Apple set to have a great holiday season, says Changewave
The holiday shopping season kicked off in America with Black Friday today, and Apple should finish out the rest of 2010 with a bang. ChangeWave, a firm that covers consumer trends, has told Apple 2.0/Fortune Tech that one of its surveys has consumers leaping for laptops, specifically those made by Apple.
10 percent of respondents told the firm they plan to buy a laptop in the next 90 days, and of those, 36 percent say they're looking for a Mac. That's an 11 point jump since the last time ChangeWave did this research, which one of its analysts says is "the highest level of planned laptop buying ever for Apple in a ChangeWave survey." In short, Apple is likely to sell a lot of laptops this holiday season.
That's not all -- NPD is saying that according to its research, 11 percent of consumers (that's all consumers) are planning to buy iPads from Apple by February of next year. That's pretty nuts -- the iPad's sales chart has been heading upward for a long time, and the end of the year will apparently be no different. NPD also shared that iPad use time seems to increase the longer that consumers own the device, starting with 15 hours a week or so near purchase, up to 18 hours or more after a few months of ownership.
Sounds like Apple's going to have a nice and profitable holiday season -- not surprising, given its growth already in this and past years.
