If and when Apple hits 25% market share for the personal computer sector I wonder if we'll see a huge increase in malware and viruses on the Mac. That's my biggest concern about an ever increasing market share.
The better question to ask if it is even possible for it to get anywhere near as bad as the alternative OS of Windows.
Still wondering where Tim got his numbers from...
I suspect Tim was quoting personal (home) computer share, which excludes Enterprise.
If we simplistically assume that many Americans have a PC at home and another in the office, then 50% of the US Market is to business and 50% home ... and since big business doesn't typically have many Macs, we can model that as being 100% Windows on that side, which means that we can take Gartner's grand sum average and estimate the "US Home Market" marketshare just by doubling it: 12.9% becomes roughly 25%.
FWIW, I'd love to see some data on the statistical distribution of personal computers by market (home vs work), but I've never seen any.
Very impressive for both Apple and HP. Why on Earth would HP want to ditch PCs with 1/4 of the market and 15% annual growth (?). Makes no sense.
Their numbers are imo even more impressive than Apple's, considering they own a large chunk of the business world.
Agreed, although that's also HP's and Dell's weakness: the world of big business is all to willing to compete them against each other as a simple commodity, which limits HP's and Dell's ability to be profitable. As such, both HP and Dell have to sell more machines to make the same amount of profit that Apple makes per machine.
If we look at TMay's comment that HP makes 1/7th the profit margin of Apple, this would mean that HP needs to sell 7x more HPs than Apple sells Macs in order to make the same bottom line profit. But let's be more conservative and say that HP only makes 1/3rd...and now let's look at the numbers: since HP is only selling 2.2x more (and Dell 1.7x), it becomes pretty evident that from a "Bottom Line" perspective, Apple already is #1 in the USA Market.
-hh