Why Macbooks matter

iPods and the iPhone may capture most of Apple headlines throughout the year, but the Macbook remains the single most important contributor to Apple’s bottom line at this time. By any measure, we believe that Apple introduced solid upgrades for the notebook yesterday and if uniqueness attracts buyers, then Apple should have a good shot at extending its market share in this segment. As it is the case with all system vendors, Mac notebook sales are growing faster than desktops – more than half of all Macs sold are notebooks and Macs overall are growing six times faster than the industry average.

The numbers: Dollars and market share

Apple claims it owns 17.6% of the retail PC market in the U.S. Wall Street analysts estimate that Mac sales contribute 47% to an estimated $32.7 billion in Apple revenue this year, up from 40% of $19.3 billion in revenue in 2006. In other words, Macs may rake in $15.37 billion in revenue this year.

Whereas sales of Mac desktops and notebooks contributed 45% and 55% to total Mac sales in 2006, this year Mac notebooks are estimated to contribute a whopping 61%. This translates to 29% ($9.38 billion) of the firm’s estimated 2008 revenue, up from 22% in 2006. Apple has done a fantastic job positioning itself for the trend of growing notebook sales and a demand for much more stylish products. It is one of Apple’s fastest growing businesses that accounts for almost one of every three dollars the company receives.

Apple’s take in the U.S. notebook market: $1 on every $3 spent

Market data provided by NPD shows that one in five laptops sold in the U.S. retail during July and August carried an Apple logo. If we look at the total revenue, Apple’s share of notebook market in the same period was 35%. In other words, Apple took in more than $1 on every $3 spent on a notebook in U.S. retail. Of course, this trend means that average selling prices of Apple notebooks are much higher than those of PC notebooks and allows Apple to rake in fat margins.

NPD believes that Mac notebook sales grew 30% in revenue and 35% by units year on year between July and August. In the same period, Windows notebooks fell 1.5% and 10%, respectively.

Mac sales are growing six times the industry average

Gartner estimates Mac U.S. market share at close to 10% in September, with an estimated 1.64 million Macs sold in the current quarter and unit shipment growth that exceeds the industry average by 6x. Net Applications’ operating system web share usage trends suggest that Gartner may be right. For example, the September survey of 40,000 websites that represent overall Internet usage indicate that OS X hit a new record of 8.2% of the operating system web share, a gain of almost 0.4 points gain over the preceding month.

With that in mind, it is easy to see that notebook space is Apple’s market to lose. Having said that, yesterday’s Macbook and MacBook Pro refresh is critical to Apple’s fortunes and the Macbook position in the notebook segment. Some feel that the refresh is underwhelming just as the iPod event did last month. Yes, we expected upgraded hardware such as Montevina Core 2 Duo processors, more hard drive capacity and more memory. We also hoped for reduced price points, but a month ago no-one would have put their money on a high-tech manufacturing process, a redesign, a glass trackpad and an Nvidia chipset move.

Source: TGdaily

OpenOffice 3.0 released, crashed server

OpenOffice may not have got the headlines it deserves in the past, but that suddenly looks to have changed… With today’s release of OpenOffice 3, developer Sun Microsystems has seen download demand for the suite reach such levels it has been forced to run a stripped down site to avoid the thing going under. Consequently all that currently remains of openoffice.org is a text only page with download links (it’s tough being popular). This popularity is looking deserved too with OfficeOffice 3 running on Windows, Linux RPM, Linux DEB, Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC and Intel based Mac OS X Mac OSX PPC OSes making it the most platform friendly office suite out there.

So what do we get this time around? In truth the benefits are more centred around improving functionality than beautification (traditionally the way with ‘OOo’) and to this end the suite takes a major step forward with a newbie-friendly smart start page (pictured) and crucially full support for Microsoft Office’s new xml based file formats including docx, xlsx and pptx. Other notable highlights include Writer’s ability to now display multiple pages at once (great for larger monitors) while the Calc spreadsheet has seen its 256 column limit expanded to over 1,000 and there are improved network collaboration tools as well. Meanwhile OpenOffice’s famed high speed, low impact performance is claimed to be better than ever.