US Mac shipments didn't shrink in holiday quarter, they grew 5%, Gartner says

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Gartner on Monday contradicted its rival IDC and claimed that domestic Mac shipments actually grew for Apple by 5 percent year over year in the holiday quarter.

Gartner


Apple's U.S.-based shipments were up 5.4 percent while the overall PC market slid 2.1 percent, according to Gartner's preliminary data for the fourth quarter of 2012. Apple is believed to have shipped more than 2.1 million Macs in the quarter, up from 2 million in the same period in 2011.

Apple's share of U.S. PC shipments also grew from 11.4 percent in the 2011 holiday shopping season to 12.3 percent in the same period in 2012.

Gartner's numbers contradict data from IDC, issued last Thursday, which claimed that Mac shipments were actually down by 0.2 percent year over year. IDC instead claimed Apple sold about 2 million Macs, giving an 11.4 percent share of the market

Actual Mac sales for the quarter will be revealed by Apple next week, when the company will reveal earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2013, which concluded in January. Analysts generally do not anticipate a big quarter for the Mac, as the company's new all-in-one iMac launched late in the quarter and remains in short supply.

One thing both Gartner and IDC do agree on is that the PC market as a whole is doing worse than Apple. Last week IDC said U.S. PC shipments were off 4.5 percent, while Gartner said holiday PC shipments in America slid 2.1 percent from the same period in 2011.

Both Gartner and IDC only give specific data for the top five PC vendors, divided into shipments for the U.S. only as well as abroad. Apple does not crack the top five worldwide PC vendors, so neither Gartner nor IDC offered projections on the company's total shipments for the quarter.

As a result, neither company's estimates account for what is a growing share of international PC sales for Apple. Analyst Maynard Um with Wells Fargo noted last Friday, in response to the IDC figures, that APple's international share of PC sales is growing faster than its U.S.-based Mac business.

Gartner's preliminary U.S. data shows HP as the top company in the U.S., with shipments of 4.7 million computers giving it a 26.6 percent share of the market. HP's sales are believed to be up 12.6 percent year over year, according to Gartner.

In second was Dell, with a 19.2 percent share from shipments of 3.4 million PCs. Its shipments were off 16.5 percent from the holiday shopping season of 2011.

Apple came in third in Gartner's rankings, followed by Lenovo, which took an estimated 8.4 percent slice of the U.S. market on shipments of 1.4 million units ??up 9.7 percent year over year. Finally, in fifth was Acer, which saw its shipments slide 21.6 percent to 1.4 million, giving it 7.9 percent of the market.

Worldwide, HP was also the top PC vendor, though its global growth was actually down 0.5 percent year over year, according to Gartner. The only vendors in the top five to see growth were second-place Lenovo, up 8.2 percent, and fifth-place Asus, up 6.4 percent.

Dell, which ranked third worldwide, saw its PC shipments tumble 20.9 percent in the holiday quarter. And fourth-place Acer also saw an 11 percent drop in shipments.

"Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by ?cannibalizing? PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs," said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. ?Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC.

"There will be some individuals who retain both, but we believe they will be exception and not the norm. Therefore, we hypothesize that buyers will not replace secondary PCs in the household, instead allowing them to age out and shifting consumption to a tablet."
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 36
    ifij775ifij775 Posts: 470member
    I don't understand the disparity between HP and Dell growth figures. They sell essentially the same product. Did Dell salespeople go out to lunch?
  • Reply 2 of 36


    This is hillarious. Stupid and incompetent businessmen/engineers/etc aka "Analyst" fighting against each other and manipulating the stock.


     


    Anyway, 6million macs this quarter.

  • Reply 3 of 36
    jragostajragosta Posts: 10,473member
    ifij775 wrote: »
    I don't understand the disparity between HP and Dell growth figures. They sell essentially the same product. Did Dell salespeople go out to lunch?

    Could be any number of reasons:
    1. Distribution. It's easier to find HP products in many stores than Dell.
    2. Price.
    3. Perception. At equal price, many people would prefer the HP due to Dell's perception as cheap junk
    4. Quality. In spite of your claims that they're the same product, they're not. HP makes a better quality product than Dell.
  • Reply 4 of 36

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by jragosta View Post





    Could be any number of reasons:

    1. Distribution. It's easier to find HP products in many stores than Dell.

    2. Price.

    3. Perception. At equal price, many people would prefer the HP due to Dell's perception as cheap junk

    4. Quality. In spite of your claims that they're the same product, they're not. HP makes a better quality product than Dell.


