Apple's Portable's Marketshare Increases; It's Likely You Know Someone With a MacBook

1400.gifBack when I actually owned stock in the company, Apple had something like -4% of the American laptop market, a segment it helped create with the Powerbook 100. They were bulky and expensive, though often innovative: my first laptop was a Powerbook 1400, the first notebook with a CD-ROM drive. And it looked good (for 1996, anyway).

Times have changed, and so have Apple’s notebooks. Gone is the venerable Powerbook brand, now supplanted by the new hotness of the MacBook Pro, and that change seems to be working: one in six notebooks sold in the month of June were of the MacBook or MacBook Pro brand. That’s significant, as it not only shows Apples giant hardware growth, but also illustrates that Apple users tend to be more of the mobile type than PC users.

What’s more, that percentage is growing. The month of May, for example, saw Apple with over 14% of the laptop market, and 17% for June. July’s numbers aren’t out, but we’re guessing as back to school heats up and more people are switching than ever before those numbers will grow like Winehouse’s record.

Apple now sells more than one in six laptops in U.S. [Computer World]