During last week"s Mac notebook launch event, Apple"s COO showed a shocking picture: A college lecture hall full of MacBook- and MacBook Pro-toting students. You"d think that all schools were all going to Macs, based on the photo, which was about as good as marketing gets. Look below for yourself and tell me, isn"t that photo a Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer coronary in the making?
Tim Cook offered up some compelling U.S. statistics to go with the startling picture. "We"ve surpassed Dell to become the top supplier of notebooks for all of education, with a stunning 39 percent unit share." Apple"s chief operating officer then put up figures for an unnamed university—one "that you would recognize"—showing Apple moving from 15 percent in 2002 to 47 percent in 2008. But he didn"t say of what the numbers meant. Is that percentage of students using Mac notebooks?