As you're certainly aware, being a Mac user isn't all tummy rubs and lollipops. Sure, we get to enjoy the world's most intuitive and rewarding computing platform and all its attendant benefits (like lower stress, better posture, and half-naked girls/guys by the truckload), but the role carries with it certain balancing factors that keep us from getting too insufferably smug. It's some kind of karma deal or something; we're not up on all the details, but apparently using a Mac requires that we occasionally get whanged upside the head with a blunt force reality check or two. And, well, what with Apple's 3Q financial results being so positive, just in case you were actually walking around feeling good about things for a change, here comes the universe at large to even out your mood: the latest market share numbers are in.

Yes, Market Share, that bogeyman lurking under the beds and in the dark closets of Mac users everywhere-- although, truth be told, the news this time around isn't as bad as we might have expected. Faithful viewer David Poves dished us the IDC press release which reveals that, in the second calendar quarter of 2004, Apple shipped 495,000 Macs in the U.S., making the company's slice of the domestic computer sales pie a mere 3.7%. Now, granted, that's more of a sliver than a slice; only one of every twenty-seven personal computers shipped in this country last quarter was a Mac, which is a big-"e" Evil on par with the likes of Enron-style corporate shenanigans, the wholesale destruction of the rain forests, and people who strap those little antlers to their cats' heads for Christmas card photos. But Apple's share a year ago was only 3.8%, so at least Apple didn't lose much ground in the past twelve months.

Indeed, this measly 3.7% figure means that Apple currently ranks as the country's fifth-largest vendor of personal computers, behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard (as if anyone was going to beat them), Gateway, and IBM. And we know what you're thinking: "Gateway? Wasn't Apple outselling that has-been years ago?" Why, yes it was, folks, at least on a global scale, but you may be forgetting that little matter of Gateway's merger with eMachines, which effectively lumps both companies' sales together now-- which certainly explains Gateway's reported 58.5% market share increase from the year-ago quarter when, in this plane of reality, Gateway hasn't even been selling enough computers alongside its plasma TVs to keep its retail stores afloat. In fact, IDC specifically notes that if the merged Gateway's sales are compared to the combined sales of both Gateway and eMachines from a year ago, the two companies actually sold 9.6% fewer computers this past quarter than they did a year ago, and their market share fell from 6.9% to 5.6%. So without the merger muddying the picture, Apple would most likely have ranked fourth instead of fifth.

Not that we get bogged down in silly minutiae like relative sales rankings, mind you. No, what we get bogged down in is silly minutiae like that darn market share number that creeps ever earthward, ticking slowly down to zero-- at which point Evil will have triumphed once and for all. We're not usually the type to put much stock in the doomsday prognostications of prophets and soothsayers, but they say that Apple's market share will hit 0% at precisely the same moment at which every store on the planet's surface will be either a Wal-Mart or a Starbucks. How's that for an armload of angst to drag around behind you? Hey, like we said, it's all part of being a Mac user. Go play with Exposé for a while and you'll feel right as rain.