If you go to the very first entries of my blog, you will find a number of rants against Apple marketing. I asserted that Apple got so many things wrong in the past and as result, ended up as a minor player in the PC industry. I think a lot of what I said in those posts have value and I may have even been right in my assessment of Apple’s product positioning in the past.
But in a significant way, especially in the past three or so years, Apple has been showing the wisdom of not playing the volume seller game. While the rest of the PC market lives on thin margins and requires complementary product sales to make money on their computer business, Apple makes thick margins. Apple is more interested in margin with less revenue than more revenue with less margin.
So, in fairness to Apple, I am checking the tick box in my WordPress Categories list: Things I Eventually Got Wrong. Though it has taken 20+ years, Apple is finally making money on the closed environment and doing a great job at it.
It’s no secret that Apple AAPL is doing really well at the high end of the personal computer business, but the other day I got some data that cast its recent achievements in a whole new light. In September, according to market researcher NPD Group, Macs accounted for 18.9% of all laptops and desktops sold in U.S. retail outlets. For computers priced above $1,000, Apple’s share was an astonishing 89%.
The NPD numbers overstate Apple’s dominance to some degree. They exclude most sales to large enterprises, which strongly prefer high-end PCs to Macs. Still, the business implications are inescapable. While competitors such as Hewlett-Packard HPQ, Acer, and Dell DELL sell vast volumes of $500 laptops that yield razor-thin profit margins, Apple—whose cheapest MacBook sells for $999—is raking in the lion’s share of the industry’s profits.
via Why Apple Leaves Low-End Computers to the Competition – BusinessWeek.
