Poll Preview: Macintosh Ownership -- In his Macworld Expo keynote last month in San Francisco, Steve Jobs made much of the fact that roughly a quarter of iBook buyers and half of iMac buyers were new to the Mac. (See "Doing the Numbers with Jobs" in TidBITS-514 for details.) Those numbers are good news for Apple but concentrating on them runs the risk of minimizing the financial impact of Apple's repeat customers. There's no question that Apple must grow the overall user base, but there's more money in repeat customers due to lower customer acquisition costs and because Mac users often buy multiple Macs over the years. If we take the reverse view of Apple's market research, we see that about three quarter of iBook users and half of iMac users (and probably most PowerBook and G4 buyers) are repeat customers. The question, then is how many Macs have you (not your employer) personally purchased for your individual use (as opposed to servers or machines for others) at work or at home? Vote now on our home page so we can show the monetary importance of the existing Macintosh community! [ACE]

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