Apple Laptops take 12 Percent of the Market

July 18th, 2006 at 3:00 PM - Reports by Jeff Gamet

The MacBook and MacBook Pro are selling well enough to push Appleis take of the U.S. portable computer market in June up to 12 percent. During Appleis second quarter earnings report, the company noted that its laptop marketshare was at 6 percent in January.

Peter Oppenheimer, Appleis chief financial officer, commented "The MacBook, which we introduced in mid-May, has been extremely well received and coupled with our very popular MacBook Pro has contributed to Appleis increased unit marketshare of portables in US retail."

That marketshare percentage may climb even higher. Apple says that it believes many creative professionals have been holding off purchasing a new Mac while waiting for an Intel-based desktop Mac and Universal Binary applications - Like Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator CS3, which should be available next spring.

Once the applications that creative pros rely on can run natively on Intel-based Macs, MacBook Pro sales are likely to ramp up even more.

The work developers have put in to migrating their application code to Universal Binary seems to be paying off. Apple noted that third-party developers have released over 2,900 Universal Binary applications so far.

"We expect that over 70 percent of the 500 applications we consider most critical to our customers will be available in Universal versions by the end of September," Mr. Oppenheimer said.

Appleis chief operating officer, Tim Cook noted that once the MacBook started shipping, there was "very robust" consumer and higher education demand. That high demand, coupled with increasing MacBook Pro sales may give Apple even more laptop marketshare in coming quarters.