What does Apple's Christmas look like? Compact.

MacBook Air - despite its size - performs just as well as some of its siblings. Photo / Supplied

Christmas looks pretty rosy, if you're an Apple shareholder. (No, I'm not.)

Component makers reckon MacBook sales just keep going up. Apple will soon be shipping over a million units a month, with orders for the new MacBook Air already accounting for almost a quarter of MacBook sales, according to Digitimes, the trade rag for these supplier blokes.

It stands to reason. More than a third of US consumers planning to purchase a laptop during the next quarter will buy from Apple, a market research company said a couple of weeks ago.

That surge is being driven by the new MacBook Air, the lightweight notebook that debuted a month ago, reckons Paul Carton, vice president of research at ChangeWave Research.

Figures released by IDC showed Apple's combined shipments of laptops for the first three quarters of 2010 reached about 6.88 million units, making Apple's global notebook market share rise from 3.7 per cent in the first quarter to 5.2 per cent in the third. Its market share in the US market went from 6.7 per cent to 12.6 per cent.

I don't know what the NZ figure for Mac laptops is, but overall Macintosh has been over 11 per cent of the NZ PC market for the last few months and feedback from the stores shows this isn't abating, with great floor traffic.

That's not to say everyone loves the new MacBook Air, which I personally found faster than it should be, if that makes sense, due to its SSD storage.

PCWorld tested two MacBook Air models running Windows 7, and published results that showed the thin and light Apple laptops outperformed most Windows-based netbooks and ultraportable notebooks on that OS.

Of course, if you want a good Mac experience, you use Mac OS. But that doesn't mean that being able to run Windows on a Mac isn't a huge advantage, even if the phenomenon is a potential Trojan Horse to introduce you to the Apple advantage.

Hundreds of readers commented on PCWorld's antics, with the gist being: 'The MacBook Air costs far more than many of the laptops you compared it to. How does it do against similarly priced notebooks?'

This is hardly comparing Apples with apples. I mean, if you pay more for a two-door Ferrari, you expect it to go faster than a two-door Toyota, no?

But PCWorld rose to the challenge and went back and redid the comparisons.

Not surprisingly, many Windows notebooks that carry a similar price tag outperform the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models tested.

Other differences showed up, too. Many of the better-performing Windows laptops are bigger and heavier than the Air, and some have poorer battery life.

And dare I mention aesthetics? Hotrods are fast, expensive and ugly, too. ('Ugly' at least according to most car buyers.)

But if you're interested in getting the most bang for your buck, it's clear that the MacBook Air isn't the best way to go. There are much gruntier machines for that price.

Which is rather stating to obvious - with the Air, you pay extra for Apple's design chops of getting so much into so little space, at the expense of raw power. It's a frigate, not a pocket battleship. But it still does what most Macs do - that's the bonus. Even though it might lose out in the battle to gain even more switchers, for Mac users its advantages are clear.

The PCWorld Labs team used Apple's Boot Camp application to load Windows 7 on new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models and benchmarked them using the WorldBench 6 test suite and the games Call of Duty 4 and DiRT 2.

I'm not going to paste in all the results - check them out for yourself. Macworld (PCWorld's sister publication) kindly reposted them.


Of course, not all PC users (Arhu, by this I mean Personal Computers that run the Microsoft Windows Operating System) were quite as - er, reasoned, let's say - as PCWorld's reviewers.

Apple says the Air is 'not a netbook' and I don't think it is, either. I think of it as a scaled down MacBook, rather than an ugly underpowered email and web surfer with a too-small keyboard.

Which is how I'd characterise every netbook I've seen.

But "Many can't resist comparing the 11.6 inch model to a netbook - you know, the underpowered, toy computers that Apple said it would never make," says Richi Jennings on IT Blogwatch at Computerworld. He goes on to list his favourite nasty comments from other blogs.

Those of you who like levelling scathing criticism at Mac Planet might want to take some notes - there are some ripe ones.

Of course, if more people were taking note, Apple's MacBook sales wouldn't be rising, so go figure.

Most Mac users will remain sanguine. We get it that they don't get it, and while their blood pressure rises, we happily work and play on our Macs. It's all good by us. PC users accuse us of being smug, cult-like and pseudo-religious. This is expressed in angry tones while exhibiting some fairly extreme prejudices, not to mention profound ignorance, at times.

What's worse?

Like I keep saying - it's your choice what you buy. If you'd rather invest time than money into your computing experience, your platform option is clear.

But for the (albeit small) rest of us...

And sure, there are those who claim they never have problems with - or get malware on - their PCs. I'm not sure how big this minority is. If it's even true. I hope, for their sake, it's an increasingly common experience, although it's certainly not what I hear.

But speaking of unreasonable beliefs in semi-mythical things, it's almost Santa time.

If you have any Apple-centric Christmas specials or deals you want New Zealanders to know about, tell me and I'll mention it here before Christmas. Email to mac.nz@mac.com. And be careful out on the roads.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com