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 ?
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.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23903013
That's true. I remember when ASUS were just 'the guys who assemble other people's gear'. They've really made a move on the market since then.
I do wish they'd show more than the top 5, though. Where *does* Apple sit on the charts for world-wide sales? 10th? 6th? 25th?