Apple Mac enjoys 27% market share — among tech reporters
With 1.83 million square feet of floor space to cover, it’s not easy to gather in one place the 600 media representatives who have flocked to Las Vegas for the orgy of marketing excess that is the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show. But in the press lounge on Sunday, Valleywag’s Jordon Golson found 129 reporters and bloggers (they wear different badges this year), and he used the opportunity to take a survey of what machines they were using.
His count: 94 Windows PCs and 35 Macs (including his MacBook Pro). That’s a 27% market share for Apple (AAPL) — considerably higher than the 7.3% reported in the latest Net Applications survey. The numbers are sure to be even more skewed Cupertino’s way when a different subset of the tech press gathers in San Francisco for Macworld next week.
No wonder Apple gets more than its share of ink — and pixels — in the technology press.
[Photo courtesy of CES]
What it comes down to is that geeks know what works, and a lot of tech writers are geeks. So it’s not surprising that so many tech writers use Apple.
My wife is a musician. Most of the musicians we know use Apple. The inclusion of Garage Band with ILife is a real value added proposition to musicians. It factored into our most recent computer purchase, a MacBook that we are using to record her CD. I think about 1/2 of the musicians I know use Macs, about 40% Windows (mostly XP), and the remaining 10% one of the specialized Linux Distributions like Ubuntu Studio.
So yeah – tech writers may use more Macs. And like musicians they may write about Macs more. Most musicians today have blogs, and Garage Band gets a lot of good press.
That doesn’t mean that Apple get more than it’s share of ink. What it means is that the geeks are ahead of the general population in their computer buying knowledge.
Macs work better than Windows boxes. It’s that simple. Or I should say they are that simple to operate. I’d rather give a Mac to an ageing relative than anything running Windows.
“No wonder Apple gets more than its share of ink — and pixels — in the technology press.”
Apple gets ink because it’s simply a more interesting company, story wise, than anyone else in the field.
Basing it on what kind of computer a (self selecting) group of people *in one small press lounge* (remember, there are 5,000+ press at CES) is as ridiculous as writing a story about Apple’s market share among reporters and then snidely insinuating that’s why Apple gets good press.
Whenever I walk into a coffee shop here in downtown Montreal, I am guaranteed to see that at least one-third, and sometimes as much as one-half, of the laptops in use are Macs.
What’s Apple’s share of the marketplace sector of individual who actually choose and purchase their operating system? Bet it’s about this percentage.
Why exactly does this assume that Apple’s share of ink and pixels should reflect it’s market share? Shouldn’t the percentage be related to it’s what the company does that is newsworthy?
The media has a long track record of supporting and promoting the new religion that was Apple. Some do it with missionary zeal, some subtly “Free-mason” style (e.g., Mossberg).
The left-leaning media types always like to support what they perceive as the underdog, anti-capitalist, and Apple indeed was the underdog until iPod came. Now just see them cringe when somebody mentions that Apple’s market-cap will soon surpass that of the Dark-Side himself.
” No wonder Apple gets more than its share of ink — and pixels — in the technology press. ”
Could it be that tech reporters are using Macs because they actually get to try an array of different brands and choose the one that allows them to do their job most efficiently?
I wonder.
C’mon, that’s not why apple gets more ink or pixels. That would be like saying IBM got more stories than say Smith Corona in the age of typewriters.
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7.3% total market share, not notebook market share. I suspect that Apple still has a 4 or 5% share of the desktop market, but have a much larger slice of the portable market than many might think….