Apple's Mac bucks negative PC market trend, gains 9% in US
According to the latest estimates from Gartner, Apple's Mac made gains in the PC market over the first quarter of 2015, bucking a wider negative trend that saw overall shipments drop 5.2 percent worldwide.
In its latest preliminary estimates release published Thursday, Gartner said Apple shipped 1.67 million Macs in the U.S. to capture 12 percent of the market, an 8.9 percent year-over-year gain.
With its quarterly performance, Apple retained its spot as the country's third-largest PC vendor, falling short of No. 1 HP's 26.1 percent and second place Dell's 23.2 percent. For the quarter ending in March, HP shipped 3.63 million units, while Dell shipped 3.2 million. Dell was the only top-five PC maker to see negative growth of 3.8 percent year-over-year.
Rounding out the top-five U.S. vendors was Lenovo and ASUS, which moved a respective 1.65 million and 996,000 units to capture 11.8 percent and 7.2 percent of the market. Overall, the market contracted 1.3 percent in the first quarter as compared to the same time last year.
Apple didn't rank in Gartner's worldwide count, which had Lenovo, HP and Dell sitting in the top spots with market shares of 18.9 percent, 17.3 percent and 12.6 percent, respectively. ASUS and Acer trailed the pack with 7.4 percent and 7.2 percent of the global market. Lenovo and HP were the only two companies to show signs of growth over quarter one, jumping a respective 5.7 percent and 2.5 percent.
"The first quarter results are not a sign doom for the U.S. market," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "The biggest reason for the decline of PC shipments in the U.S. was attributed to the desktop market, which experienced a double-digit decline. This was primarily due to the end of the Windows XP replacement cycle. In contrast, mobile PC shipments in the U.S. continued to show year-over-year growth, and early results show this segment could have grown approximately 10 percent in the first quarter of 2015."
Overall, worldwide PC shipments came in at 71.7 million units, a 5.2 percent year-over-year drop.
In its latest preliminary estimates release published Thursday, Gartner said Apple shipped 1.67 million Macs in the U.S. to capture 12 percent of the market, an 8.9 percent year-over-year gain.
With its quarterly performance, Apple retained its spot as the country's third-largest PC vendor, falling short of No. 1 HP's 26.1 percent and second place Dell's 23.2 percent. For the quarter ending in March, HP shipped 3.63 million units, while Dell shipped 3.2 million. Dell was the only top-five PC maker to see negative growth of 3.8 percent year-over-year.
Rounding out the top-five U.S. vendors was Lenovo and ASUS, which moved a respective 1.65 million and 996,000 units to capture 11.8 percent and 7.2 percent of the market. Overall, the market contracted 1.3 percent in the first quarter as compared to the same time last year.
Apple didn't rank in Gartner's worldwide count, which had Lenovo, HP and Dell sitting in the top spots with market shares of 18.9 percent, 17.3 percent and 12.6 percent, respectively. ASUS and Acer trailed the pack with 7.4 percent and 7.2 percent of the global market. Lenovo and HP were the only two companies to show signs of growth over quarter one, jumping a respective 5.7 percent and 2.5 percent.
"The first quarter results are not a sign doom for the U.S. market," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. "The biggest reason for the decline of PC shipments in the U.S. was attributed to the desktop market, which experienced a double-digit decline. This was primarily due to the end of the Windows XP replacement cycle. In contrast, mobile PC shipments in the U.S. continued to show year-over-year growth, and early results show this segment could have grown approximately 10 percent in the first quarter of 2015."
Overall, worldwide PC shipments came in at 71.7 million units, a 5.2 percent year-over-year drop.
Comments
Wait, you mean all the articles last year saying the PostPC Era was a myth because "PC SALES ROSE" were really just a load of bunk?
The reality is most people really don't need PC's anymore. Apple's bucking the trend because they're integrating things even further, adding value, whereas Microsoft doesn't have this advantage because Windows Phone is a speck on the wall.
In short, Jobs's truck analogy still holds. Most people don't need trucks, and while the best selling single vehicle in America is everyone's favorite creation from Dearborn, as a whole cars outsell trucks big time. Likewise, some will continue to buy PC's because they need them (personally for writing I still need a full-fledged multitasking OS, but I don't need new hardware for that), some will because they just like them, but most won't anymore.
