The thing about statistics is this: they carry an inherent authority. When the average person hears that 67% of American college graduates have never owned a cat, he or she will take that information as gospel, because obviously if some poor soul went to all the trouble of being so scientific and painstakingly tabulating data about cat ownership, well, then they must be correct. And there's even more authority imparted when those statistics are presented in graph form, because now that scientific data is even further processed for "normal" people to understand quickly and easily-- so there's this subliminal pressure to accept the data as fact. (Just ask USA Today-- 79% of American movie-goers agree.)

That's why your friendly neighborhood AtAT paranoid conspiracy theorists are generally a little leery when it comes to statistics about Mac purchases; just because the numbers are expressed as percentages and pretty bar graphs doesn't mean that they're telling the truth. Many (if not most) of the time, someone's got an agenda and wants those numbers to tell a particular story. "Redmond Justice" fans, in particular, will recall how Microsoft's final witness, MIT economist Richard Schmalensee ("SCHMALENSEE!!"), brought his own graphs up to the stand to show that Netscape's market share wasn't substantially hindered by Internet Explorer being given away for free-- and government mouthpiece David Boies noticed that two of the graphs actually contradicted each other. Whoops.

So in that vein, we took the graph posted by ZD InfoBeads (which we found via MacInTouch) showing recent trends in Macintosh demographics with a grain of salt. InfoBeads shows that recent Mac buyers are less educated and make less money than Mac buyers of old, which (though it may not sound like it at first) is a good thing. It implies that Apple's appealing to a much broader range of the computer-buying spectrum, which is great in terms of expanding the installed user base. It shows that Macs are no longer only affordable by people pulling down huge salaries. In more ways than one, the iMac is re-establishing the Macintosh as the Computer For The Rest Of Us. But the bad news is that, according to the InfoBeads chart, the percentage of Mac purchasers who are first-time computer buyers actually decreased during the iMac's first seven months on the market, despite Apple's claim that about a third of all iMacs went to first-time buyers.

So are these lies, damn lies, or statistics? In particular, we're trying to understand how about 88% of Mac buyers in the August-February period were second-time buyers who had already owned a Mac, while about 27% of the same group were first-time buyers. Neat trick. But even supposing that the overall picture is correct-- that the percentage of first-time buyers actually went down slightly during the iMac's first seven months-- even that isn't as bad as it first sounds. Remember the pent-up demand for inexpensive Mac replacements? When the iMac was finally released, of course a ton of buyers were existing Mac owners looking to replace their LC's and IIci's. But while the percentage of first-time buyers may have dropped slightly, the overall sales volume was very high, so we'd guess that more first-time buyers were purchasing Macs during the August-February period than at any previous time in recent Mac history. Mind you, that's just a guess, but we figure you'll believe it without questioning. 89% of AtAT viewers do.