Apple Market Share vs. Margin Debate Ahead of Reported Back-to-School Promo

"(Imagine being a college student going to class with a boring Windows-based laptop or, heaven forbid, a Zune.)" You remian objective. That's important. Good grief.

i agree

Apple has been one of the few companies that I have seen able to retain its margins. Selling their products at high cost to retailers and balanced with the high demand of apple products, most companies such as best buy are only seeing margins from the products being attached along with ipod or imacs. If that keep this a rare move in the company, I can only see positives in this actions.

the big issue here is that Apple is king on most with college and university students, not to mention the high schoolers. this group of consumers display a huge amount of loyalty and will be mac users/buers for perhaps the rest of their lives and there's nothing wrong with sale pricing to capture more of this ever-expanding market. The phone is a big home run and a huge market builder and the non-stop vision of apple is fun to watch, and of course, invest in as well. cheers.

I think they have a good point. Mac may be for the next generation. I have a zune and despite MS major f ups it works for what I need it to do . Play music and show photo's and video. However for my fledgeling business a mac would be best There fore MS has really lost its market for the office placce and mac is replcing it. Howver are we going to live by two Operating systems only? Why not Linnox? a third competitor would alow for more competition

So sick of this biased crap. These guys are the 2 biggest dorks. I hate tech ticker

Reality check: PCs are still used by majority of businesses, and businesses have much more spending power than college students who love macs.

... these guys are lame!

I say sell them at cost to students. For a very short time. The long term rewards will be returned 10 fold.

...wait 'til these college kids graduate! Face it... MS is dead, really.

Man are these guys out of it, (or totally sucking up to Apple!) I did an unscientific check of my own. I checked out what my Jr. High School aged daughter & the 20+ kids in her afterschool computer club were using. As far as computers, Dell & HP have nothing to worry about. Not a Macbook in sight. All Dell's , HP's, & one kid had a Gateway. As for mp3 players, Apple fared better, 5 iPods (all Nano's) against 4 Sansa's, 5 Verizon VCast cell phones , & a pair of iRiver players.

lovemyvistapc: It is painful to know you got ripped off isn't it? There are two kinds of Vista users - Those that admit Vista is garbage, and those that try to defend their purchasing blunder by hiding behind their ability to run more software that doesn't work well.

Dude, the apple store in new york did not close, except insofar as it closed for an evening, probably to film a commercial. But it didn't "close" in the typical sense of the word. After all the negative articles you've written about apple, maybe it is time that the SEC starts to take a look at your articles.

livinginmeridian my vista pc runs great. Don't believe all the ms hate. Read some dell reviews and see what people say about vista. It's hip to hate ms and apple can do no wrong. Apple is much more evil than ms.

We are witnessing the new paradigm. Apple is increasing it's market share on all fronts while others are languishing. There is not stopping them. If they lower prices, look out. Microsoft's operating systems are so last century. One other thing, Dell has 5 product design engineers - Apple has 1800.

As for the mp3 players look around it's MAC/Apple stomping them all. Even many of my MAC hating friends have ipods. Including several who a few years ago swore they'd never own a Apple product. Hehhehehe "You will be assimilated"!!!

An artist I used to work with fresh out of college and was still paying off her Apple a year and a half after starting her job. The thing is, we all had Microsoft based PC's where we worked. In business, it's all about the server platform and the desktop applications. Macs are for fun.

If the new iPhone has built in GPS and 3G I will be buying them for my entire family. Sorry Nokia. I also love my current iPhone so much that I will be buying nothing but Apple products for the rest of my life. I don't care if I have to pay twice as much, the user experience is unmatchable. My PC is so full of virii I can barely surf the web on it anymore. I'm so sick of reformatting every month... Macbook, here I come. Nearly everyone I know is making the switch to Apple. In another 2-3 years, PC's will be strictly cheap workplace machines.

An artist I used to work with fresh out of college and was still paying off her Apple a year and a half after starting her job. The thing is, we all had Microsoft based PC's where we worked. In business, it's all about the server platform and the desktop applications. Macs are for fun.

In all honesty, I haven't had any problems with Vista.