Analysis by market research firm IDC shows that Mac sales growth in the last fiscal quarter was nearly seven times that of the overall PC market with Apple outgrowing overall PCs for 19 consecutive quarters, or nearly five years running. But the Mac's biggest gains aren't in the education, home, or small business segments, where the Mac has traditionally thrived—they come from large businesses and government sales.

For the quarter ending December 2010, IDC recorded an overall 3.4 percent year-over-year growth for the PC market. Mac sales, on the other hand, grew 23.5 percent. Enterprise sales were a big part of the Mac's success; while overall PC sales to business grew 9.7 percent for the quarter, Macs were up 65.4 percent. Mac sales saw big gains in every business category, surpassing overall PC sales by large margins. And while sales to small businesses and home offices grew handsomely, the biggest growth area for the Mac was "very large business," where Mac sales doubled over the same quarter last year.

While government sales are a very small part of Mac sales—about 1 percent—growth in this segment is nearly 600 percent compared to the PC industry's 8.4 percent overall growth. That's a big jump over the 200 percent government sales growth the Mac enjoyed just two quarters ago.

Needham analyst Charlie Wolf is still citing a halo effect from Apple’s iOS devices for fueling the increased growth in the enterprise. In particular, he fingered the iPad as driving Mac adoption even more than the iPhone.

"The surge in Mac sales in the business market coincided with the introduction of the iPad in the second quarter of 2010," Wolf noted. While it's hard to show a direct cause-and-effect between the two events, Apple has highlighted the fact that 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies are working iPads into their IT infrastructure. "It's likely, then, that the halo effect emanating from the iPad will be far stronger than the iPhone halo effect in the business market if only because the iPad is a kissing cousin of Apple's family of notebook computers," according to Wolf.

Oddly, Apple posted a slight decline in education sales while the overall PC sales grew 3 percent in the same segment. Education has always been a traditionally strong market for Apple, though it has suffered overall declining sales in the segment for several years.

Apple's consumer focus is still apparent in sales growth in the "home" market segment, however, from which a majority of Mac sales come. While the overall industry saw a 0.6 percent decline in year-over-year sales, Apple managed to increase sales to consumers by 17.1 percent.

The recent increases in business sales have led to Apple creating a business sales specialist position at its retail stores. Apple has also made continual improvements to iOS to attract more enterprise customers. However, the company doesn't directly target enterprises with Macs or Mac OS X. In the last few years, Apple has discontinued its two major enterprise hardware products: the Xserve RAID and, more recently, the Xserve itself.