Global PC market's ongoing collapse has been an opportunity for Mac to gain market share
The Mac is more than holding its own in the gradually collapsing PC market, with Apple the only one of the top six vendors to see year-over-year growth.
Mac Studio
Reports of the global PC market being in decline are not new, and neither is Apple's ability to rise above its competitors in the field. While there has already been one report stating that, a new one proposes that Apple's doing even better than what was claimed one week prior.
In a Counterpoint Research note seen by AppleInsider, global PC shipments dropped 15% year-over-year for Q2 2023, though this still represents a quarter-to-quarter rise of 8%.
Inventory levels continued to normalize in Q2, though a double-digit year-on-year decline was recorded following the Q1 YoY decline of 28%. This is considered as the shipment downturn "relatively stabilizing" since Q1 2022.
Combined with quarterly growth in Q1 being the first since Q1 2022, these are seen as an "early sign of stabilization in the PC market," and that a mild recovery could be expected in the second half of 2023.
On a per-vendor basis, Apple was the main beneficiary in the top six producers, in terms of shipments. For Q2 2023, Apple managed 5.5 million shipments, 8% up from the 5 million in the year-ago quarter.
via Counterpoint Research
It is reckoned the growth was due to a "relatively low" Q2 2022, with new product launches being "partially" beneficial to the figures.
Counterpoint's report follows the same general comments made by IDC on July 11, which claimed the year-over-year decline of the market was a lower 13.4%. As for Apple IDC's numbers are more conservative at 5.3 million units in Q2 2023, 10.3% up from 4.8 million in Q2 2022.
Of the remainder, Lenovo saw an 18% YoY decline to 14.2 million units shipped, HP dropped 1% to 13.3 million, and Dell endured a 22% drop to 10.2 million.
Counterpoint reckons that the market still has "some turbulence" to get through in the second half of 2023 before "seeing the first sunrise" on shipment declines. End demand has picked up to become stronger than OEM shipments, which could translate into an acceleration of re-order demand.
For the second half of 2023, it's expected that there will be "back-to-school momentum" that could be coupled with "potential AI-enabled and ARM laptop launches."
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
That's what happened to the companies making buggy whips a hundred years ago. As more and more companies went bankrupt, the ones remaining got a larger and larger share of the remaining market. You can draw your own conclusions about how much money they make today versus when they had a smaller share of a larger market!
Apple is in the best position because PC manufacturers have drilled margins down to unsustainable levels (some as low as 2%) and the market is saturated. They have nowhere to go but down and out like so many before them that followed the same strategy.
Apple has a 5-10% global share of the PC market and they sell at premium price points with healthy, sustainable margins. They can outlast all of them. Even when upgrade frequency drops for them too, they have the ability to grow the customer base. They will ride high in the PC market for at least another decade and over that time, their other platforms will have evolved considerably.
Collapses don't happen overnight. We've had iPhones for more than 15 years at this point, and (while it is shrinking) the PC market remains large enough to support multiple vendors that are (combined) selling in excess of 100 million units per year. There remain multiple use cases where a desktop or laptop machine is better than a smartphone or tablet, unlike your example where the motor vehicle was better at everything than the horse-drawn buggy. And, really, the buggy whip manufacturers were making an accessory to a dominant device; the buggy makers had the option of transitioning to on-device horsepower and those that did it well survived.
There is also a comparison to be made to the floppy disk industry: it can be profitable to serve even a dying niche, but the safe bet is to diversify before the end becomes apparent.