    BS.


     


    HP makes MBP clones at the highend, Dell actually tries something.


    there's no evidence to support what you said.

  • Reply 5 of 36
    nasseraenasserae Posts: 3,167member
    The funny part is we will never know who is right since Apple never gives the numbers for each region. Apple only reports world wide numbers.
  • Reply 6 of 36
    Don't confuse engineers with business men. Finance Majors/Business Majors know nothing of Engineering nor Engineering Economics and yet when is this country gonna wake up and send most of the Business majors packing to work at a Starbucks before people sell their fortunes on their next pack of bs.
  • Reply 7 of 36
    anonymouseanonymouse Posts: 6,857member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer View Post



    Don't confuse engineers with business men. Finance Majors/Business Majors know nothing of Engineering nor Engineering Economics and yet when is this country gonna wake up and send most of the Business majors packing to work at a Starbucks before people sell their fortunes on their next pack of bs.


     


    Frankly, I don't think most of them would be much use at Starbucks.

  • Reply 8 of 36
    ifij775ifij775 Posts: 470member


    I was just looking at Lenovo's computers on Best Buy's website (wondering who buys these), and clearly they are little more than MBP knock-offs with "Lenovo" stamped on them. Apple needs to protect the IP of their designs more diligently, because their competitors clearly copy their designs and just sell them for less.

  • Reply 9 of 36

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by ifij775 View Post


    I was just looking at Lenovo's computers on Best Buy's website (wondering who buys these), and clearly they are little more than MBP knock-offs with "Lenovo" stamped on them. Apple needs to protect the IP of their designs more diligently, because their competitors clearly copy their designs and just sell them for less.



    Lenovo Thinkpads are by far the best business laptops on the market. I don't know of a Lenovo Ideapad or a Thinkpad that attempts to copy a MBP.

  • Reply 10 of 36

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by anonymouse View Post


     


    Frankly, I don't think most of them would be much use at Starbucks.



    Thankfully we have you.

  • Reply 11 of 36

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by extremeskater View Post


    Lenovo Thinkpads are by far the best business laptops on the market. I don't know of a Lenovo Ideapad or a Thinkpad that attempts to copy a MBP.



    What does this remind you of?


     


    http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Lenovo+-+IdeaPad+Ultrabook+13.3%22+Laptop+-+4GB+Memory+-+500GB+Hard+Drive+%2B+32GB+SSD+-+Graphite+Gray/5599296.p?id=1218670777857&skuId=5599296#tab=overview

  • Reply 12 of 36
    gazoobeegazoobee Posts: 3,754member


    The thing that strikes me every single year when they publish these figures is that the "PC market" itself is a bit of a artificial creature.  


     


    It really only makes sense to talk about sales in the "PC market" only from the manufacturing perspective, but then they turn around and apply the numbers to an analysis that talks almost exclusively about market share, which they then strongly imply is an indicator of consumer interest.  In reality nothing could be further from the truth.  


     


    The "PC market" actually has two main segments, consumer sales and business or institutional sales.  Since HP, Acer, etc. have always made computers for both segments it makes sense from a manufacturing perspective to lump them together, but from a marketshare perspective or from the perspective of reading consumer market share into those figures, it makes no sense at all.  


     


    I read an excellent analysis over four years ago that attempted to filter the business and institutional purchases out of the equation and they came up with a 25% market share (for that year) for Apple.  It seems that when we are talking only about individual consumers purchasing decisions, that roughly one out of four purchases are Macs.  I'm willing to bet that the number is even higher now considering the popularity of Macs, iPhones, etc.  


     


    The fact that HP is "on top" is merely a reflection of the fact that if you are putting together a call centre, and filling up ten floors of some skyscraper with hundreds and hundreds of cubicles, that you will probably be buying some crap HP computer for that purpose.  They are on top, but only in the sense of manufacturing and gross sales.  


