windows only computers but that is not to be construed to “all campuses are x86 based”.
I believe that all of us tend to “run” with folks who think like we do. Unfortunately, that narrows our life’s experiences. The rich and the poor do not usually mix. Computer nerds tend to enjoy being with other nerds who AGREE with their opinions. Us humans prefer to be with those who are like us. Companies often hire on that basis also. Fraternities pick people who are like they are, etc.
So, lighten up. Learn to accept diversity in acquaintences, subject matter, politics, etc. You will be richly rewarded for your effort.
I still never understand all this noise. I basically abandoned windows (OK, I still have a win-box, but it gets used 5-10 times a year) several years ago for Linux. I loved (still love) linux, but the desktop experience was not so great 5-6 years ago. It was okay, but in all honesty, you were limiting what you could and couldn’t do concerning apps, and even on the net by making the switch to linux.
I was delighted when Mac’s became unix-y (though admittedly they really weren’t ready for prime-time until around 10.2). I made the switch to Macintosh as my desktop of choice back then and have never looked back. Several other people I know have made the same choice, though truthfully, many of these people are unix/science geeks, so they may fall into the “niche” people keep discussing — bottom line, though, is that people are switching from linux to macintosh.
Are Apple’s too expensive? IMO, yes. The reality is that there is no similarity between a macintosh and a Ferrari, and most reasonable people understand this. The other reality is that it is the best (IMO) unix desktop around at this point, so it is what I (and several others I know) use at this point.
Do I look at Sager or Acer laptops with geeklust sometimes? You bet your ass. Many of these laptops (again, IMO) are far nicer than any apple offerings, but the reality is that I’d be stuck running linux as a desktop, and while I DO like the filesystem hierarchy MUCH better in most linux distros, I still feel that as far as a desktop goes, it isn’t ready for prime-time. There are several distros currently making headway that may change this opinion over the next few months or years, but as for now, I’ll pay too much for a desktop that I can use reliably to do what I need it to.
Is this the latest results.
Apple is currently a profitable company, and has been for most of the past seven years (since Steve came back). In 1996, they *lost* nearly a billion dollars. The doomsayers had more to work with back then; today they don’t. I don’t see how they’re anywhere near being doomed. Apple has made a lot of smart moves to position itself as a more-or-less niche company. They’re not all things to all people; that’s Dell. I think their approach is about the best way possible, because it keeps their margins high and avoids direct confrontation with larger foes who could ground them into dust (Dell, Microsoft).
speaking as a home user, the mac is a great way to enjoy computers again, which many home users of windows dont really get. my dad never enjoyed computers until we went back to macs (our first 2 computers were macs followed by 2 PCs)
for freedom from viruses and slick, efficient computing, macs are all home users need. everything is neatly packaged. there’s no downloading from the windows update site which takes a million tries just to get working. there’s no installing java, a pop up blocker, a spam blocker: it’s neatly bundled in. for a home user who just wants to plug in their computer, edit home movies and make dvds and organize music and photos and print stuff and work with office documents, the mac is a dream. there’s no need to worry about viruses, and it does everything that the PC does with the same software in reguards to the home user. Most home users just need office, email, internet, finance programs for taxes, and “digital lifestyle” type things like what iLife offers. there’s no disadvantage to the mac in these reguards. it’s all advantages.
i dont know how to analyze apple’s financial situation, but all i know is that no matter how low apple’s market share is, it’s still compatible and useful and a joy to use.
OK so market share is falling, does Apple have a plan to turn things around? If so, is it likely that that plan will work?
I wonder what the impact on sales for iMac was when it became clear that a G5 system was on the way? I guess the answer to this will be seen when the next quarterly report is published.
Yup market share is third on Apple priority. Meeting customers needs are number 1.
For once I was actually enjoying reading post until in the end we have the mac vs pc argument again.
