Saw this on Macintouch today; according to ITJungle, Apple’s Q1* unit sales of Xserve systems rate it pretty high among Unix server vendors, but in terms of dollars, the news isn’t that great. Here’s the relevant section of the article:

Even with chip shortages from IBM that are holding down sales of its Xserve machines, Apple Computer is the number five RISC/Unix vendor by box count, with 7,736 boxes sold. But with only $41.4 million in sales, it is not in the top 10 when ranked by sales.

7700 machines may seem like a drop in the bucket compared with, say, Mac mini sales, but hey, I can’t buy them all. Actually, for the Unix server market, it turns out to be not that bad.

The Unix market was somewhat peppy in the quarter, with shipments up 2.2 percent to 137,349 units and revenues up 1.5 percent to $4.07 billion. If that doesn’t sound exactly perky to you, the stabilization of the Unix market, which has been plummeting for years, is something of a cause for jubilation among the Unix vendors.

Of course, sales figures like that don’t exactly signify a drastic demand for Apple-certified system administrators. Sigh.

* Note: that’s calendar Q1, as opposed to Apple’s fiscal Q1 — their fiscal year matches that of the U.S. government, October 1 - September 30.