By Dan Moren for Macworld

February 1, 2021 6:41 AM PT

How Apple flips the switch and keeps bringing in new customers

The more things change, the more things stay the same. For the past several years, the comic strip Doonesbury has been in re-runs for its weekday strips; this past week’s series, hailing from 1995, dated from the release of Windows 95, in which one of the strip’s characters pointed out the superiority of Apple’s Macintosh, only to be brought back down to earth by the reality of Microsoft’s platform dominance.

More than a quarter of a century later, Apple has become one of the most valuable and pervasive companies in the world, but, some things clearly haven’t changed that much. CEO Tim Cook said in the firm’s latest quarterly financial call, “…we really don’t have a significant share in any market.” Cook was speaking specifically of the iPhone, which is a minority in the smartphone market when compared to Android, but the same can still be said of the Mac. Yet the company has always maintained an outsized presence, even when it’s in the minority.

Cook continues to see that as an opportunity for Apple. When most people in the market aren’t already your customers, that means they’re still potentially customers. And that theory seems to be borne out by the numbers; for years, Apple has said that around half of those buying Macs or iPads in a quarter are new to the product.

But even with such a big potential market, how do you convince people who haven’t already made the jump to switch?

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