Mac shipments outpace market in Q1
Apple's Macs, such as the MacBook Air, continue to sell well in the U.S. market.
(Credit: CNET)Apple's Mac business outgrew the overall PC market in the U.S. by a significant margin in the first quarter, according to research from IDC and Gartner released Wednesday.
Check out my colleague Erica Ogg's post for the overall news, which has the PC market as a whole growing by 14.6 percent, but the U.S. market growing by just 3.5 percent. Despite that tepid growth in the U.S., Apple saw its U.S. shipments increase by a margin far greater than the market, as well as any other PC maker in the top 5.
According to Gartner, Mac shipments increased by 32.5 percent to U.S. customers. IDC didn't think Mac growth was quite that strong, pegging the increase at 25.1 percent. The numbers are different because the two companies count PC shipments in slightly different ways, but it really doesn't matter: Apple had a good quarter. Dell was the only other company to post double-digit growth in the U.S., according to both market research companies, with about 15.6 percent growth in the first quarter.
Gartner says that Apple appears to have shown "decent growth" within the professional PC market, which is a little outside of its usual haunts. Apple now has 6.6 percent of the overall U.S. market, according to Gartner, while IDC says Apple's at 6 percent market share. The two firms only release the top 5 in each region at first, and Apple is still pretty far away from cracking the worldwide Top 5.
Apple reports its quarterly earnings next week, and while there have been concerns about the iPod and iPhone businesses heading into that report, any concern about Mac sales can be safely laid to rest.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
/P
i mean in a world where everyone will use the same mac so to be cool.
good for stevej... though
You take the blue pill (PeeCee) and the story ends. You wake in
your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill (Mac) and you stay in Wonderland and I
show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.
I took the red pill 5 years ago and haven't regretted a day of it.
Funny part is I manage "blue pills" every day.
According to the story linked to in the beginning of the article all 5 of the leading computer manufactures posted increases larger than the industry growth. Varying from 66% as the highest growth, to 17% as the lowest growth among the big 5.
As for why the raw numbers are so different, good question. But it's important to remember these are estimates, educated guesses at shipment totals, not a thorough counting of each box as it's sold.
1. Apple's market share wasn't much from their low so doubling
it wasn't going to be that difficult compared to if they already
had a higher share.
2. Apple once had a substantial market share but managed to
**** it all away. This is recapturing a small amount of the
ground they threw away through general incompetence and
mismanagement.
I honestly do think this is good news but it needs to be
tempered a bit.
- This settles PC vs MAC war...
- by mmmtriplem April 17, 2008 4:31 PM PDT
- The following link is to an article which fully explains which platform is superior. It is based on many years of user polls and technology specifics.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(19 Comments)http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant