Macintosh Platform Growth

Since Apple's stunning turnaround in 1998, with the advent of the iMac and the Power Mac G3, and then G4, the Macintosh platform has begun to grow again at a pace above the industry average. According to Dataquest, the worldwide PC market experienced 15.8% unit growth in 1998, compared to Apple's unit growth of 17.9%. In the first fiscal quarter of 2000 (holiday season) Apple shipped a record 1.37 million Macs, a unit volume increase of 46% over the prior year -- shattering the overall industry average growth of 17%, as reported by International Data Corporation (IDC).

With Apple's new UNIX-based operating system Mac OS X, Apple is again poised for rapid growth as it will now be capable of addressing the advanced UNIX workstation market in addition to solidifying it dominant market share position in the design, publishing and multimedia industries.

While both new and old Macintosh software development firms continue to expand their product offerings to this growing market, a significant growth has taken place since 1999 in the technical and visualization market, as confidence and enthusiasm for Apple's new UNIX-based Mac OS X (operating system) has come in.

In 1999 alone, Apple saw the enthusiastic adoption of the Macintosh by key 3D and CAD developers. New programs in 2000-2001 for the Mac CAD/3D market include Gestel's solidThinking 4, Alias/Wavefront's Maya 3 for OS X, BOA Research's CAD product BOA, and Nemetschek's VectorWorks ARCHITECT. And there are others. Additional new programs are coming this way with SketchUp for 3D architecture and more in 2002.

In addition, as the computer industry is on the verge of enormous software development across an array of heterogeneous software platforms and digital devices, 'multi-platform' development has become a key strategy for gaining new users and increasing market share. As such Apple attracted record numbers of developers to its 2000 Worldwide Developers Conference and continued with breaking the record in 2001.

see Apple's Business Case for additional information.