Apple has been seeing record Mac sales for quite some time now and as expected, the company's platform has been slowly but steadily gaining market share. While the Cupertino company may only have a tiny fraction of the entire worldwide market at the moment, its growth is unparalleled.

iPods, iPhones, the 'Get a Mac' campaign and even the latest Mac models themselves have all generated so much buzz that Apple's mindshare has grown dramatically over the past year. Not surprisingly, this buzz as well as the halo effect have had a major impact in attracting new business to Apple.
Research firm Net Applications reports that Apple's global share of the personal computer market had grown to 6.6 percent in September. Considering that during the same month last year Apple had 4.7 percent, the year-over-year gain is over 40 percent. Even on a short term, Apple's market share grew from 6.15 percent in the previous month, which would amount to a sequential gain of over 7 percent.
The growth that Apple is seeing is simply amazing, especially when taking into account the fact that Leopard is due to be released at the end of the month and many users are postponing their purchases in order to get the latest version of the operating system with their new machines.

All that market share had to come from somewhere and it is not surprising to see that Microsoft saw a decline of 3 market share points from the same month a year ago. Apple has been reporting that over half of their Mac sales are to people new to the platform, and the market share results are starting to reflect that in a big way.
The company is expected to continue to do very well in the current quarter, due both to back-to-school sales and the recently released iMac models. Some analysts are predicting that Mac sales will exceed Wall Street expectations by as much as 400,000 units, for a total of 2.35 million iMacs and MacBooks.