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Research firm Gartner today released its preliminary personal computer shipment data for the fourth quarter of 2011, offering up a picture of market performance during the quarter. With year-over-year unit growth of over 20%, Apple was the only one of the top five U.S. vendors to see an increase in shipments in an overall market that shrank by nearly 6%.

gartner_4Q11_us_trend.png



Apple's U.S. Market Share Trend: 1Q06-4Q11 (Gartner)
Apple's share dipped from 12.9% in the third quarter, which is routinely the company's strongest quarter due to a heavy presence in education. But the performance marks a distinct improvement over Apple's 9.0% share in the year-ago quarter and continues a long-term trend of increasing market share.

gartner_4Q11_us.png



Gartner's Preliminary U.S. PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 4Q11 (Thousands of Units)
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. PC shipments shrank 1.4% year-over-year on a worldwide basis, with strong growth from Lenovo and Asus being offset by declines from HP and Acer.

Update: IDC has also released its numbers for the fourth quarter of 2011, yielding results similar to Gartner's. As is typical, IDC pegged Apple's market share slightly lower than in Gartner's data, with IDC showing Apple with 10.92% of the U.S. market on 18% year-over-year growth.

IDC also released numbers for full-year 2011, showing Apple in third place in the U.S. market at 10.73%, up from 8.83% in 2010. Apple's full-year growth of 16.41% easily outpaced the other top-five manufacturers in an overall U.S. market that declined by nearly 5% from 2010.

Article Link: Apple Maintains Third Place Ranking with 11.6% of U.S. PC Shipments in 4Q 2011
 
Apple going to beat Dell in 2014.

Who's laughing now, Michael Dell.

Being as he and Steve Jobs were good friends I would imagine he isn't as enraged as you think.

EDIT: Realized I was thinking of the HP founders, not Dell.
 
Well, besides HP and Dell any other PC brand is junk.
Toshiba is good for notebooks, but not desktops.
Apple gets third place basically by default, following Toshiba very close.
Lenovo doesn't even appear.
 
As someone who remembers Apple being around 1.9% in 1997, I never thought I would see 10%, but here we are.

Apple's Mac share has never been better, has it? Not even in 1984.
 
Im not surprised its going backwards.

The price of the Macbook pro is beyond a joke now.

having owned 2 15" pros im seriously thinking of moving away as upgrading is way to expensive.

When a laptop costs over £2000 with a half assed GPU inside and upgrades which have to be bought with blood diamonds your market share is going to drop.

Time apple started charging average prices for average spec laptops or actually spec them up to what they are trying to charge.
 
Dell had 8% growth worldwide. They might not care that much about a shrinking US market, that now represents less than 20% of the total PC market.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to see these numbers multiplied by the average sales price per unit. I remember reading that the average sales price of a windows laptop is below the average price of an iPad... Apple might be very close to HP and Dell in terms of PC generated revenue (in the US that is)... and lets not even mention profit :D
 
Waiting for refresh. Our 4 year old mac pros are getting replaced with 78 new ones!! Derivative trading needs fast macs!!
 
With year-over-year unit growth of over 20%, Apple was the only one of the top five U.S. vendors to see an increase in shipments in an overall market that shrank by nearly 6%.

I guess that helps explain why CES 2012 looks an awful lot like MacWorld 2008........

apple_macbook-air2-thumb-450x276.jpg


acer-aspire-s5-ultrabook-CES.jpg


....and MacWorld 2009.

mbp13-090608-1.png


hp-envy-14-spectre,F-L-321969-13.jpg


:p
 
Wirelessly posted (This odd thing that I hold: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Poor HP, lost 25% of their sales in one year :0 For me, thats remarkable.

Some say Apple computers last 2x as long as PCs, though I wouldnt put it as high as that. That means that between roughly 12% and 20% of all computers in active use are from Apple :0 (allowing for the fact that apple sold fewer computers in previous years)
 
As someone who remembers Apple being around 1.9% in 1997, I never thought I would see 10%, but here we are.

