"That number, btw, never went over 38% before the switch campaign."
Wrong. (now there's a big surprise)
As I said before, and have posted on several occasions previously, the number ranged in the 40+% neighborhood for as long as they were releasing it. Here, the January 1999 press release pointing out that the number was 45% for the October to December 1998 period, following 41% previously.
I don't want to mess with your self-constructed world of denial, but haven't you ever asked yourself what must be happening to the Apple installed base if 50% of sales were coming from switchers? If we wanted to keep up the fiction of 20 million installed base, even assuming an average replacement cycle of 5 years, Apple should have been seeing 4 million unit sales a year, rather than the 3.5 million they got.
BUT ... if you want to trumpet the clearly absurd notion that 50% of sales are to Switchers, then less than 2 million sales were made to the installed base. Which would lead to the inescapable conclusion that either the installed base is a lot smaller than is claimed, or has extended its replacement cycle to biblical proportions, or (perish the thought) there are really a bunch of reverse switchers out there too.
If you were to pull out the sales to people like Kevin and others who upgrade many machines a year, the numbers get even more extreme.
The problem is, zanny, you live in a fantasyland of denial.
At least from time to time you provide us a little humor in the process.
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