I’m a fan of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign, but this time Apple I think is skating on thin ice with its words. At least that’s how I look at it. You be the judge.
In a new education-oriented commercial, the Apple ad called “Pep Rally” makes the claim that the Mac is “the number one notebook on college campuses.”
My first impression of this was that on average if I visit a college campus I’ll see more than half of the students with Macs. Sounded good to me. Macs are quite popular from what I’ve seen. However, when I started thinking about this I started doubting what I was hearing. I played it over and over again to see if I was misunderstanding something. You see, I have no doubt that Macs are growing in sales, however, I doubt these numbers.
So I started Googling around and the best “numbers” I can find are from here for this year.
And from this link it appears that stats are showing that Apple has now become the number one seller of computers in higher education. That is, they are now outpacing Dell’s 30% market share by becoming the number one supplier of computers to students with their new 31% market share. 31% of the market is great, however, that leaves 69% of the market to PCs and other OSes. Setting aside 5% for Linux and the rest, that means that PCs have approximately 64% of the student market.
Now maybe the numbers are different for notebooks or maybe they’re talking about Switzerland’. Maybe. But I doubt that greater than 50% of the students–as the commercial suggests–are using or purchasing Mac notebooks.
Of course, there’s another explanation here: That saying that you’re “number one” doesn’t really mean anything. It just means someone thinks that Mac notebooks are number one. This sounds mighty shady to me though.
Maybe I’m off base here. Anyone know if Macs are truly number one in usage on college campuses today?