Why would you think Apple's marketshare is not growing at the rate it was, or even decreasing?
Apple had a huge spike from late-1998 into 2001 (one week pro and consumer laptops did 21% percent and one month, computers in general reached 14% percent) which has not been matched since then, and the nearly 80% percent market share of the Apple IIe will be impossible to reach again in any high tech market outside of Windows and the home/business operating system market.
Apple's total share (Macworld USA numbers) has not even resembled anything close to double digits in the 2000s counting the consumer and professional markets. I am within an hour of Apple's headquarters yet HP, Compaq, Toshiba, and Microsoft all have larger campuses there.
I was a part of the huge buying rush that was into the great blueberry iMac and iBooks. I bought an early clamshell and though it was $1599 and had only 32 megabytes of RAM, they were everywhere in my neck of the woods in Northern California.
As to how Macs have fared in your England, or Japan, or other countries, I don't really know unless I read through a foreign market Mac magazine at Borders/Amazon. Generally, what info I do read about foreign market share is positive news, and I wish us Northern California users, would wake up because we should know better, and as a populace, don't realize what we have in our own backyard.
You can go to any coffeehouse in or near Cupertino and you will see the Acers, Dells, and HP laptops with a few Macs here and there. The only place I see Macs approaching 30% percent of the computers is the local colleges' graphic design/audio/filmaking labs which are evenly split between Macs, PCs, Sun Solaris, and Silicon Graphics machines. When I am on the Stanford campus, not far from Apple, I can't see why most of the students still use PCs. What? To save money? These kids are not exactly cash strapped. I lived in London and you can compare the wealth of Palo Alto, Los Altos hills, Woodside to your Kensington and West End.
Now if you want to talk about US high end cellphones, we just outdid Blackberry in the last quarter (Macworld, Dec), and the MP3 market is all about iPod in the states. But I do hope this is the case in England, too. And all the other countries.
We have iPod vending machines in department stores in the states, so that part of Apple's market share is doing very, very well.
