The guy sitting at the table next to mine at the Fair Trade Coffee House here in Madison had a Dell laptop. He asked me for help. It was his son’s computer, he said, and he couldn’t figure out how to make the wifi work. I looked at the screen for a minute and finally said, “I dunno, I’m a Mac guy.”
“Me too,” he said. We both looked around, to see if anybody else on the place was on a Windows machine. No luck. Only Macs in sight.
Now I realize that a coffeehouse in Madison isn’t America. But still, with Apple’s latest blowout earnings report due in large part to big Mac market-share gains, you’ve got to wonder: Is Mac on every table/desk really where we’re headed?
Naah, I don’t believe it either. But what’s gonna stop it?
Update: I’m back at the Fair Trade on Tuesday afternoon, and the current count is eight Macs (mine included) to six Windows laptops.
Update 2: Commenter Dave is right to point out that what stands in the way of a nation of Macs is that Macs now cost much more than Windows machines. (I actually knew that but I thought what’s the point of a blog post that answers its own question.) But of course the high-end segment is much more profitable. And Apple’s dominance there is truly amazing. Philip Elmer-DeWitt reported a couple of weeks ago that Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi Jr. estimates that Apple has a 29.4% market share among laptops in the top price quintile, and a 45.8% (!) market share in that quintile among consumer and education buyers (that is, the people who don’t have to go through humbug corporate IT managers).
Update 3: The Wednesday morning count at the Fair Trade appears to be five Macs to eight Windows laptops. The trend is against them!