14 DAY TRIAL // An analyst tracking Apple has some interesting things to say about the company’s Mac business, and how it “seems to defy the laws of economics,” having grown year-over-year despite the huge price discrepancy between regular computers and Macs.
Wolf says, “In the face of rising relative prices, we view the Mac's success as the rare instance where sales increased in the face of rising prices.”
He elaborates, saying that the only explanation he and his fellow analysts could find is “the now-mythical halo effect,” which started with the iPod in the 2000s, and spread across Apple’s entire product lineup, including the Macintosh business.
He says that “...a meaningful number of Windows users who bought these products seem to have switched from a PC to a Mac... What should be underscored is how unique the Mac phenomenon is. Indeed, it's the only situation we've encountered where shifts in the demand curve completely swamped movements along the curve itself.”
Wolf also has some thoughts on the iPhone and its declining market-share. He bluntly puts the blame on emerging markets where people who once used feature phones now wield big-screen smartphones.
“The iPhone's loss of worldwide market share,” he writes, “chiefly reflects the shift in smartphone market share from developed, postpaid markets to emerging, prepaid markets. This shift was not driven by a change in consumer behavior but rather by rapidly falling prices of smartphones, especially in Asia Pacific, which induced feature phone users to switch to smartphones,” writes Wolf.
“We calculate that the iPhone's share of the smartphone market would be over ten percentage points higher were it not for the migration of smartphone sales from developed to emerging regions.”
In other words, iPhone really hasn’t changed at all. It’s the world around it that’s constantly changing, there’s no way of stopping this smartphone tsunami whose epicenter was in fact Apple itself.
Fans around the world are eagerly anticipating the announcement of Apple’s first event for 2014 sitting on the edge of their seats hoping for a radically redesigned iPhone, a new TV box with rumored gaming features, and the much-hyped iWatch which many believe will disrupt one or more industries, including medicine.
As for the Mac’s rising market share, it’s really not too hard to pinpoint some of the actual reasons behind their popularity. Every Mac is a gem, both inside and out. Running intuitive software and working right out of the box, it’s hard not to see why some prefer to shell out extra cash.