Sedans: Phones
Tablets: Big sedans
Phablets: Crossovers.
PC's: Trucks.
So what were sales like if we drop Apple from the mix? And where does Apple rank if we include iPads as "computers"? Inquiring minds want to know....
Didn't Tim say that including iPads made Apple the largest computer manufacturer in the world?
We'll know more when Apple releases Q2 results this month.
Didn't Tim say that including iPads made Apple the largest computer manufacturer in the world?
We'll know more when Apple releases Q2 results this month.
Yes, and with a good lead in that number one position. If you look at the broader "mobile computing" market, including the appropriate smart phones, tablets and mobile PC's, Apple has both the largest unit share, and the overwhelming amount of profit in the industry. That being said, there is still a lot of unit share out there to gain, and while Apple is getting the top end of that, more & more are entering that top end each year.
Wait, you mean all the articles last year saying the PostPC Era was a myth because "PC SALES ROSE" were really just a load of bunk?
The reality is most people really don't need PC's anymore. Apple's bucking the trend because they're integrating things even further, adding value, whereas Microsoft doesn't have this advantage because Windows Phone is a speck on the wall.
In short, Jobs's truck analogy still holds. Most people don't need trucks, and while the best selling single vehicle in America is everyone's favorite creation from Dearborn, as a whole cars outsell trucks big time. Likewise, some will continue to buy PC's because they need them (personally for writing I still need a full-fledged multitasking OS, but I don't need new hardware for that), some will because they just like them, but most won't anymore.
Sedans: Phones
Tablets: Big sedans
Phablets: Crossovers.
PC's: Trucks.
as with phones, marketshare isn't everything.
i wonder what apple's 1st quarter net profit was from mac sales, vs. the other guys.
considering apple's making 25-30% margins and they are making 2-3% margins, it would be interesting to compare apples to apples...
There was a report a few years ago which calculated that HP had to sell SEVEN computers to make the same amount of profit as ONE Macintosh.
So the conclusion must be that Apple is overcharging yet people still line up and pay...
There was a report a few years ago which calculated that HP had to sell SEVEN computers to make the same amount of profit as ONE Macintosh.
So the conclusion must be that Apple is overcharging yet people still line up and pay...
Go hop back in your awesome Lada. It has 4 wheels, that's all you need.
HP and Dell are want companies buy. I'd love to see the figures if they excluded corporate sales, I bet Apple would be over half of the home computer market.
Gartner is careful to lump Apple's figures in with the rest, when calculating the "Total" of 1.3% industry decline; i.e. there is no row in their chart for "Windows PCs." To help obscure this trick, they call the Mac row "Apple," as if Apple is just another maker of Microsoft crap along with HP, Dell, etc.
To get the Windows figure, simply subtract the Mac numbers from the Total numbers, do the math, and voila: Windows PCs experienced a 2.6% decline, double the loss of Gartner's obfuscational "Total."
ascii and Eriamjh — How right you are! Go to almost any college campus or Starbucks, and Apple logos are everywhere. But if you ever have the privilege(?) to visit the triple-locked, halon-equipped, vast, underground data center at the company where I work, you'll see row after row of razor-margin, rack-mounted, Dell servers humming away, storing and retrieving customer records and webpages, and performing bulk math calculations for research simulations. Naturally, Gartner counts each and every one of them as a unit of sales, absolutely equivalent to all those Macs you see out in public.
Here we go again with the "Others" that dwarfs any manufacturer. A third of all "PCs" are sold by someone we don't know. Are there really that many throwaway PCs being built? Does this include PCs in refrigerators? Who's included in the Other category?
Dell & HP's problem is twofold; business clients are migrating to cloud services, concentrating server sales to a smaller group of cloud service providers, and some cloud platforms (google, amazon, facebook) are designing their own servers.
Plus there is a push to run open source (hadoop, apache) on ARM.
S q u e e e e z ing the traditional server manufacturers.
There was a report a few years ago which calculated that HP had to sell SEVEN computers to make the same amount of profit as ONE Macintosh.
So the conclusion must be that Apple is overcharging yet people still line up and pay...
Wrong conclusion. Here's the right one. As the famous wall plaque says:
"Quality is Like Buying Oats"
"If you want nice fresh oats you have to pay a fair price. If you can be satisfied with oats that have already been thru the horse, that comes a little cheaper."