Research firm Gartner today released its preliminary personal computer shipment data for the fourth quarter of 2012, showing a mixed market for manufacturers. Overall, Gartner saw a 2.1% year-over-year decline in PC sales in the United States, compared to a 4.9% decline on a global basis.
Gartner's Preliminary U.S. PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 4Q12 (Thousands of Units)
In the United States, Apple maintained its third-place ranking with 12.3% of the market on a unit sales increase of 5.4% over the year-ago quarter. Apple's growth was outpaced by leader HP at 12.6% and fourth-place Lenovo at 9.7%, but Lenovo remains well behind Apple at 8.4% of the U.S. market. Apple and the other gainers were, however, more than offset by steep losses at Dell and Acer, leading to overall contraction of the PC market in the U.S.
Apple's U.S. Market Share Trend: 1Q06-4Q12 (Gartner)
As usual, Gartner did not cover Apple's worldwide market share for the quarter, as the company does not rank among the top five vendors on a worldwide basis.
IDC has also released its estimates of PC sales for the quarter, offering an even bleaker view of the market with its calculations of 6.4% contraction in the global market and a 4.5% decline in the United States. Apple in particular took a hit in IDC's estimates relative to Gartner's numbers, with IDC projecting that Apple's sales actually shrank by 0.2% year-over-year. Still, given the overall market decline in the U.S., IDC saw Apple's share of the market rise from 10.9% to 11.4%.
Wednesday February 19, 2025 8:02 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple today introduced the iPhone 16e, its newest entry-level smartphone. The device succeeds the third-generation iPhone SE, which has now been discontinued.
The iPhone 16e features a larger 6.1-inch OLED display, up from a 4.7-inch LCD on the iPhone SE. The display has a notch for Face ID, and this means that Apple no longer sells any iPhones with a Touch ID fingerprint button, marking the ...
Tuesday February 18, 2025 12:02 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
Over the years, Apple has switched from an aluminum frame to a stainless steel frame to a titanium frame for its highest-end iPhones. And now, it has been rumored that Apple will go back to using aluminum for three out of four iPhone 17 models.
In an investor note with research firm GF Securities, obtained by MacRumors this week, Apple supply chain analyst Jeff Pu said the iPhone 17, iPhone...
Thursday February 20, 2025 5:06 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Now that Apple has announced its new more affordable iPhone 16e, our thoughts turn to what else we are expecting from the company this spring.
There are three product categories that we are definitely expecting to get upgraded before spring has ended. Keep reading to learn what they are. If we're lucky, Apple might make a surprise announcement about a completely new product category.
M4...
Wednesday February 19, 2025 11:38 am PST by Juli Clover
Following the launch of the iPhone 16e, Apple updated its iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia pages to give a narrower timeline on when the next updates are set to launch.
All three pages now state that new Apple Intelligence features and languages will launch in early April, an update from the more broader April timeframe that Apple provided before. The next major point updates will be iOS ...
Friday February 21, 2025 1:08 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple finally released the first beta of iOS 18.4 to developers for testing purposes, and while the beta is lacking some of the Apple Intelligence features we were hoping for, there are some notable new additions.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
Priority Notifications - Apple Intelligence
There is a new Priority Notifications feature that can show you your most...
Thursday February 13, 2025 8:07 am PST by Joe Rossignol
In a social media post today, Apple CEO Tim Cook teased an upcoming "launch" of some kind scheduled for Wednesday, February 19.
"Get ready to meet the newest member of the family," he said, with an #AppleLaunch hashtag.
The post includes a short video with an animated Apple logo inside a circle.
Cook did not provide an exact time for the launch, or share any other specific details, so...
Friday February 21, 2025 8:01 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple has confirmed that its custom-designed C1 modem in the iPhone 16e has nothing to do with the device's lack of MagSafe support, according to Macworld.
Following the launch of the iPhone 16e, there was some speculation online about how MagSafe magnets might have interfered with the C1 modem's cellular connectivity performance, and this was considered to be a potential reason for the...
Apple today announced its first custom cellular modem with the name "C1," debuting in the all-new iPhone 16e.