@the raven
So we meet again
quote the raven never more. Anyways microsoft being threatened by firefox? I think they should be glad a quality browser came to windows don’t you think. I get 80% less adware ever since I got firefox in my system and thats one of those things that macs are so good against also. If their wasn’t firefox on windows and microsoft didn’t pay to much attention to adware except to rely on the likes of spybot and adware se then more people would make the “switch” such as myself since my computer gets like 200+ of those things and i am sick and tired of getting rid of them. So I disagree with you on firefox being a threat to windows but a browser great for all platforms especially windows. I do agree with you that gartners apple market share research is as credible as their last one with linux PC encouraging windows piracy which is not credible at all but revealing that gartner has obviously turned into a tool to create FUD. Damn this tab browsing thing is great 
@hakime
barefeats.com? Who the hell are they. Refer to a proven website next time. If you just “googled it up” and not actually looked at like 5 or 6 sites that proven the similar results but just looked at this one then you just proved that you are gulible and biased researcher then. Sorry to say it but not many proved mac performance but many proved amd64 cpu performance and thats not only coming from 5 or 6 sites. Also apple at one point posted G5 “the worlds fastest desktop” uhhhum workstation against only the xeon and not even bothered including opteron benches and of course they won. Ever since then I was always skeptical of the G5 and so far I see no evidence of G5 being better than amd 64 in anyway. Also we amd fans don’t care what clockspeed those G5s run at all that matters is the cost and take those cost and then do benchmarks on the same price point. Also why the hell does apple need watercooling at this point?
@johnone
People like you give make enthusiasts a bad image. How old are you anyway? I am guessing 16 because thats the way you are responding to ECS regarding CAD. You are not just hurting yourself but the Mac enthusiasts as well. I wonder why hackers are writing viruses for OSX now? Also don’t give me that crap about OSX is immune against viruses because if you think about it since you guys were barely considered a target before who knows how many security flaws are in OSX.
Learn some manors and repect your fellow posters and you might actually get your point across to other people next time.
The mac is a great platform but in my opinion they really overprice the hardware to the point I see a 2800 system with a geforce fx 5200, 1gb or ram and only 1 250GB hardddrive. I think thats an absolute ripoff and to all you people calling a mac a ferrari I don’t think ferrari comes with parts made by hyundai. It looks like a ferrari but drives like a elantra doesn’t cut it. Also why the hell do I want a flashy computer anyway. Oh it looks great but gets burned by the computer I can build for 2800 bucks and looks better doesn’t make me feel special. Makes me feel like I got ripped off and that makes me feel like an idiot. Only thing I see great about mac is OSX and that it catters well to its niche market. I am just hoping that watercooling doesn’t become complementary for the high speed grades to the G5.
“How old are you anyway? I am guessing 16”
23 year old. Sorry for you. 🙂
“because thats the way you are responding to ECS regarding CAD.”
He is “JCS”, not “ECS”. If you want to reply me, please, read WELL the posts THAN reply me. For this reason, all the rest you wrote is “fuffa”, as we say in Italy. 😀
PS to moderator: “fuffa” is NOT a dirty word. 🙂
Well Caliber FX,
Of course now Barefeats is not a proven web sites. I am sure that if Barefeats would have claimed that Opteron machines are faster than Apple machines, you would be the first to say “go and look at that web site to see how Apple is behind”. Barefeast is a well-known tester of the performance of Apple machines, and they are not very kind with Apple. Just remember the time when Barefeats has tested the Apple G4 machines and has claimed that Apple hardware is running behint intel and amd. Don’t say me that you don’t remember that? And i am sure that at that time, Barefeats was rather a proven place for benchmarking for you, isn’it. So don’t come now when Apple is ahead to say me go and check 5 or 6 sites, as far as i know, there is one version of photoshop, Bryce, AfterEffects, or whatever, the tested configurations are well exposed, so where is the problem?
And why a cooling system? Well go and check the noise of a Powermac G5 2,5 ghz, its extremely quite for such a powerful machine, much quite than Dual 2.0 ghz opteron machines or dual xeons machines. I guess that Apple could go without cooling systeme, that’s obvious, but it would have recquired more work for the cooling system relying on fans only, and so more noise than the previous generation dual 2.0 ghz mahines, which was not acceptable for Apple. I am sure that everyone would have come and complain about why this new machines are more noisy than the previous ones, so now you complain that Apple is making a hard work of engeneering to satisfy their clients. Ridiculous?
