While RIM’s Blackberry remains the smartphone market leader, the iPhone has more than doubled its share since last June, when it stood at around 11 percent. The Blackberry maintains a commanding 41 percent of this market yet has dipped 1 percent between the months of September and December, notes CultofMac.

Customer satisfaction numbers put the iPhone in another realm completely, as 77 percent of users rank as “very satisfied” compared to the 52 percent of Blackberry owners. Rim’s touch edition Blackberry Storm owners seem even less impressed as a ChangeWave survey shows a mere 33 percent of users to be “very satisfied” with their purchase.

Electronista reports that an iSuppli study had shown a considerable shift from desktops to notebooks this summer as Apple’s global market share had slipped a half of a percent, from 3.7 to 3.2 leaving it in seventh place. The study had shown HP leading the worldwide market with an 18.8 percent share, followed by Dell with 13.9 percent and Acer with 12.2 percent.

iSuppli provided no explanation for Apple’s slipping performance other than it had been seen at the tail end of the early 2008 MacBook model lifecycle. Asus, in comparison had grown 79 percent year over year, partially due to their shift toward netbook manufacturing, such as the Aspire One. It has additionally been noted that notebooks have ousted desktops for the first time ever during a summer quarter, where 38.6 million notebook shipments had been made compared to the 38.5 million desktops.

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The advertising battle between both companies has become very heated recently. Apple is known for showing very little restraint when it comes to poking fun at Vista, and Microsoft’s blown $300 million ad campaign, which first started out with the Seinfeld+Gates bits.

As it turns out, Apple’s ‘Get a Mac’ commercials have received twice as many placements (unique copies of the videos) as many times as Microsoft’s. “The Apple ads — which were part of the same “Get a Mac” campaign that has been running for a long time now — attracted 70% of the total first-week viral video views as the brand-spanking-new “I’m a PC” campaign. And while it’s tough to predict future view count growth, these Apple ads have garnered twice as many video placements (140+) as the Microsoft campaign (70+),” Cutler explains. “Apple’s recent additions to its Get a Mac series have received significant viral video interest so far, generating over 140 different placements that collectively have driven almost 1.2 million views and attracted over 800 comments. These results indicate that this long-running campaign has managed to stay fresh and maintain the audience interest over the long haul.”

To see if Apple was able to blunt Microsoft’s attempt to reshape consumer perception of Windows, we tapped our Viral Reach Database to identify and measure the viral video placements from each campaigns. And since Microsoft’s campaign has been in-market for over a month while the Apple ads were released in mid-October, we compared only the first seven days for each campaign, Matt Cutler explains for Visible Measures.

These first week results reveal that Apple’s viral video offensive made significant headway against Microsoft’s message. Apple’s three new spots scored 70% of the viral video views that the much-discussed “I’m a PC” initially generated. And the view count totals are only part of the story, as these new Apple ads have inspired twice as many viral video placements (i.e. distinct videos with their own URL) as the Microsoft “I’m a PC” campaign.

As shown in the results above, Microsoft’s original Seinfeld+Gates were the most successful for the company. Perhaps if they had stuck with the campaign, it would’ve been more effective. Having spied on Cupertino for so many years, a company as big as Microsoft should understand that developing strong brand loyalty and recognition isn’t an overnight thing. In all fairness, we first heard that the Seinfeld+Gates commercials were “just on hold,” not canceled. It’s believed that Microsoft has a few more commercials/segments done, only they aren’t airing them.

Apple’s most recent commercials (Bake Sale, V Word and Bean Counter) weren’t totally digested positively by many people. They were so strikingly aggressive, that many wondered whether they were doing good, more so than they were tarnishing the Apple brand. When the commercials first aired, it wasn’t long before they were being compared to slanderous political campaigns. Even though Apple is known for not showing restraint, many believed these particular ads to be slightly more “cut-throat” than the others.

Both companies are actively airing their latest commercials, appealing to the target demographic they believe is the most important. While Microsoft focuses on showcasing Windows as “life without walls” and claiming that “everyone in the world” is a PC, Apple aggressively pokes fun at Microsoft’s blunders with Vista, and their inability to fix its ailing issues.

