Apple selling 23 MacBooks a minute, claim

Apple’s selling around 23 MacBooks each minute worldwide, fresh data from its Taiwan-based supply chain suggests.

Citing industry sources, Digitimes explains: “Quanta Computer is expected to ship 3.5-3.7 million notebooks in January 2009 mainly benefiting from shipments of one million MacBooks to Apple.”

That’s colossal growth. The report tells us Apple shipped “about seven million” notebooks in 2009, a sale rate in the region of 13 Mac portables each and every minute of last year.

The lion’s share of these laptops are manufactured by Quanta, though some are built by Foxconn (aka, Hon Hai Precision Industry).

Seems Apple’s laptop sales are exploding. Digitimes informs, “Apple's monthly order volume to Quanta has also grown from only 300,000-400,000 units in the first half of 2009 to one million units in the fourth quarter of 2009, the sources noted.”

Apple orders for one million notebooks are expected to be made this month (January), the report adds.

However, any Apple effort to trim prices on its range may be delayed, as the short month of February (which also features the all-important Lunar New Year celebrations) is likely to reduce manufacturing capacity and create component shortages.

Apple’s engineers are already hatching plans to make the company’s pro laptops even more attractive. Intel today leaked a suggestion Apple intends releasing new Core i5 MacBooks soon.

The entry-level MacBook Pro was the top-selling notebook in the US in October. Even now, Apple laptops account for four places within Amazon’s top-selling laptops list.