We know we should be excited about Apple's latest press release, but frankly, it's just more of the same. According to International Data Corp., no one's yet managed to topple Apple from the Education throne; in the first quarter of 2000, Apple secured a 26% share among educational computer purchases in the U.S. and 14% worldwide, thus retaining its hold on the top spot. Which means that Apple's the king of educational computing. Still. Why, we haven't been this thrilled since, oh, about ten minutes ago-- when we found an abnormally large raisin in our trail mix.

But since it's our job to take dull (though pleasant) news and find something interesting about it, we decided to plunder Apple's press release archive to find out just how the latest results compare to those from, say, three quarters ago. What we found was this gem, Apple's reaction to Dell's claim of educational sales superiority last October. (Longtime viewers will recall that Dell "accidentally" forgot to include Apple's direct sales when calculating market share percentages. Oops.) IDC states that in Q299, Apple held 22.2% of the pie-- enough to hold first place even back then. So the real good news here is not that Apple's still in first place-- it's that Apple's in first place and its relative market share has grown a few percentage points over nine months. Them's good eatin'.

We wouldn't get too cheery if we were you, though. Apple may be improving its sales into the education channel, but a 26% share means that roughly one out of every four computers sold to schools are Macs-- while the other three aren't. We'll feel a lot more comfortable once Apple pushes its chunk up to 50%, or even 75%. Don't laugh; between iMacs, iBooks, AirPort, and various other school-friendly goodies coming out of Apple these days, we figure the sky's the limit. Now if you'll excuse us, we have a raisin to measure. Guinness, here we come!