[citation][nom]zak_mckraken[/nom]Apple is one company while PCs are countless companies. In 2008, they sold more laptops than IBM, Lenovo, Sony and Acer.[/citation]
What about desktops?
[citation][nom]zak_mckraken[/nom]
So, by comparison to other computer manufacturers, they do have a good share of the laptop market even though the Mac platform is not widely used.[/citation]
Bolded was mine.
[citation][nom]zak_mckraken[/nom]
As for the future, only time will tell! Maybe they'll finaly begin to share their profits with the customers by lowering the price of their toys. I'm not sure Win7 will have a big impact on Mac users. As a former reseller, I can tell that the mac fans will stay with Apple while PC fans will obviously stay with Windows, Win7 or not. The only people that might be affected would be the newcomers to the computer world and these people usually go for PC anyway.[/citation]
I agree that Windows 7 is unlikely to sway Mac fans. However, Vista was pretty disastrous for Microsoft, with terrible press right from the start. The best that Apple was able to do, was grow their O/S market share by about 2% in that time.
Both Apple and now Microsoft are going after novice/new buyers with their advertising campaigns. With Windows 7 getting such a good reception, I think new buyers are going to be even more swayed to buy a MS based pc, considering the already massive price difference for essentially the same hardware.
Remember that the only reason Apple still exists today is because MS bailed them out in 1997. They only did this to avoid anti-trust issues by retaining a weak competitor. Im convinced that this is why Microsoft has taken so long to respond to the ridiculous Apple ads. Even saying that, their response has been pretty mild. You can bet that if Microsoft considered Apple to be a real threat, they would be far more aggressive in their advertising.