There's a rather misleading article on TGDaily about Apple's growth in hardware sales. Now I do not usually 'bash' a company, or stick blindly to them either, as I use Windows XP and Ubuntu at home, but I do not like the misrepresentation of facts.

The article states that:

The overall increase in unit shipments for the PC industry in Q4 2007 was 14.1%, but all of the world’s six largest manufacturers were able to achieve numbers significantly higher than that. HP, in position one, posted a growth of 25.5%, Dell bounced back to 17.4%, Acer (thanks to the acquisition of Gateway) saw a 25.0% increase, Lenovo 21.3% and Toshiba 25.3%.

Apple remains the shining star at #6 in the list with 39.3% shipment growth.

Now at 39.3% Apple's growth seems to dwarf that of it's competitors and this would be a fact you would expect some Apple fan boys to use in their 'Apple is better than X' arguments with other people on your chosen forum/blog/news post. Yes 39.3% does sound like great growth, but there is a problem; it is fundamental economics to know that higher growth figures are obtained by countries with a smaller base.

So although Apple did boost sales by nearly 40%, the amount of actual sales their sales team managed to get over the past year was only 0.6 million. Whilst HP increased sales by 3 million (five times Apple) and Dell 1.6 million.

It is of no surprise to me that Apple's market share is still estimated at 2.9%, which is just in line with what it has been for several years. So no actual progress then...