And have a look to the last Athlon Fx @2.6 ghz,it is a very hot chip, close to the Prescott, around 100 watts. Ok its 130 nm chip, but Amd is not able to produce chips with this frequency using the 90 nm process, and the results is here, its very hot, and noisy to cool without a cooling system…..
Have a nice day…..
Ever since then I was always skeptical of the G5 and so far I see no evidence of G5 being better than amd 64 in anyway
The G5’s FPU is better than anything on the x86 side. If you work with a lot of numeric code the G5 will mop the floor with anything that’s x86 based. For example, see http://www.fftw.org/speed/ and compare the Opteron 2 GHz to the G5 2 GHz. You’ll see that the G5 has a slight lead in double precision math. The neat things come when you start looking at single precsion math where the G5 positively mops the floor with any x86 processor. Heck, even the G4 with the altivec unit will handily beat an Opteron clocked twice as fast at single precision floating point.
No, FFTs are NOT trivial benchmarks that have no applications in the real world. Of course these aren’t applicable to every application but for apps that are heavily reliant on floating point math, the G5 is a very very good chip and the Powermacs are competitively priced. Denying that is to demonstrate fanboy-ism.
Another reason why Apple ships less units per quarter , that I havent seen explicitly stated yet is you don’t need to replace an apple every 18 months to stay current as you would with PC hardware. I have a 3 year old PC laptop that is useless under XP. I also have a B&W G3 that I still could use under OSX (till it burnt out). While this isn’t great from a sales point of view, as a customer you know that when you buy an Apple it lasts a long time.
@Hakime
Depands on benchmarks e.g. Refer to http://www.barefeats.com/ut2004.html
for game results (near the end of article)(ecosystem vs ecosystem).
The Opteron box presented in your barefeat.com was not Opteron 250 @2.4Ghz solution (air cooled).
Refer to
http://www.barefeats.com/g5c.html
http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/1235/images/0015664_PIC.gif
Cinebench 2003 CPU rendering.
Dual Opteron 250 @2.4Ghz scored 632
Dual PowerMac G5 @2.5 scored 633
Addendum for “depands on benchmarks” POV refer to barefeats.com’s Adobe Photoshop 7 test i.e.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
(Dual G5 @2Ghz vs Dual K8 @2Ghz**)
**Using the old 333DDR not the newer 400DDR(e.g. CG stepping).
I don’t see any good future for Apple unless they release OS X for x86.
Otherwise, they are just going to become a funny music-selling company with their stupid iPods.
Did you know they have the phenomenal number of 93 shops in the WHOLE WORLD
)) According to Jobs this is incredible and amazing 
)))))))))))) (btw just like everything he speaks about on their stupid conferences)
“I don’t see any good future for Apple unless they release OS X for x86.”
You need glasses. 🙂
Pulease, the number of units sold by Apple has INCREASED but NOT at the same rate as the rest of the industry, hence, their marketshare has decreased;
If you took time to read the article you would have seen that unit sales have also decreased.
Also, comparing one company against the rest of the industry? hell, why don’t we compare IBM PC shipments to the industry, “Oh, they SUX00R, the only hold 1.8% of the market!”.
Because it’s a platform against an other platform. If Dell only sells say 3% that’s not a problem, because software house will still catter for the 98% of the PC market that includes the 3% Dell. So a Dell user will have no problem to find support and software. Not so with Apple. If Apple has only 1.8% then OSX has only 1.8%, period.
What is ferrari’s market share in the entire global car market? 0.005%? less? I’m pretty sure they don’t care either.. why should Apple
Because Ferrari makes cars. In order to use cars you need:
a) petrol (gas)
b) roads
both are standardized.
In order to use a computer you need software. In order to use OSX you need OSX software. If OSX accounts to 0.05% only small shareware firms (enthusiasts mainly) will catter for it. Thus, you would not be able to run it.
