Typical !! Market Share and Profit Share are completely different. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 did away with this pea/shell game. Apple does not post profits willingly, SOX's forces that issue. Apple delays big time posting profits, up to 2 years, so its a lot of smoke and mirrors, in other words take your profit now and you competitor knows you margins, wait two years and it takes a Cray Computer to figure the margins.

dmg

dmg

We don't cover Mac news, so if analysts predict Mac market share is down, fine, but it's not news for us (we generally don't cover when Mac market share goes up either

Con call is next week. If iPhone market share goes down, we'll report it as such.

We may also point to Apple's traditional heavy holiday quarter, light new year quarter, and slow pre-new hardware quarter from last year as the beginning of an iPod-esque sales pattern... /:

To satisfy your argument: Sure, someone should have put out a seperate article before this one simply stating that the marketshare went down. Just to be fair. Instead it was rolled into one article to save the stock "panic" that news like that would cause.

If apple has the same low marketshare as a company selling cheaper products then they are still making more profit than the other company. The fact that the blogs say it's not a big deal when apple's marketshare goes down is just stating the facts. IT DOESN'T MATTER. It's not the blogs being fanboys (note: I'm not saying they aren't). With apple's high profit margin, a low marketshare doesn't mean the same thing to them as it would someone selling cheaper products.

Google Jon Stewart interviews Jim Cramer. Cramer got called out on talking down the iPhone to lower the stock price before it was released. Essentially this is the same thing. Their marketshare goes down so people hype that up thinking it means the same thing as it does to other companies. It doesn't.

I'm not talking about Apple standpoint, their business practices, anything they have said or anything of that nature.

Just how Apple blogs treat the idea of Apple's market share situation, when things were climbing you guys (apple blogs) kept harping on the subject, saying how great things are going, how the iPod, the iPhone and OSX are bring customers over to Mac and how Apple's share keeps going up while PC/Windows shares are going down, how great this is.

But now when its going down just about all the Apple blogs are now like "hey remember market share is unimportant to Apple".

But yeah clearly my point of view is in the minority here, with only Adam being able to grasp what I've now said like 3 or 4 times now. Best just to say lets agree to disagree.

Maybe I'm failing to make this point:

Mac and iPhone market share matter because they're also profit share. At 30% margins, they make lots of money, and more money the greater the market share obviously.

For Apple to go into razor-thin margin products like how netbooks or cheap laptops are currently being made and sold, they would lose profit share even if they gained market share -- hence my citing the Palm Centro example. Millions of sales, nothing to show for it on the books.

Anyone or any site that says Apple should go the netbook route to increase market share, not understanding what that would do to Apple's profit share, isn't looking at it from Apple's perspective.

Does that help?

The inconsistency is simply this, when things were on the up it wasn't important even once to point out that market share wasn't important, but instead it was reported as something great, the second it starts to slip it is unimportant. Its either always important to you (as a reporter/fan) or not...you can't have it both ways.

As I said before, I don't really care one way or the other...I'm a gadget fan, I buy Apple products, but I buy PC stuff as well.

Anyways, when in Apple country don't question stories about Apple is safe way to live....so I won't say anymore on the matter, less I be burned at the stake. lol

A few examples. In January 2007, Jobs made fun of the Zune and Microsoft. From Engadget's transcript: "They garnered 2% market share in November 2006… We don't have data for December. No matter how you try and spin this, what can you say?" Last October, during Apple's "Spotlight turns to notebooks" event, Tim Cook explained how the Mac has outgrown the market for almost 4 years. He stated: "Since we're growing faster than the market, in US retail market share we've gone from single digits to 17.6%."

When Apple opened its first retail store, Steve Jobs talked at length about, huh, was it profitability? Nope, he talked about regaining some market share. Apple's main reason for opening the stores was growth, according to Jobs. The company started a newspaper ad campaign called "5 down, 95 to go" referring to its market share. "If only 5 of those remaining 95 people switch, we'll double our market share," Jobs said. Oh Steve, you should know that Apple doesn’t care about that! And the fact that half of the computers sold at your retail stores are to people that have never own a Mac before is also unimportant.

Of course I'm not confusing Apple with Dell or Motorola. Its business model is different, the company doesn't usually cater to the low-end market because it wants to release the best products, and it always tries to maintain gross margins. Apple won't chase market share at any cost, at the expense of margins and profitability, people have to keep that in mind when commenting about the company. Yet, that didn't deter the iPod or iTunes from garnering and maintaining a staggering market share (above 70%). For historical reasons —the deal between IBM and Microsoft, the PC clones saga, etc— and because Apple has made a series of business model choices —not licensing the OS to other companies—, its share of the PC market will never reach that level, but it doesn't mean that market share is meaningless.

Concerning the March quarter, I don't see evidence that the Mac U.S. market share is slipping. The growth is slightly negative, but the whole market is down. Apple's U.S. share for 1Q2009 is down 0.1% compared to last year's quarter according to Gartner and it's up by 0.2% according to IDC. Some people are freaking out (or pretending to freak out to generate controversy) because Apple's share is down from Q3, but it happens every year no matter what. Market share gains or losses are not linear, they varie due to seasonality. The Mac is usually doing better in the 3rd calendar quarter (July-September), since it benefits from the back-to-school season. There is always a spike in Q3, as you can see on the following graph (Gartner figures, posted on macrumors.com). Usually, Apple's share is at a low-point in Q4 and Q1, and Q3 is traditionally the year's high-point. Then the cycle starts anew, rince and repeat.

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/04/16/apples-us-market-share-slips-in-1q-2009/

Concerning the Mac sites, I think that Neil has a point. When Apple is perceived to do well, fans will gloat about market share gains. When figures are less stellar, people will pretend that market share doesn't matter anyway. Of course some stupid pundits will always try to generate headlines, sometimes they will use monthly figures from NPD without even waiting for the quarter to end ("Apple US Mac Sales Down 16%, Windows PC Sales up 22%, Please Panic!!!") or thinking about product cycles (new Macs introduced late in the quarter). But it's easy to see through this bullshit and it's no reason to reject market share entirely.

Additionally, if you'll check out other Apple based blog sites, such as tuaw.com, you'll see that the decrease in market-share has been covered. I see no "inconsistency" in an article that puts Apple's point of view on the drop.

For the others, with little to no margin, that is extremely not the case. (The more 1%, the worse).

Make sense?

I read the article dude, my point is even this site was going on about Apple's market share going up and passing [insert name here] and now when its on the down, its oh "we should remember market share isn't important". Just seems like wanting have your cake and eat it too...that's all I'm saying.

Anyways, it really to me one way or the other.