iMac claims the prize - Apple desktop sales take half of US PC retail revenue

Apple's iMac line is now selling at a pretty serious clip.

Don’t believe us? Well, we’re not the only ones saying it - NPD analyst, Stephen Baker (vice president of industry analysis) came up with this gem in a chat with journalist, Joe Wilcox, as bought to our attention by Dalrymple and his beard).

So - some stats to back-up these claims:

Apple’s US retail desktop revenue share for October was 47.71 percent, up from same time last year when it hit 33.44 percent.

Sure, we know PC sales kinda declined as everyone waited on new purchases in order to ensure they got a free Win7 upgrade (Mac users do the same thing when they see an OS upgrade coming), but as Dalrymple observes: “Baker also pointed out that the numbers compare a month where a new iMac was released to a month last year when people stopped buying.”

There’s a little caveat to this goodness. As we await the ceremonial unveiling of what the Mac world and its brother currently call the “Apple tablet”, those netbook sales are getting under market share analysis skin - seems Mac laptop sales, “fell from 38 percent to 34 percent, while PC laptops rose from 61 percent to 66 percent.”

That last stat, incidentally, still means Apple laptops account for a good one-third share of actual cold hard cash laid down in retail outlets on new laptop purchases. Which begs the further question, given analysis of the PC market tends to favour a 90 percent Windows equation, just how cheap are they pushing out those Windows-based PCs the world’s meant to be using?