Look at median household income to get a better picture of the market for high-end laptops; what your customers have to spend is a better way to figure out how big your market is than raw bodies or statistics that can be heavily-influenced by single entities. Buying a laptop that's 3% of your household's yearly income is a ridiculous financial decision, and given that most of Lenovo's business laptops start at near that range for your average person in significant amounts of countries in the EU, I'd wager that the market is smaller.
You make a good point though in that my mention of GDP elsewhere in this thread was mostly irrelevant, though; thanks for helping me refine this argument.
You're making a lot of assumptions based on arbitrarily chosen and only tangentially relevant criteria, and superficial analysis.
I'm absolutely sure you have no reason to be absolutely sure the second you implied the numbers I linked to must be wrong but your back of the napkin calculation must be correct.
One more data point: Apple has a 30% higher market share in NA than in Europe. ChromeOS has a ~5 times higher market share in NA. This goes out of everyone else's market share.
Most of your comments in this thread have been dull and poorly-conceived strawmanning with ad hominem interlaced. If you don't see how "income of population" relates to "What citizens will spend money on," you're surely joking.
I'm going to respond to you entirely here, because I dislike responding to the same person making variations of the same comment in multiple places. Here's the important bit of your other comment:
You brought up population, GDP, average income, etc. None of these explicitly support your claim, half of them actually work against it.
Note that one of these is a blatant lie; I was not the person who brought up population in this thread, and I've done nothing but point out reasons as to why it's not a perfect representation of the market.
I already admit that GDP was largely a mistake to bring up when I can make the point better and easier with average income.
Your accusation of using any "back of the napkin calculation" is similarly ridiculous. Every single number I've cited is trivially verifiable to anyone with an internet connection.
You've been repeating "Linux market share is higher in Europe!", and sure, you've given a source for that. Market-share, however, is not market-size, as I've repeatedly said in this thread. To demonstrate it in a simple fashion so you can't avoid what I'm saying anymore: 100% of a market of 10 is less than 1% of a market of 1,000,000,000. "X has a higher share of the market in Europe than it does the US!" means very little on its own.
If the market in Europe is smaller than the United States, which isn't particularly controversial (that the entirety of the PC market in the US is just slightly smaller than the entirety of it in EMEA is fairly strong evidence [1]), the US is the bigger market, regardless of how much you repeat the market-share claim.
Especially when comparing luxury markets like high-end computing gear, what the population can spend is a significant factor in how big the market is: the United States' median person & median household has more to spend than the median person & household in most countries of Europe. This is not controversial whatsoever, and is trivially verifiable. [2] [3]
[1] Gartner's quarterly reports on it for the past decade; linking ten years of them would make this comment too large, but if you search their site with the query "PC shipments", you'll get the data.
Your premise was that the European market is not valuable enough to receive the same attention.
>> yet they are impossible to buy
> That's only because you're in a less valuable market
Your assumptions based on very indirect evidence of household income did nothing to support that claim. The difference should be pretty sizable. This is akin to saying "Europe has socialized medical system and free studies". While entirely true, it might or might not support the idea that people have less worries and more money for things like computers.
You stopped short of actual numbers because it "would make this comment too large". Q3/Q4 2019 Gartner estimates [0][1]:
> In the U.S., PC shipments totaled 14.8 million units in the third quarter of 2019, a 0.3% decline from the third quarter of 2018
> The EMEA PC market grew 3% in the third quarter of 2019, with shipments totaling 19.4 million units
> PC shipments in EMEA increased 3.6% year over year to 21 million units, with the fourth quarter of 2019 marking the second consecutive quarter of shipment growth as regional demand improves.
Africa and Middle East cannot account for enough of those shipments to support your claim that the growing (even if severely held back by Brexit) European market is not valuable enough to warrant attention, especially when shipments are slowing down in other regions. By the looks of it the markets are similarly sized even including Apple shipments which are not really relevant for the discussion. There is simply no data to support your claim. If the European market is not getting enough attention, its value is definitely not the reason. Feel free to keep going.
You make a good point though in that my mention of GDP elsewhere in this thread was mostly irrelevant, though; thanks for helping me refine this argument.