Apple outpaces PC industry in sales for February

whether I made the right choice to move to the "wrong side of the spectrum" (as my friends call using Macs) about 20 years back. Great news. Apple keep it up. We not only love being Mac lovers, we also love to see the Mac being economically more viable and more so as a Mac developer. :)

If you want to see where all of these laptop sales are, just take a stroll through some university auditoriums right before class starts. In my 4 recent years of college, I went from seeing maybe 3 or 4 glowing Apple logos in crowds of +/-120 to scores of them.

It's this generation that's smart enough to see the benefits of a quality machine/software and will continue to buy more Macs in the future (count me as one of them). We were raised when the early apples were still popular in the grade school classrooms, and may have had a passing acquaintance in high school labs, for the serious schools.

Education (at least in the area schools where I lived) didn't listen to business when it called Apple dead. It ignored the sneers in the late '90s and found itself rewarded with long-lasting hardware and smaller IT staffs.

Look for a resurgence/explosion of Macs in the workplace with the next decade. You'll find that those in the decision making positions aren't so M$ engrained as the current batch of "professionals," and today's growing marketshare demographic is just going to fuel the fire.

I'm surprised at the 25% dollar share, would this top Dell?

Apple's market share can only go up. With tons of switchers due to iPod, coupled to the mighty flop that is Vista; what else could have happened?

That said, I'm glad for it. Apple users have been--too often--relegated to second class status. These numbers indicate that the playing field is starting to level a bit. With MS, planing a Vista upgrade in 2010, Apple will continue to lap it with OSX.

I too am seeing a lot more Mac laptops at my campus and it is definitely not Apple friendly. Zero support, nada, zip. Still the platform is making inroads. And this being a campus that provides a thinkpad to every student and faculty member!

BTW: It has nothing to do with the topic, but I saw my first zune in the wild this week. How long have they been out? As it turns out, it was a student in my class. He was perfectly happy with it and liked it's integration with the provided laptop. He also mentioned that he never "squirted" a song.

...crippled RAM capacities if they want to keep growing - while touting dual OS use for 'switchers' the current headroom doesn't really allow for more than recreational use - 4G on a 'Pro' laptop seems laughably unreasonable to me compared to 32G on a desktop Pro system & 2G on a mini is hardly adequate for even basics if one starts loading a major app or two... Constant paging undermines speed & RAM is cheap (check the activity monitor app: system memory) finding one could buy a new computer simply for such a basic requirement may undermine any initial enthusiasm for the platform...

It's this generation that's smart enough

mmm, not sure it's because they are smart, I would just say, it's because they already have an iPod

is it just me or someone didn't close an italic tag? All my MacNN text is italic! Am sure it'll be fixed before anyone reads this... nevermind.

i run a small company and we provide tools to run their business, for a specialized market, and over the last few years the mac sells have grown tremendously. not only that but more and more folks are wanting it recompiled for the mac as they're switching over. these are for the most part working adults.

At my work, we have a computer program. After one year, an employee can borrow (interest free) up to $1,000 for a new computer. We are all macs and 95% of the employees who come in have never even used a Mac. (I know since I do the training and always ask)

So lets see the numbers...

# of loans over the past 2 years to employees = 41 # of PC's purchased = 0 # of Macs purchased = 40 # of times I talked a employee into a Mac = 1

At this point 4Gbs of ram is plenty. With this I can run FCP, Motion, PS CS3 & Soundtrack without a hitch. What Apps could you possibly mean? Looking around at the laptop landscape, 4Gb is pretty much all anyone stuffs into one of these things. I suspect due to size constraints.

Less performance the 32Gb of Ram--ya think? Even going third party that would cost as much as a Mac Pro, also, that much ram is strictly for the production level pros. Nobody who requires those kind of specs would ever turn to laptop to do that sort of heavy lifting anyhow.

bobolicious, have you even used a Mac? Your post implies you haven't. I've got a last gen MB outfitted with 2GB of ram and it more than handles the basics. I wouldn't render Maya on it, but that is what my Pro machine is for. If your suggesting that Vista/XP need more, I can't say, but PC magazine indicates that both those OS(s) perform better on a Mac than on other hardware?

I'm sure though, after following these comments, Steve's going to shoehorn a 8 core xenon along with 32Gb of ram into a MBP, hoping to accommodate that undeserved part of the market.

I've been thinking, the mini cooper should be outfitted with a jimmy diesel engine. That way, it could haul the load of an eighteen wheeler and be good on the commute.