Gathering Numbers 

How many folks around the world use Macs as their main machine? To satisfy my curiosity and 

other staff members, I did a little research of my own. Like all good researchers, I started 

googling for sales figures: 

There is Al Fasoldt s article from March 2004, 

http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/mac033104.html

 and Dennis Sellers  article in April 2004: 

http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/37/

. John Papola wrote about focusing on 

specific markets and percentages in January 2005, 

http://homepage.mac.com/jpapola/iblog/C142463209/E1354383806/

 and this comes from the 

MacDailyNews, June 2005,  

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/5933/

.  

Meanwhile, SlashDot gathered commentary, 

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/05/0548225&from=rss

. 

I love this quote from SlashDot; 

" While I don t have any hard numbers to provide, from what I ve seen working in a 

Mac/PC repair shop is that we see a lot more old Macs come in for service than old PCs. 

People are still bringing in old grey PowerPC laptops and Performas. They use them 

every day. When we suggest they upgrade, they say no, this machine does everything I 

need it to. And that s a machine that s 10 years old. It won t do everything I would 

personally want, but for these grandmothers and so forth, it s still operational and useful. 

We do see PCs come in that are getting near 10 years old, very, very rarely, and it s 

almost always to do a data transfer to a new machine. You just don t see someone with a 

10 year old PC that says; "this machine still does everything I need it to." Now that might 

be a statement about the user or about the computer, but I tend to think it s a mix of both. 

For that reason I would expect the install base for Macs to be surprisingly large. All said 

and counted, I might go as far as to say that 30% of all Macs manufactured, ever, are still 

in use today. If I had to guess wildly on PCs, I d place that number at somewhere closer 

to 10%." 

However, I tend to disagree a little with the commentor's percentages. According to Apple, there 

were 60 million Macs that had been sold worldwide by 1997. These were mostly pre G3s 

http://www.theapplecollection.com/various/why_prefer_mac.html

.  Many are still in use, but we 

probably can heavily discount how many are in use today.  

The G3's began shipping in 1997 and Peter Perlslo has captured a timeline at 

http://haxor.dk/articles/apple.html

 and so has 

http://www.apple history.com/

. If you want the 

info on each Mac model, you can always download MacTracker at 

http://www.mactracker.ca/

.  

  MPN, LLC 2005 macCompanion 

Page 6 

August 2005, Volume 3 Issue 8