The Growing Popularity of Macs

I was reading a posting over on the EMH Design Blog on the rise in popularity of Macs.  My current choice of computers are a laptop running Windows XP and a test PC running Windows Web Server, Windows 7, and OpenSuse Linux.  

The rise in Mac users brings Apple to a 9.4% market share [1].  Which doesn't seem like a lot glancing at it, but it accounts for around 1.64 million people.  How does the PC market compare?  Dell and HP both hold around 25% of the market.  Which is understandable considering the difference in pricing between these two companies and Apple.

Apple markets and prices their computer as a high end computer.  HP and Dell market their computers as an economy computer with a low price. 

For me the rise shows me that perhaps people are starting to look for performance over price these days?

Preliminary U.S. PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q09 (Thousands of Units) | Source: IDC