It looks like growth in Mac shipments last quarter outpaced PC shipments for the 32nd time in 33 quarters.
That’s the consensus among more than two dozen Apple analysts polled by Fortune.
Overall PC sales last quarter — including Macs — recovered somewhat from a two year slump, either growing slightly (0.1% according Gartner) or falling less slowly (-1.7% according to IDC).
By contrast, Mac sales grew more than 4% year over year, according to the average estimate of the 25 analysts we’ve heard from so far.
In note to clients issued Monday, Needham’s Charlie Wolf attributed most of this growth to former Microsoft (MSFT) Windows users who were introduced to Apple through the iPod, iPhone or iPad and decided they liked the look and feel of Apple’s products — not to mention the free post-sale support at the Genius Bar.
Wolf believes that Macs — despite higher prices — will continue to nibble away at Windows’ vastly larger market share for some quarters to come.
“Even though the Mac’s share of the PC market has increased from 1.8% to 5.5%, it is still miniscule,” he writes. “We estimate the Mac’s installed base has increased from 16 million users to over 50 million courtesy of the halo effect. However, this does not imply the halo effect will fade. Apple now has over 800 million credit cards on file. The company has sold over 500 million iPhones and over 200 million iPads. So that’s a substantial group of consumers who have yet to decide between a Mac and a PC.”
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Despite the range of estimates — from a low of 3.53 million (from Credit Suisse’s Kulbinder Garcha) to a high of 4.3 million (Bill Choi, Janney), there wasn’t much difference this quarter between the pros and amateur analysts.
We’ll find out who was closest to the mark when Apple reports its fiscal Q3 2014 earnings after the markets close on Tuesday, July 22.
Below: The individual analyst’s estimates — pros in blue, indies in green. Thanks as always to Posts at Eventide‘s Robert Paul Leitao for pulling together the Braeburn Group numbers.
Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple (AAPL) coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.
