| > Owning a constant 70% of a market that’s growing consistently each year is not saturation - was the portable music market stagnant by 2007? iPod sales grew by 18% in 2006 and 17% in 2007. It was 140% 2006 and 373% in 2005. So yeah they weren't technically really stagnant just slowed down significantly. Even if we look at combined iPod and iPhone sales they grew slower than Nokia and Sony phone in the same period (Motorola had peaked in 2006). That didn't change until the 3G came out in 2008 and "high-end feature phone" market collapsed by 2009. > It’s important to remember that consumers don’t make decisions on what CPU is in a machine Yes but IIRC G5 had pretty awful performance per watt and Apple never put it into any laptops. They were stuck with G4 which wasn't really competitive with x86 by 2006. > 2007 which is when growth had started slowing is when the iPhone kept up the growth. It didn't initially though, not until mid 2008 if we compare to how fast Mac sales grew in the same period. Between 2006 and 2009 Apple's laptop sales increased by almost 3x or so. While even if we add up iPod + iPhone sales they "only" grew by 2x. Especially 2007 to 2008 was relatively pretty bad since iPod + iPhone sales only went up by 1.3x. Macbooks were the fastest growing product/segment between mid 2006 and mid 2008. To be fair I'm mostly nitpicking at this point since I do agree with your longterm analysis more or less, but since Mac sales grew at the fastest during the period when iPod sales were relatively stagnant and iPhone sales were still relatively very low (2007 to mid 2008 before the 3G, the original iPhone wasn't a particularly good smartphone it had a large multitouch screen and that's about it..) it's not that obvious to me that iPod/iPhone sales were driving Mac sales that much. Of course that specific period was pretty unique. Laptop market was growing very fast and Apple finally was offering devices which were incredibly competitive with other laptops at the time. It doesn't change the big picture too much (most growth was coming from iPod sales before that and iPhone/iPad afterwards) |