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Apple: Cool enough for your granny
Silver surfers biggest Mac owners

By Jo Best

Published: Thursday 30 November 2006

In its latest batch of adverts, Apple painted the Mac as the young, cool face of desktop computing. But now research has found it's the silver surfers who have a yen for Cupertino's goods - while the kids are opting for cheap Windows machines.

According to a report from industry watchers MetaFacts, nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older - that's almost double the share for average home-PC users.

For the digital youth, high-street box shifter Gateway is the brand of choice, taking the number-one slot among PC buyers aged between 18 and 25.

Dan Ness, principal at MetaFacts, said in a statement: "Apple can claim long-time loyalists but its future among the young technoliterati is an interesting dynamic."

Apple has in past ad campaigns hoped to trade on the cachet and cool of the iPod to persuade Windows users to switch to Macs, explicitly marketing the device as from the people behind the iPod.

The Mac maker is also reportedly investigating the true nature of the so-called iPod halo effect, where owning an iPod causes users to switch from PC to Mac. While the Mac's market share remains in single figures, Apple has said that it is seeing more first-time buyers picking up its kit.

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The halo effect is given credence by MetaFacts' research, which reports that more than two-thirds of Macs in current use were bought since 2004. By comparison, when looking at all computers in current use, only half were bought since 2004. The iPod was first introduced in 2001.

The report did find Apple users are ahead of the curve in mobility, with a far higher percentage of users who prefer laptops to desktops. More than half of Apple households have laptops, compared to the 30 per cent of computer users as a whole who use a notebook as their primary computer.