Ferrari is more like a ultra high quality PC-maker (alienware, sony vaio, etc), not Apple, in that sense.
What decline? I guess I should ignore the sharply increasing amount of mac laptops I see at my school. Three years ago I would have to search for a mac user (I knew 1). Nowadays I see them everywhere and can’t count all of the mac users that I know now.
OSX is almost a dream OS for us Computer Science majors. Why must you trolls spend your time trashing our choice? Go outside and take your energy out on a baseball or something.
Ha ha ha! fisrt you mention that you see more and more macs in your school and then you say that you are a …computer science major!
But of course, you idiot!!! Normal people are not cs majors, though, and NORMAL sales of macs have declined.
because im not ITALIAN
Weak, Eugenia, very weak! There are was to translate that article. Besides, to be fair, you should be looking EVERYWHERE to find news for your site, and not just selecting the news that fits YOUR stilted opinion.
Weak? What kind of silly logic is this? Who told you we should pay any attention to your crappy article or go to the length to translate it from italian?
Eugenia should have looked around for foreign language articles she doesn’t understand and translate them with babelfish?!!!
Are you a complete idiot?
Also, news editors publish the news that THEY see fit (i.e that FIT their opinion). That what a news source is, a source of opionion and taste. Else all news sources would be the same list of bare facts (translated from Italian or not).
because im not ITALIAN
Weak, Eugenia, very weak! There are was to translate that article. Besides, to be fair, you should be looking EVERYWHERE to find news for your site, and not just selecting the news that fits YOUR stilted opinion.
Weak? What kind of silly logic is this? Who told you we should pay any attention to your crappy article or go to the length to translate it from italian?
Eugenia should have looked around for foreign language articles she doesn’t understand and translate them with babelfish?!!!
Are you a complete idiot?
Also, news editors publish the news that THEY see fit (i.e that FIT their opinion). That what a news source is, a source of opionion and taste. Else all news sources would be the same list of bare facts (translated from Italian or not).
But of course, you idiot!!! Normal people are not cs majors, though, and NORMAL sales of macs have declined.
Where in the article did anyone say NORMAL users? What’s a normal user anyway? The post you’re replying to was intended at those who claimed to be knowledgable in PCs and were comparing cheap x86 Opteron/P4 boxes to ‘expensive’ PPC G5 boxes. Who cares if sales to NORMAL users goes down as long as sales are increasing?
The average user wouldn’t have a clue about what Opteron, Athlon 64, etc is. They’re just happy with email, word processing, and maybe playing some music and viewing photos. In time, they might see that Macs (and Linux) provide a very viable alternative to Windows.
The last niche that the Mac has seems to be music/midi and with the release of Sonar 4 (which far eclipses even protools in features and functionality) the Mac is once again a 2nd rate platform.
What???!!!!
Sonar 4 has nothing to do with Pro Tools. It is a decent sequencer, but not many pros use it (public enemy do btw -and with the demise of Ray Charles there is one less user).
Anyway, most pros use either Pro Tools or Logic. The first is multi-platform the second is Mac only.
Some use Nuendo (multi-platform).
Of the Pro-Tools users, most use it on a Mac.
So there.
I didn’t read this topic. 🙂
Something no one is mentioning is that over 40% of new PowerMac/iMac systems shipped and stated in the last quarterly report come from former Windows users.
As has been mentioned prior and most recently, the turnaround rate for replacement systems have continued since Apple’s inception to be historically slower than in the x86 space. You get more bang for your buck out of Macs than you do PCs.
Personally, I attribute this to Windows. Why? I have a Pentium II Celeron running Debian Linux with both KDE3.3.1 and Gnome 2.6.
The system has 384MB Ram, dual drives and runs just fine at 550Mhz. Slow to compile but doesn’t stop me from being productive.
Ultimately, doing productivity work is more constrained to how much output one can generate versus how fast your computer system runs.
Games of course is a whole other beast.
My next purchases(plural) will be a dual G5 for OS X and an Athlon 64 FX-55 for Debian Linux.