“The two leading high tech market research firms have done it again,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“They issued their preliminary PC sales estimates for the first calendar quarter of 2013 Wednesday, and while they agree that it represented either the worst quarterly decline on record (IDC) or the worst in a generation (Gartner) — thanks in large part to the disruption caused by the iPad and its imitators — they can’t seem to get their stories straight on the sales of Apple’s computers,” P.E.D. reports. “According to Gartner, Mac sales in the U.S. grew 7.4%. According to IDC, they fell 7.5%.”
P.E.D. reports, “We’ve seen the two firms get their Mac signals crossed before, but never this badly. In the summer of 2012, IDC had U.S. Mac sales falling 1.1% in the second quarter while Gartner had them growing 4.3% — a 5.4% gap. This time they disagree by nearly 15%.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Gartner: PC Market posts 11.2 percent decline in Q113; Apple Mac sales up 7.4 percent in U.S. – April 10, 2013
IDC: PC shipments post the steepest decline ever in a single quarter, down 13.9% in Q113 – April 10, 2013
More tripe for the ingnoramous ANALists & their cronies.
Our trusted data sources…
Obvious reaction: trust neither source.
And both of them still think that iPads are not computers.
By every classical description of a computer, an iPad fits it.
Hell, a human brain is a computer. Let’s use the birth counts.
Why believe either? Or better yet, choose which one you want to believe. Choose the one that fits your need. Desperate people do desperate things. Sometimes the truth is difficult to accept.
And the actual number was (drum roll):
+2%
That’s pretty much the average of the two forecasts. If we do that this time we arrive at a slight increase, <1%.
IDC was using a Dell to compute it an Gartner used an iPad.
One source to keep the bears happy, one for the bulls.
One is paid by samdung and the other isn’t. Guess which?
Idiots with the right facts sometime come to the right conclusion.
The problem is, Idiots with the wrong facts come the the right conclusion just as often.
Most of the time, they are just wrong and we can safely ignore them.
Alice in Wonderland Dept – they probably get paid a king’s ransom to turn out dreck like this.
Why would they think it will go down when windows machines are going down, what do they think people are buying?
“Gartner and IDC trumpet wildly incongruous Mac unti sales estimates”
C’mon… we’re all giving you kudos for your often cited Caribbean island hopping locals, 4-hour work week, whatever, but if you are in the business of pointing out stupid vs. care and accuracy you need to *always* proof read your postings (even if this means propping up the beach chair).
As much as I want to like you guys (and I mostly do), the occasional (but too frequent) hypocrisy is at some point going to become a deal killer. It certainly lessens you.
p.s. stop pointing story links back to your own site — you have (accurately) berated others for less.
“…they can’t seem to get their stories straight on the sales of Apple’s computers”
…because they just make things up. And this time, they did it without consulting each other first.
It all doesn’t really matter. The proof in what is happening is in manufacturer earnings reports.
Dell is going private due the spectre of zero profits, and a need to hide from public view what management thinks is the tyrn around cure.
HP sales are way down, again as reported in their earnings reports.
Those that remain cut margins to survive (or prosper?).
The only question mark is Apple, and we’ll know the answer to that in a little less than 2 weeks.
This is “preliminary PC sales estimates”. Don’t get too excited. You do know what preliminary means.