Both Apple and Microsoft’s commercials attract eyeballs, which at the core is most important for any advertising campaign. So for each respective company, the directly measured “buzz” around each ad, might be more than sufficient. After all, it doesn’t matter what we’re saying, as long as we’re talking about it.

All of the data in the research was collected from Visible Measure’s Viral Reach Database. Which as they put it best is a “a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.”
Thanx to our friends at Visible Measures for the data.

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Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) analyst, Mike Abramsky, is expecting the Cupertino based company to ship just over 3 million Macs in the September quarter, which represents 41% year-over-year growth and 22% quarter-over-quater growth, up from previous estimates of 2.8 million.

RBC’s most recent technology adoption survey of 4,400 consumers indicates, “massive Mac sales… demonstrating resilience despite a sluggish consumer spending environment.” The study further shows that 34% of respondents are planning on purchasing a Mac within the next three months, while an additional 30% plan on buying a Mac desktop.

“We forecast Apple’s global PC share to rise to 4.2 percent [in 2009], from 2.9 percent [in 2007],” he said, adding that every 25 basis points of market share gain will equate to $1 billion in incremental revenue and $0.15 in per share earnings. via AppleInsider.

There are two factors that may be driving this increased Q4 growth. The first of which, is Apple’s back-to-school promotion that offers up a free iPod touch (rebate) to educational customers that purchase a qualifying Mac by September 15. The second factor is, what is referred to as the “iPhone halo effect,” in which 17% of those involved in RBC’s survey say that they are more likely to buy a Mac after purchasing an iPhone 3G.

[via AlleyInsider]

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“When the company asked which model they were “interested in” among new smartphones to be released in the near future and those already debuted (multiple answers allowed), the most 57.9% of all respondents named the “iPhone,” which will be released from SoftBank Mobile Corp.”

“The “Willcom D4″ to be released from Willcom Inc came next at 35.8%, followed by the “Willcom 03″ to be released from Willcom at 33.1%, Emobile Ltd’s “EMONSTER” at 18.0% and NTT DOCOMO Inc’s “HT1100″ at 8.8%. ”

“To a question asking their preferences on handset design (multiple answers allowed), the highest ratio of 68.6% cited “lightness,” followed by “compactness” at 38.1%, “slimness” at 37.2% and “cuteness or stylishness” at 28.3%.”

“By gender, male respondents focused more on “lightness” (67.1%), “compactness” (40.0%) and “slimness” (37.8%), while female respondents cared more about “lightness” (70.7%), “cuteness or stylishness” (36.7%) and “slimness” (36.3%). The order of the preferences differed by gender.”

“Regarding the “availability of optional colors,” 25.0% of all female respondents said “I care,” a large gap compared with the 7% of male respondents who did. iSHARE analyzed that this gap is reflected in the significant popularity of the WILLCOM 03 among women.”

Full article here.

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“Speculation had been rampant in recent months that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was getting ready to introduce a 3G iPhone at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9, and indeed he did just that,” said Dan Lackner, comScore Senior VP. “Search is frequently a harbinger of purchase intent. The increase in volume of iPhone searches demonstrates just how heavy that interest has been for the next generation of Apple’s popular phone – even when its existence was still just a rumor.”

While consumers have searched an array of terms pertaining to the device, the most common, “iPhone,” generated nearly 1.5 million searches.  Ranking high on the list was “iPhone update,” with 151,000, “iPhone web apps,” with 118,000, and “iPhone MMS,” with 101,000 searches. Also interesting was the search for “iPhone G3,” whatever that may be. I’ll chalk it up to speed typing or dyslexia.

“Of the iPhone-related searches that generated click-thrus, the vast majority (88.4 percent) occurred on Google search, 33 percent higher than one would expect given Google’s share of total Internet search click-thrus. All other search engines generated a lower percentage of iPhone-related clicks than their respective shares of total search clicks.”

It came as no surprise that at the top of the list of destinations for iPhone related searches was Apple Inc. with 17.5% of all click-thrus.  Of these click-thrus onto Apple, 16.5% were the result of paid searches, leaving the remaining 83.5% to organic search results.  AT&T, ranking #7 on the list of top destinations, received the highest proportion of paid inbound click-thrus at 42.8%.  Interesting, seeing as though AT&T does not really have any direct competition for the iPhone.

Full ComScore report here.

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Yankee Group Research Inc. has recently conducted a survey showing that nearly 80% of businesses are running Macs in-house, almost double the percentage of two years ago.

“Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies,” said Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Yankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. “Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed.”

In early 2006 DiDio had polled numerous corporate IT professionals on Mac deployment in which 47% had claimed to have had Apple hardware in their environments.  Impressed with the overall turnout of Mac usage in the corporate sector, considering what little effort had been put into this part of the market, DiDio noted “This isn’t a tidal wave, but it’s certainly a sustained trend.  Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just 1-to-2% market share in corporate, now they’re up to 8-to-10%.”

Twenty-one percent of the firms polled in the survey had noted the use of 50 or more Macs in operation.  Enterprise use on this scale shows Apple’s graduation into the big leagues.

“Among the reasons businesses cited for adopting Macs, the most surprising was the ability to virtualize other operating systems, primarily Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, on Mac hardware. “That’s clearly spurring some businesses,” DiDio said. “A number of the respondents said, ‘Oh, guess what, we’re using the Mac to load Vista or XP on there and using Mac hardware.”

Over one fourth of the firms surveyed said they are running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs that they currently have.  22% have noted that their Macs are set up to boot either Windows or Mac OS X through the use of Boot Camp.

In a soon to be released report, DiDio writes “There’s no doubt that user confidence in the reliability of both the Macintosh hardware and software products is having a tangible impact on corporate purchasing and deployment trends.”

There is no doubt that Macs are becoming a far more viable choice to run in enterprise settings.  IT guys be warned, your days may be numbered.

Full article here.

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“The Fame-O-Meter, according to the magazine’s website, is an “absurdly scientific real-time” measure of the “notoriety and cultural relevance” of public figures based on the number of times they appear in news publications, newswires, blogs and other sources combined with data from such aggregators as Google, Technorati and Yahoo.” via Fortune.

According to the magazine’s “buzz index,” Steve Jobs has already passed Gates by in the daily index, with 83 million hits over Gates’ 70 million. “With last week’s announcement of the new iPhone, more gadget geeks than ever have been clicking for Steve Jobs,” writes Hailey Eber, who runs the meter. “Adding to Jobs’ online intrigue is concern over his health.” via Radar.

He is also steadily climbing in overall popularity sitting well ahead of News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Why Rupert Murdoch is even on the list may be the biggest surprise of all.

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Newsfactor reveals that NPD Group, a global provider of consumer and retail market information, has reported that Apple Inc. holds 66 percent of the U.S. market for computers priced at over $1000.

For the $1,000+ desktop market Apple holds a 70 percent retail share, and 64 percent for notebooks of the same price range. These figures account for the first 3 months of 2008 Apple Store sales ( not including online purchases).

The NPD Group has also found that Apple’s overall U.S. retail computer market share is 14 percent, with reports indicating a 50-60 percent growth of notebooks year-over-year.

Being that the entire Mac computer line is priced over $1,000 (excluding the Mac-Mini), some observers have noted that consumers may be more willing to pay a higher price for their overall computing experience.

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A recent study by ClimateCounts.org, a collaborative effort to bring consumers and companies together in the fight against global climate change, shows that Apple Inc.’s contributions are not even remotely meeting an acceptable level. (Keep in mind this is based upon the findings of one survey).

The scorecard is based on a number scale from 1-100 with four primary criterion, which are as follows:

•Measured their climate “footprint”
•Reduced their impact on global warming
•Supported (or suggest intent to block) progressive climate legislation
•Publicly disclosed their climate actions clearly and comprehensively

Based upon this scale, Apple Inc. has scored a meager 11, compared to industry leader IBM who boasts a rather impressive 77. Following in line are Cannon (74), Toshiba (70), HP (68) Sony (68), Motorola (66) Hitachi (51), Samsung (51)… down to second to last Nokia with a score of 37.

This survey could, and more than likely be interpreted as more of a company’s publicly stated intents to become more eco-friendly, than an actual measure of steps that are currently being take.

You can certainly form your own opinion about these findings by checking out the survey’s statistics here, and also learn more about Apple’s environmental intentions here.

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