From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: August 24, 2010 8:49:33 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: basler vision technology


Dear Christophe;


On 24-Aug-10, at 5:32 AM, funemea wrote:


I understand there needs to be à business case to support Development,fine to me.


However your data About mac growth vs pc is wrong, with the only exception of education Mac outperforms the pc market


Fortune reports on a new research note from Needham analyst Charlie Wolf breaking down Apple's Mac sales by market segment for the second calendar quarter of 2010 and comparing that performance to the PC industry's as a whole. While Wolf found strong across-the-board growth for Apple, the company saw its strongest performance in government and business sales, where it far outpaced overall industry growth.

Among his findings:


- At 35%, Mac shipment growth in June easily exceeded the market's growth rate of 20.9%.

- Mac shipments grew 31.4% in the home market, topping the market's growth rate of 25.2%.

- At 49.8%, the Mac's growth in business was three times higher than the market's 15.7%.

- Mac shipments in government grew 200%, sixteen times faster than the market's 12.1%.


In the business market, Wolf revealed Apple's strongest growth occurring among larger companies, with "large" and "very large" businesses seeing on the order of 100% growth, presumably on a year-over-year basis.


I'm sorry but going from 2.x% to 3.x% world market share means nothing to my end user sales. It really doesn't. I can tell you for a fact that I and other Scientific / Astronomy developers are seeing basically no growth at all. It's flatlined as far as sales go and I don't anticipate it increasing at all, as Apple's iToy market cannibalizes Mac sales going forward.


I have tracked Apple's Mac sales numbers (actual units sold and model breakdowns) for the past 15+ years. Percentage wise they still haven't recovered to the old days when they had 12+% market share back in 1992 when they sold 2.5 million Macs per year. Mac market share (as a percentage to world wide PC sales) was 3.2% back in 1999, dropped to it's lowest level in company history in 2003 at 1.79% and then has slowly climbed back up from there. But it's no where near what it was in the past.


And the question has always been if this is growth or just Mac users replacing existing hardware that Apple has obsoleted?  Apple won't answer that question at all. Remember that Snow Leopard has orphaned about 40 million PowerPC users going forward, so I would expect that many people would be replacing hardware and a huge sales jump should be expected, but where is it?


The fact that Apple is putting no innovation into their PC's (where is USB 3 or FireWire 3200 or Quad Core laptops etc), except for cosmetic superficial stuff (i.e. "Liquid Metal" or Laptops machined from a block of aluminum etc.) and that the entire WWDC for the past 2 years has been devoid of anything on Macs speaks volumes to the future of the Mac platform.


I could go on, but there is no point in arguing over it. Steve will do whatever he wants.


Milton J. Aupperle