Apple Computer recently celebrated an amazing quarter in which Macintosh sales grew by an astonishing 43 percent when compared with the same quarter a year previously. It got me thinking: What will it take for Apple to secure just 5 percent of the market for the Mac? This week, Gartner and IDC released total PC sales figures for the first quarter, so we can at least see how Apple improved during what was, by all accounts, a gangbuster time period for the Mac. According to Gartner, PC makers shipped 50.4 million units in the first quarter, up 10.3 percent from the 45.7 million units shipped a year earlier. IDC places the sales at 46.1 million units, up 10.9 percent. The average of those two figures is 48.25 million. Apple sold 1.07 million Macs in the quarter. That means Apple snagged 2.2 percent of the overall PC market in that quarter
