And that market share is now growing. See, for example, this:



While all flavors of Windows has a much greater share of the installed base than OS X, Apple's hardware sales are 10% of the market, Dell is at ~22% and HP is at 29%. Plus, Dell's share is falling and Apple's is rising. So a lot of people are buying Macs.

I would also imagine that a lot of HP's and Dell's sales are in enterprise sales (like rental car fleets) where there's a regular upgrade cycle every two years and a corporation will swap out a thousand machines at a time.

My experience with Macs, as well as that of my friends who use them, is that we tend to replace machines less often than the Windows users. I just replaced my Core Duo MacBook Pro (from 2006) with a new machine. The old one was used daily for six years, and it went on many flights in a backpack, too.



Do not forget that at the root of it, Apple is a hardware company. App sales give users a reason to buy the hardware. Of course iPhone (and iPod Touch, and now iPad) sales dwarf the computer sales -- an iPhone is $200 (with contract).



Android has a lot of sales because it's offered on more carriers (AT+T was the only iPhone carrier for years, until Verizon and now Sprint were added), and it's offered on more manufacturer's phones. But a lot of Android users are pissed off because of fragmentation: different carriers offer different versions of the operating system, and many times the phones cannot use an upgraded OS. And worse is when a phone ships with an outdated version of the OS and it can't be updated! The iPhone 3GS from what, four years ago, will run the latest version of iOS.

Google isn't helping matters, either. It lets the carriers and phone vendors pretty much do what they want.

-a