Apple's computer line celebrated a unusually merry Christmas, with total Mac unit sales for the first fiscal quarter of 2011 up 23% year over year, thanks in large part to the new $999 MacBook Air.
And although almost none of the 43 analysts we polled -- professionals and amateurs -- think Apple sold more Macs in the quarter that ended two weeks ago (the outlier is an amateur, Nicolae Mihalache, with a pretty good track record), they are calling, on average, for Mac sales to grow even faster in Q2 -- nearly 25% year over year.
Mihalache's estimate of 4.89 million Macs is the highest, followed by a half-dozen analysts who expect sales to come in between 3.80 million and 3.87 million. The low estimate, 3.34 million, comes from Pacific Crest's Andy Hargreaves.
We've used the average of the 43 estimates, 3.67 million units, in the chart above.
