50% of Apple Retail Sales to Switchers

Arik Hesseldah's Byte of the Apple column in Businessweek this week focuses on the salient numbers. No, not the financials. Something a little more interesting.

The number of switchers.

Hesseldah notes that Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said in Wednesday's conference call that fully 50% of Mac buyers at the Apple Retail Stores are 'new to Mac'. That's significant.

It's unlikely that many have never used a computer before. The correct conclusion to draw is that they're coming over from the Windows side of the ledger.

Of course, it's difficult to know how accurate Apple's polling of customers is. Hesseldah figures that, of the 154,000 Macs sold at retail, around 77,000 people were 'new to Mac'. As Apple Retail Store locations grow in number, that figure should rise exponentially.

That doesn't count, of course, store.apple.com purchases, as well as third-party resellers.

Hesseldah is right to focus not only on the iPod 'halo effect', but also Boot Camp, which may well bring – let's call them 'semi-switchers' – into the Apple camp. Which means Apple's selling them hardware, rather than software. They'll use OS X, maybe as their main OS, but they also need to boot into Windows for work projects, or possibly to use Windows-only software. But the dual (or triple) boot capability of the Mac makes it the most flexible of all the personal computers on the market.

Despite the fractional fall in Apple's market share this quarter, desktop sales were surprisingly strong, given the entire line has not been transitioned to Intel. Moreover, had Apple been able to get enough MBP units out there (remembering iBook is still PowerPC), the figures would have been much more impressive. Once the full Mac model range is on Intel, and there are regular speed boosts and steady supplies, then we have every right to expect very strong sales indeed.

Especially sales to switchers. Welcome. Seriously.



Read The Full Article:
http://www.my-mac.org/files/4f57052f32235bfb7968c5d6282cadd2-208.html#unique-entr
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