The new modem contributes to the iPhone 16e's power efficiency, giving it the longest battery life of any iPhone with a 6.1-inch display, such as the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16.
Expanding the benefits of Apple silicon, C1 is the first modem designed by Apple and the most...
Wow, this thread opens on quick the butthurt already. Are you really surprised, what with enterprise level contracts for notebooks and desktops that HP and Dell would outsell Apple, when they've been at #1 and #2 for years now ? :rolleyes:
As for the actual numbers, I'm surprised the current tablet craze didn't eat more into this segment. The market is mature and lets face, as technology advances, the actual niches that do require more and more computing power are getting smaller and rarer. Most people have attained a level of computing power to fill their needs quite a while ago, and upgrades are mostly done to replace faulty old hardware or out of a "want" consumerism basis.
I think you must have been actively looking for 'butthurt' to comment on,
No sorry, trying to dismiss market share numbers with "profit" is the argument of someone looking to justify Apple's position in some way. It's not really the topic and no one rational would care enough that Apple is #3 to try and attack HP and Dell's #1 spot.
No one but shareholders care about profits. Profits are essentially the dollars a company managed to charge extra for to buyers and stuff their money with. If you ask me, the less profits the better I'm off.
What do the numbers look like when you just look at laptops?
Edit: I'm in a university engineering classroom... my understanding was many engineering students use Windows...
If you're in a university the chances are most of the computers around you will be macs.
(Funny side-note: We had a linux obsessed lecturer who spent 2 hours shouting at everyone in the room for being on a Mac or Windows machine, and he stood there with his laptop giving a presentation. Literally as he said "Those crappy closed source operating systems are so unreliable" his laptop locked up. Needless to say the lecture ended at that point. :D)
I think you must have been actively looking for 'butthurt' to comment on, because there didn't actually seem to be any in that post.
I disagree. I think it's pretty obvious the tone of the post. Not to mention - what does profit margin have to do with the topic. Oh I know it's related. But the manner in which the OP commented - it wasn't a discussion point. It was what everyone knows it was. A knock on HP and Dell for not being Apple.
Wow, this thread opens on quick the butthurt already. Are you really surprised, what with enterprise level contracts for notebooks and desktops that HP and Dell would outsell Apple, when they've been at #1 and #2 for years now ? :rolleyes:
As for the actual numbers, I'm surprised the current tablet craze didn't eat more into this segment. The market is mature and lets face, as technology advances, the actual niches that do require more and more computing power are getting smaller and rarer. Most people have attained a level of computing power to fill their needs quite a while ago, and upgrades are mostly done to replace faulty old hardware or out of a "want" consumerism basis.
I think you must have been actively looking for 'butthurt' to comment on, because there didn't actually seem to be any in that post. Dell and HP, in fact, make virtually nothing from their PC sales because they got involved in the PC price wars, where vendors competed for market share based solely on price. In the beginning that competition was good, but eventually the vendors had to cut into quality to keep pricing lower, and the market *still* hasn't really recovered from that.
The fact is that both Dell and HP outsell Apple (in both units and revenue), but they're getting *murdered* by the unbelievably low margins on the typical systems they sell. Apple avoided the race to no profits that the rest of the PC industry 'competed' in over the last two decades or so. The lowest-end systems sold by Apple are mid-range system by the standards of most OEMs, including Dell and HP, and carry similar profit margins to those systems. Apple doesn't *do* the 'low-end' where there are no profit margins though.
In the mid-range and upper end, there is more room for both quality and profits because not so many corners need to be cut to squeeze prices down. The result of cutting corners and 'going cheap' in order to compete solely on price has resulted in *most* Windows PC vendors gaining a reputation for poor quality over the years, at the very least in their 'consumer' lines.
Profitability in the Windows PC market has been so poor that HP recently looked at unloading their PC division because it was so unprofitable. Dell has had financial issues related to poor profitability in the recent past as well, though I don't recall seeing anything in the past few years, so they may have gotten things under control.
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Gotta stick to the U.S. numbers because they fall off when you consider worldwide numbers, which really show how successful Lenovo and ASUS have been.
