9 ms·

it speaks to the amazing power of marketing. People are always blown away when they find out that apple has less than a 10% market share and that their market s

by batoure 13y ago

it speaks to the amazing power of marketing. People are always blown away when they find out that apple has less than a 10% market share and that their market share has actually gone down over the last 10 years.

migrantgeek 13y ago
I'm not sure it's marketing but being in the bubble like was previously mentioned. Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work. Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)
- batoure 13y ago
  Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners. So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.
  - niels_olson 13y ago
    Would developers write better software if they had to write on slower, older machines with less memory and storage?
    - batoure 13y ago
      I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for. When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective. http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacked-together-iphone-looked-like-an/ http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...
    - rwallace 13y ago
      No. They would write the kind of software we used to write back in the days when all computers are like that and we traded away everything else for machine efficiency because we had no choice: clumsy, feature impoverished, riddled with arbitrary limits that trip you up at the worst possible moment, fundamentally insecure, hard to use and generally crap.
gress 13y ago
That's because market share is a meaningless measure.
- batoure 13y ago
  Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market market -> all the people encompasses your share share -> using your stuff Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.
  - gress 13y ago
    It's meaningless because the 'market' of which share is measured is an arbitrary classification.
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      How so ? What market do you propose to measure then ?
      - gress 13y ago
        How so? Because these so called 'markets' of which share is measured are not markets at all. They are simply groups of products that analysts have decided to add together.
  - nwp90 13y ago
    Except that it doesn't measure the actual using at all; I seem to recall there being rather more interesting stats than just vanilla "market share" in the iOS vs Android comparison that show that while more people have Android devices, more people with iOS are spending more on, and using more Apps.
    - batoure 13y ago
      So again we see that apple has been good at getting the platform profitable here is a great article that breaks this down. It ends up being less about the fact that iphone apps are better per say (which I think they often are) but more about the fact that significantly more apps for android start out free. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-numbers-behind-apps/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-number... but your statement about usage is wrong see the following article on app use: http://www.cnet.com/news/most-iphone-applications-gathering-dust/ http://www.cnet.com/news/most-iphone-applications-gathering-...
dasil003 13y ago
It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher. And that is not even considering the effect of smart phones and tables on peoples usage patterns. My in-laws who are small town folk from the midwest, as far as you can possibly imagine from an urban hipster, had been using Dells for years and switched to an iPad last year and are getting much more out of it than they ever did their last aircraft carrier of a Win 7 Dell that was ostensibly much more powerful.
- batoure 13y ago
  There isn't really any useful information in your reply here. Apples "Consumer only" market share is still less than 20% and if you include Ipads..... as a PC replacement their market share is still only around 15% (though that data is a year old apple only had about 25% growth last year which makes it a wash in the over all market so those numbers are still pretty truthy-ish) http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-computer-market-share-chart http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-compute... Part of the point of my post was to show how people assume statistics in their head without doing something as simple as a Google search. Saying that market share isn't a significant measure is silly because, well its a measure of how much of the market actually uses apple. Which leads us back to the original point, the fact that you feel that the numbers must be significantly higher is only a representation of how apple has captured the minds and hearts of people around the world... Marketing
  - malandrew 13y ago
    I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.
yskchu 13y ago
Their marketing is funded by their dominant profit margin; before, people think market share equates to higher earnings, but apple shows that even with a small market share you can have a dominant profit margin and earnings, which is what really matter.
- batoure 13y ago
  A most truthful argument. However I think that in relation to the OP its important to ask Cui Bono. This is most definitely to the benefit of apple and its shareholder, and so reflects less value to the overall population of technology users. Assuming you don't want to get into the hocus pocus circular math of trying to figure out the value of how Apples profitability is driving competitive innovations in the greater share of the market(i.e. there would be no Microsoft surface tablet today without the ipad)
Tloewald 13y ago
Your post speaks to the amazing power of something, not sure what. Apple's market share of what? Is below what? Where? Among whom? Has dropped since when?

by batoure 13y ago

migrantgeek 13y ago

I'm not sure it's marketing but being in the bubble like was previously mentioned. Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work. Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)

batoure 13y ago
Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners. So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.
- niels_olson 13y ago
  Would developers write better software if they had to write on slower, older machines with less memory and storage?
  - batoure 13y ago
    I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for. When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective. http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacked-together-iphone-looked-like-an/ http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...
  - rwallace 13y ago
    No. They would write the kind of software we used to write back in the days when all computers are like that and we traded away everything else for machine efficiency because we had no choice: clumsy, feature impoverished, riddled with arbitrary limits that trip you up at the worst possible moment, fundamentally insecure, hard to use and generally crap.

gress 13y ago

That's because market share is a meaningless measure.

batoure 13y ago
Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market market -> all the people encompasses your share share -> using your stuff Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.
- gress 13y ago
  It's meaningless because the 'market' of which share is measured is an arbitrary classification.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    How so ? What market do you propose to measure then ?
    - gress 13y ago
      How so? Because these so called 'markets' of which share is measured are not markets at all. They are simply groups of products that analysts have decided to add together.
- nwp90 13y ago
  Except that it doesn't measure the actual using at all; I seem to recall there being rather more interesting stats than just vanilla "market share" in the iOS vs Android comparison that show that while more people have Android devices, more people with iOS are spending more on, and using more Apps.
  - batoure 13y ago
    So again we see that apple has been good at getting the platform profitable here is a great article that breaks this down. It ends up being less about the fact that iphone apps are better per say (which I think they often are) but more about the fact that significantly more apps for android start out free. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-numbers-behind-apps/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-number... but your statement about usage is wrong see the following article on app use: http://www.cnet.com/news/most-iphone-applications-gathering-dust/ http://www.cnet.com/news/most-iphone-applications-gathering-...

dasil003 13y ago

It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher. And that is not even considering the effect of smart phones and tables on peoples usage patterns. My in-laws who are small town folk from the midwest, as far as you can possibly imagine from an urban hipster, had been using Dells for years and switched to an iPad last year and are getting much more out of it than they ever did their last aircraft carrier of a Win 7 Dell that was ostensibly much more powerful.

batoure 13y ago
There isn't really any useful information in your reply here. Apples "Consumer only" market share is still less than 20% and if you include Ipads..... as a PC replacement their market share is still only around 15% (though that data is a year old apple only had about 25% growth last year which makes it a wash in the over all market so those numbers are still pretty truthy-ish) http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-computer-market-share-chart http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-compute... Part of the point of my post was to show how people assume statistics in their head without doing something as simple as a Google search. Saying that market share isn't a significant measure is silly because, well its a measure of how much of the market actually uses apple. Which leads us back to the original point, the fact that you feel that the numbers must be significantly higher is only a representation of how apple has captured the minds and hearts of people around the world... Marketing
- malandrew 13y ago
  I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.

yskchu 13y ago

Their marketing is funded by their dominant profit margin; before, people think market share equates to higher earnings, but apple shows that even with a small market share you can have a dominant profit margin and earnings, which is what really matter.

batoure 13y ago
A most truthful argument. However I think that in relation to the OP its important to ask Cui Bono. This is most definitely to the benefit of apple and its shareholder, and so reflects less value to the overall population of technology users. Assuming you don't want to get into the hocus pocus circular math of trying to figure out the value of how Apples profitability is driving competitive innovations in the greater share of the market(i.e. there would be no Microsoft surface tablet today without the ipad)

Tloewald 13y ago

Your post speaks to the amazing power of something, not sure what. Apple's market share of what? Is below what? Where? Among whom? Has dropped since when?