Apple's target Audience

When googled this is the first hit for Apples target audience. 

"1) Middle/Upper income folks who are willing to pay a bit more for a better user experience. paying 500 more for a computer is not a huge deal if you have a decent income. 
2) People who like to have fun with technology. No other platform offers as many entry level tools (the whole iLife bunch and more). This includes people who like to shoot a lot of digital photos or video. It's the whole digital hub concept. People are starting to buy into it. 
3) Music enthusiasts and fans ages 12-35. 
4) Professionals in media and design. 
The first two groups do overlap, but it's a huge market. Way bigger than 5% or whatever. Apple's problem is not really pricing. These are the same people who pay $500 to get seats that warm up your behind. Apple's problem is the status quo. People who should consider macs don't, because of a stigma of incompatibility that developed in the 90's. 
Apple's market share and success will grow in the next ten years for the simple reason that our generations X and Y who have been exposed heavily to the internet weren't using computers much during the 'compatibility' days But anyway, the 'compatibility' problem dies when the people who believe in it are not young anymore."

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_are_apple's_target_market

I wouldn't entirely agree with each point. Point 4 brings up a good discussion though. Professionals in media design indeed seem to prefer Mac's, speaking from personal experience. But why do we seem to think that fact? Is it a matter of preferring what we are used to? Is it the half true fact that creative types can spend more time creating and less time refining/installing/messing around with their computers for post processing?

 All 4 points seem to be banking on the actual sales of Apple products not who Apple are actually targeting their ads at. Does this mean Apple are not entirely successful with their ad campaigns? This link provides a different insight.

"It’s fascinating to watch enterprise adoption of Apple technology given its apparent disdain for this market. According to The Wall Street Journal, businesses are tripping over themselves to justify iPad purchases, just a few years after they resisted the rise of the Mac and rejected the iPhones in their midst.All without a penny spent by Apple on marketing to the enterprise.Well, that’s not quite true. Apple has never (to my knowledge) marketed Macs to enterprise customers, and only hired a skeleton sales crew to sell to such customers, but it has been advertising the iPhone and its business-related applications in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and other business-friendly publications. It’s also added Microsoft Exchange compatibility to the iPhone, as well as advanced, CIO-pleasing security.However, these actions came well after the initial launch of the iPhone, and serve to fuel existing adoption rather than to kickstart new adoption. It’s possible Apple will become more enterprise-centric in the future, but I doubt it. Why? Because Apple doesn’t seem to target markets in the way other companies do.It targets people. It focuses on users. And Apple lets them decide how and where they’ll use its products.This sounds simple, but in my experience very few companies think this way. Most startups write business plans that dredge up IDC data on market size, then define their target market (e.g., “Global 2000 enterprises”). Few seem to realize that there are people employed within these target markets, and these people will be the ones who actually embrace or reject one’s product.Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest that this is one of the primary failings of most enterprise software today: It’s built for enterprises, not for people employed by the enterprises, a theme echoed by noted developer Michael Nygard.Not all companies screw this up. The open-source world offers a few good examples of companies that understood their target market was the individual, not the tribe/company.Marc Fleury’s JBoss, for example, understood its target market was the developer buried within corporate IT. All JBoss’ early marketing was focused on developers, not CIOs, and its product development was focused on making developers happy. Only later did those developers return the favor by pushing JBoss into serious production, requiring the CIOs to get involved.Along the way, JBoss took its share of criticism for this indifference to decorum and CIO concerns, including accusations that the company “astroturfed” to drum up developer support. True or not, the accusations don’t diminish JBoss’ clear success winning over developers by catering to developers.The same is true of SpringSource, which fought off the accusation that it wasn’t “enterprise ready” by being “developer ready” from the start, and focusing relentlessly on pleasing its target market: the developer.This is how great companies are built: they focus on individuals and build exceptional products for them, and let these individuals determine how best to make use of the technology.The enterprise is now clamoring for Apple products because Apple first solved individual employees’ needs. Apple made complex technology easy, an incredibly difficult task as Gartner’s Brian Prentice argues, and individual users rewarded it accordingly. It is this single-minded devotion to making beautiful products work beautifully that may give Apple the edge in the mobile market over Google’s Android, as Andrew Orlowski opines, and which positions it to continue its march into enterprise computing…without really trying.So the next time a VC asks you about your target market, remember that every market is composed of individual customers, and build your company around those individuals’ needs, not necessarily their employers’."

http://gigaom.com/2010/08/26/apple-doesnt-target-markets-it-targets-people/

I think judging from the images and videos I researched Apple is trying to market to the users who would enjoy their products. An interesting, simple and open ended target and indeed one that is easy to think but harder to explain. I don't think the image sand videos are directed at upper class i think it is directed at every class but it is the upper class who can afford such products. I think Apple has decided to not limit itself by not having a type of person it appeals to though it has done in the past. A great example would be the 'I'm a Mac' campaign where the mac is constantly reasonable saying he can do everything and it all 'just works'. This target obviously has not been entirely effective as there are still users who prefer PC. However at this stage in my research I feel the preference comes with familiarity. It is a significant operating system change and this is something Apple has not addressed in their marketing.