     


    To turn around and suggest, even obliquely, that these figures actually mean that 80-90% of the population prefers Windows computers is so patently false it just astounds me.  


    Yet it's put forward year after year after year without anyone seriously questioning it.  

  • Reply 13 of 36
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Many businesses have sent Dell packing. Simply put Dell doesn't have the chops to support business properly. Couple that with the consummer perception of Dell and you have a recipe for a contraction in sales.
    ifij775 wrote: »
    I don't understand the disparity between HP and Dell growth figures. They sell essentially the same product. Did Dell salespeople go out to lunch?
  • Reply 14 of 36


    I work for IBM and honestly the quality of that system isn't even close to a MBP. The Ideapad line is the consumer line from Lenovo and most of them I would say have the look and feel of what HP or Dell would put out. They are better quality than both HP and Dell but when you actually see one they aren't all that nice.


     


    Thinpad business series is a different story. Most are not that pretty to look at except maybe for the X1 Carbon but they can take a major beating and they work forever.


     


    Also you will find that Lenovo loves to use the typical 1378x768 on Ideapads which sucks. The Y580 however is actually a pretty nice laptop for the price but again feels more like an HP DV7.


     


    Lenovo for the most part has to meet some fairly strict standards for their Thinkpad series but the Ideapad they can do pretty much whatever they want which would include Windows 8. They offer Windows 8 on the Thinkpads but I don't know anyone that would be crazy enough to install Windows 8 on a Thinkpad.

  • Reply 15 of 36
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    +++++++++

    One of Americas greatest problems economically is the rise of professional managers with little to no grasp of the businesses they manage. Often you have a situation where the clueless lead or more accurately frustrate the rank and file in an organization.
    anonymouse wrote: »
    Frankly, I don't think most of them would be much use at Starbucks.
  • Reply 16 of 36

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post



    Many businesses have sent Dell packing. Simply put Dell doesn't have the chops to support business properly. Couple that with the consummer perception of Dell and you have a recipe for a contraction in sales.


    Utter rubbish. I work for a company where Dell is used predominantly and has been for quite some time.  They are put through tons of requirements (performance, delivery, pricing, warranty etc) and they deliver.  We have well over 300k systems.

  • Reply 18 of 36
    jragostajragosta Posts: 10,473member
    Lenovo Thinkpads are by far the best business laptops on the market.

    Well, no. The MacBook Pro Retina is the best business laptop on the market. Not that long ago, one of the magazines reported that the MacBook Pro even runs Windows better than PC laptops. And since the Retina Display came out, no one else is even close.
    I don't know of a Lenovo Ideapad or a Thinkpad that attempts to copy a MBP.

    Right. They just got that way by accident.
  • Reply 19 of 36

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by extremeskater View Post


    Lenovo Thinkpads are by far the best business laptops on the market. I don't know of a Lenovo Ideapad or a Thinkpad that attempts to copy a MBP.



    No, they are not. the rMBP is. Please, do not speak about some random ports.

  • Reply 20 of 36

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by jragosta View Post





    Could be any number of reasons:

    1. Distribution. It's easier to find HP products in many stores than Dell.

    2. Price.

    3. Perception. At equal price, many people would prefer the HP due to Dell's perception as cheap junk

    4. Quality. In spite of your claims that they're the same product, they're not. HP makes a better quality product than Dell.




    Is that another US-only comparison? Here in Europe, it's the exact opposite... Well, anyway, I'm not buying any HP/Dell, but I have 7 Dells in a 2m radius right now (Latitude ones) and my girlfriend used to have one which lasted about 8 years. Her HP lasted about two years, and she hated pretty much 20 months of that. She now runs an ASUS EEEPC, lovely little unpretentious netbook which fits in her handbag and does the heavy lifting on the iMac, but while she could consider buying DELL again, HP is banned forever from this household, as well as my colleagues and friends, due to known junk status (and worse, I knew it for junk and was there when she bought, but some salesmen seem to have a reality-distortion-field or something... well, I learned a lesson there) so I'm quite perplexed (honestly) at your statement. Anyway, I think she's getting an iPad on next refresh (courtesy of myself, lol), so the whole DELL/HP is probably an irrelevant question, since I guess the same can be said from most people...

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