Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster today released a brief report highlighting April data from market research firm NPD looking at Apple's U.S. Mac and iPod sales. The data shows Apple's Mac sales coming in flat year-over-year, and while Munster acknowledges that it has become increasingly difficult to extrapolate NPD's numbers to Apple's global sales performance, he views the latest data as "neutral to slight positive" relative to expectations for the company.
Based on the differences between NPD data and Apple reported Mac sales over the past few quarters, we note it is becoming more difficult to draw conclusions from NPD data (see table below). We note that some of the more recent supply issues with the redesigned Macs have impacted the Apple reported numbers over the past two quarters. At the end of the day, we believe this April data point is likely a neutral to slight positive given our expectation that iPads will continue to cannibalize Macs over the next few years.
Munster stands by his predictions of 5% year-over-year decline in Mac sales for the second quarter as customers await updated models and the PC market remains weak.
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On the iPod side, Munster only briefly cites NPD data showing sales sliding 36% year-over-year, compared to the Piper Jaffray estimate of a 23% decline for the entire quarter on a worldwide basis. But with iPod sales now representing only about 2% of Apple's revenue, the impact of the continued decline in iPod sales as customers shift increasingly to smartphones will be negligible.
Top Rated Comments
Mac computers remain the benchmark for computers. Nothing else comes close.
There is one problem with this statement: Mac computers always lag behind PCs in benchmarks.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster
Nuff said
Can you say nearing point of device saturation? ^_^;
There is one problem with this statement: Mac computers always lag behind PCs in benchmarks.
There's just one problem with this statement: Mac computers always lag behind PCs in benchmarks that don't really matter.i.e. I know I'll get five hours out of my MacBook Pro at university. My old Dell laptop (three years old now) struggled to last two hours. My screen is of a significantly higher standard than almost every laptop out there. Build quality's top notch, incredible support, high re-sale value.
I don't care if your laptop can do the Egypt OpenGLES Offscreen render or whatever 12% faster than my MacBook. I know for a fact Safari will be snappier for me than you can get it.
Also: Do some research (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Windows-Best-Laptop-Performance-Crashes-Windows-on-Mac,news-43703.html).
I'm probably repeating myself...
As usual, lilo tries putting a negative spin on things, and as usual, she fails. Most cheap laptops that are sold come with the absolute bottom line of Intel or worse AMD processors. For example, Dell doesn't sell anything with quad core processors that is cheaper than a MacBook Pro with Retina display.
Dell sells cheap laptop. So what? If you talk about benchmarks, Dell's top of the line laptops (mobile workstations) easily beat Mac Book Pros.