Apple's Mac share has never been better, has it? Not even in 1984.

It was better in some years in the 80s and early 90s I think. I remember the 12.9% of the previous quarter being mentioned as best marked share since 15 years (not sure about the exact number of years).
 
On the other hand, it would be interesting to see these numbers multiplied by the average sales price per unit.
Thats going to be a hell lot worse. Not only are they competing far more closely with other OEMs, forcing them to keep tight profits - but the custom Desktop build market has been on a sharp increase over the years as well, so they've been desperately trying to not let that grow out of control too.

When more and more stores also offer on-order-assembly, the OEMs are loosing their place. Apple has a very small presence in just that sector, and the machines that matters market-share-wise cannot be replicated by custom builders (Laptop + All-in-One) - they're neatly managing to avoid direct competition with it.
 
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The price of the Macbook pro is beyond a joke now.

And the companies that price their products the same as a joke, or lower, don't make as much money. Why should Apple do likewise? Forget the 1% and the 99%, the top 20% are the customers with enough money to buy nicer stuff.

That's why Apple store's sales per square meter of floor averages better than both Walmart and Tiffany's.
 
Im not surprised its going backwards.

The price of the Macbook pro is beyond a joke now.

having owned 2 15" pros im seriously thinking of moving away as upgrading is way to expensive.

When a laptop costs over £2000 with a half assed GPU inside and upgrades which have to be bought with blood diamonds your market share is going to drop.

Time apple started charging average prices for average spec laptops or actually spec them up to what they are trying to charge.

Goes to show that some people only see what supports their own opinion. :)

Apple is the only one of the top 5 vendors to NOT be going backwards year over year.
 
The impressive part is the growth (or decline) column. It is humorous, all the buzz going to the "ultra-portable" laptops this year, as if it were something new.
 
Is this the first time they've climbed above 10% since the Apple II (II+,IIe,IIc) days?

Hello? Apple's been above 10% for the last three quarters.

In addition, I like how the graph just keeps climbing while the other top four are falling. Someone, get me a straight-edge I want to see when they cross.
 
In addition, I like how the graph just keeps climbing while the other top four are falling. Someone, get me a straight-edge I want to see when they cross.

Maybe they're having a bad year? Call me when Apple reaches the top 5 PC Vendors Worldwide. :p
 
The impressive part is the growth (or decline) column. It is humorous, all the buzz going to the "ultra-portable" laptops this year, as if it were something new.

Yea that's mainly Intel's marketing dollars, creating buzz about a category of devices that has existed for very long. Apparently it will be accompanied by the biggest advertising campaign they've ever done.

The Intel HD Graphics 3000 used in current Mac Book Air models (and upcoming Ultrabooks) is too way slow either way for me. Holding out for better models.
 
with year-over-year unit growth of over 20%, apple was the only one of the top five u.s. Vendors to see an increase in shipments in an overall market that shrank by nearly 6%.

i guess that helps explain why ces 2012 looks an awful lot like macworld 2008........

apple_macbook-air2-thumb-450x276.jpg


acer-aspire-s5-ultrabook-CES.jpg


....and macworld 2009.

mbp13-090608-1.png


hp-envy-14-spectre,F-L-321969-13.jpg


:p


The copy cats have no shame. Trying to look like a Mac is not going to make that Windows crap run any better. LOL!
 
The impressive part is the growth (or decline) column. It is humorous, all the buzz going to the "ultra-portable" laptops this year, as if it were something new.

While the ultra-portables want to kick Apple's MBA to the curb (kerb, in some other English-speaking countries), the analysts think they will only make about a 10% inroad, combined. Why, you might ask? They will cost as much as the MBA or up to 40% more. Some will be thinner than the MBA, but since that's the standard, you also can't charge more. If Apple refreshes the MBA early in this year, as expected, they could blow the wannabes out of the water with something like a retina display, or adding Siri, or some other compelling "next big thing." ...OR a combination of those things.

I'm tickled to see that it's still Apple's ball game and the wannabes are still in a catch-up mode.
 
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