18.2.12

Why Apple is winning | Molly Rants - CNET News

Why Apple is winning | Molly Rants - CNET News

Why Apple is winning

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Apple is on a tear: shares up over $100 in a month, big product launches looming and a massive untapped market of tablet and computer buyers. Here's why it won't slow down anytime soon.

Apple's killing it. The reasons are simple.

Apple's killing it. The reasons are simple.

Call this column "confessions of a reformed Apple hater." I've spent the better part of my career insisting that Apple products were not for me--this after my first job in tech was reviewing them for the now-defunct Mac Home Journal. The company was too controlling, the prices too high, the forced upgrade march too abusive, the closed system too limiting.

Now, just a week ago, I traded in my fourth Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy Nexus) for an iPhone 4S, which just about completes the cycle of Apple in my life. I bought a MacBook Air to replace a balky HP laptop running Windows Vista. I own an iPad because, well, what other tablet would I own? I have an iPod Touch almost solely to power a Bose sound system (and because I wanted to Facetime with my son back before I had the iPhone). And the other day, when my mom was complaining about startup times, printing, and wireless networking, the words, "you should get a Mac" were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

Apple is winning. It's doing much more than winning me over, but I think my experiences point, in part, to why Apple is currently and will keep winning well into the near future.

Look at the numbers alone. Apple stock is up almost $100 in just the past month, reaching an all-time high of $509 this week. As Dan Frommer points out at ReadWriteWeb, the company has been riding a decade-long growth period, increasing revenue every year at an ever-increasing pace.

Apple stock soars above $500 a share

Apple's stock price reached a record high in February, breaching the $500 a share mark for the first time.

The company is making that money on products that are the vast minorities in their market-share categories: Mac sales hit an all-time high of 5 million, which still rates at maybe 6 percent of estimated global market share. The iPhone clocks in at 23.8 percent of the global smart phone market, according to Gartner. The iPad is the obvious exception here: it is its market, and when you add its sales to global PC sales, it's a big part of the reason that Windows


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