Apple's strong iPhone and iPad sales dazzled Wall Street this week, but an even bigger surprise perhaps came from sales of the company's line of Mac computers in its third business quarter. The computer maker announced record sales of 3.47 million desktop and notebook products, exceeding the previous quarterly high mark by more than 100,000 units.
Mac sales grew 33 percent year over year, which Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said easily exceeded IDC's pre-earnings release estimate of 22 percent growth in this year's second quarter.
"We are pleased to have outgrown the global market in both the desktop and portable categories," Oppenheimer told financial analysts. "We experienced strong double-digit Mac growth in each of our geographies" and "began and ended the quarter with between three and four weeks of Mac channel inventory."
A Strong U.S. Showing
Apple said its surprising Mac shipment growth was driven by the continuing sales momentum behind the iMac as well as heightened demand for the company's notebooks. Apple's MacBook Pro family "was updated in April with faster processors, more powerful graphics, and even longer battery life," Oppenheimer said.
Despite school budgetary constraints, Apple's U.S. education business enjoyed record sales. Furthermore, revenue at Apple's retail stores amounted to $2.58 million -- a 73 percent rise from the $1.49 billion that Apple's retail stores rang up in the year-earlier period.
"Our stores sold 677,000 Macs compared to 492,000 Macs in the year-ago quarter -- an increase of 38 percent" and "about half the Macs sold in our stores during the June quarter were to customers who have never owned a Mac before," Oppenheimer said.
Apple sold nearly 1.75 million Mac computers in the United States alone during the second quarter of 2010, according to Gartner. U.S. unit shipments were good enough to give Apple a number-four ranking with an 9.8 percent market share -- up from 9.1 percent in the year-ago quarter, the research firm said.
"Asia-Pacific and Europe showed strong growth of Mac shipments," said Mika Kitagawa, a principal research analyst at Gartner. The growth in the U.S. "is still good, but to a lesser extent," she added.
The iPad Effect
Though overall PC sales to U.S. consumers achieved double-digit shipment growth in the quarter, mobile  shipment growth declined due to slowing netbook sales growth, Kitagawa observed.
"We have seen minor cannibalization from iPad to the U.S. consumer notebooks -- both regular and mini," Kitagawa said. "But it may be temporary due to the high-profile introduction of iPad."
Apple told financial analysts it sold 3.27 million iPads in the second quarter, which exceeded the 3.2 million predicted by analysts at Piper Jaffray. Overall, ABI Research forecasts that 11 million media tablets will ship this year, with Apple ending up the major beneficiary due to the delayed introduction of competing products.
"Assuming that competing tablets from other vendors do arrive in the second half of the year as expected, we believe that the iPad will account for a significant portion -- but not all -- of the projected 11 million units," said Jeff Orr, a principal analyst at the research firm. "To capitalize on the usual fourth-quarter sales boom, other tablets need to reach retailers' shelves by early September."
Despite the robust sales prediction, Orr thinks the media tablet segment will fall short of becoming a mass-market consumer gadget until 2013. However, much will depend on the relative success of Apple's rivals as well as the iPad maker's distribution reach, which is still quite limited, Orr explained.
zing:
Posted: 2010-07-28 @ 2:47am PT
Basically showing that iditos will buy anything if they are brainwashed enough. Especially if they are tweens and somewhat if they are under 25. Even when shown they are over priced, and that you can get faster PC's for less, they don't get it. It's form over function. I guess those deceptive ImAMac commercials really work. And each year new itards are born that will be faithful to their leader Steve Jobs. But every time I meet one of them bragging about how they can edit videos etc. I either run the same software from adobe, or similar editors and while they are waiting 20 minutes for thiers to finish, mine finishes in like 10. That's because I have an i7 based pc that is faster than a typical mac pro. It only cost me $730 and it's more than twice as fast as their $1600 core2duo imac. It's still quicker than their $2000 i7 imac, and faster than their $2500 pro.
And windows 7 is great. Even mac users like windows 7 as that is what they boot camp into when they want windows.
So none of this makes sense other than people are uninformed, impressionable etc.
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