Apple's marketshare and browsershare have been marching upwards over the last several years, and this is no exception, a strong indication of Apple's strength as a brand as its turning around of its historically very niche and marginal portion of the market. Switch To a Mac breaks down a recent report showing that from November to November the Apple marketshare jumped 31%, a nice run. Another thing to note is that Macs started the year as 4.21% of the whole market, and right now are 5.39% of the market.

That's still pretty niche, but to understand context, only a few years ago the Mac was 2 or 3% at most of the market.

Needham and Co.'s analyst Charles Wolf estimates that by 2016 Apple will have 8.6% of the market. It's a straight projection, however, remember that market adoption of products works in similar way to viral spreads, with exponential 'tipping points' where products 'take off.' It may be more of a case that Mac will either still be in 4-5% area, or it climbs significantly higher.

Some hints of this can be found in the Switch to a Mac's analysis of Apple marketshare that shows very fast adoption rates of Intel processor Macs, the kinds of Macs that so-called 'switchers' are more likely to take a chance on due their ability to dual-boot Windows. Another demonstration of growing marketshare comes from a look at browser marketplace results, where the use of Mac browsers has jumped 45% to just a little over 4% of all browsers used.

All of that tells you that Apple is still a niche computer system, but a growing niche nonetheless. It faces a challenge in that most computer manufacturers sell to people with existing computers that are growing old. Apple is selling to both their own customers and trying to talk them into upgrading, while also trying to convince people to switch. It has a long way to go, according to these figures.

Or it has a large potential market.

It all depends on the perception of the investor.