Market researcher IDC reports that Dell has regained the number one PC maker slot, surpassing Hewlett-Packard, which had briefly retaken the number one spot during the last quarter of 2002 after its merger with Compaq. Dell owns 17.3 percent of the worldwide PC market, IDC says, compared with HP, which accounted for 15.8 percent of the market in the quarter ending March 31.
IDC measures shipments to distribution channels or end users. OEM sales are counted under the vendor/brand under which they are sold.
IBM places at a distant number three with 5.4 percent of the market. IDC’s research figures show the PC industry is again growing. Year-over-year sales were up 2.1 percent, according to IDC, with 34.6 million PCs sold. Gartner Research is reporting more optimisitic figures, stating that sales have grown 5.5 percent worldwide. According to IDC, Gateway placed fourth with 4.3 percent, down from 5.6 percent year-over-year. Toshiba rounded out the top five with 3.2 percent, up from 2.7 percent year-over-year.
On Wednesday Apple posted a quarterly profit of $14 million on sales of $1.475 billion. Year-over-year profits were down 65 percent with machine sales of 711,000, down 29,000 from 740,000 Apple reported in the same quarter last year. A red flag for Jobs & Co: Apple’s sales are falling as the overall PC market worldwide showed growth last quarter. IDC’s figures of 34.6 million PCs sold last quarter, which would indicate that Apple accounted for 2.05 percent of PC shipments worldwide.
More information from IDC here.
Our own SteveJack weighs in with his article, “I could market Macintosh better than Apple Marketing in my sleep,” found in the MacDailyNews Opinion section here.
Come on PPC 970 already, so I and every one of my publishing co-workers can upgrade. Also, Quark for OS X wouldn;t hurt, although we switched to the superior InDesign long ago, others foolishly haven’t.
The headline is misleading: “market share down to 2.05 percent.”
This claims that Apple owns 2% of the entire computer market, yet the article goes on to say that they “accounted for 2.05 percent of all shipments.” But this is for one quarter only. It doesn’t account for all desktops systems in use.
There’s something wrong with your article since Gateway shipped 506,000 PC’s this past quarter that’s 200,000 less then Apple, so Apple has more share
from gatway.com
“Quarterly Sales
In the first quarter, Gateway sold 506,000 PCs, down 30 percent
sequentially and down 22 percent on a year-over-year basis.”
Oded Helman,
You have to use the IDC figures for all to get a perspective of wher all maker stand. IDC measures certain things. Obviously, IDC doesn’t credit Apple for 711,000 units.
Companies that use Macs usually use them in niche activities and/or keep them till they become a productivity issue which usually take a long long time. By that time the company has probably hired IT staff that have been indoctrinated into the M$ sect and will in short order replace “incompatible” machines with wintel machines relying only on initial acquisition cost figures to justify that move. Because of this Apple has to increasingly rely on sales to individuals and niche activities of it’s PC’s. This fact alone makes for depressed percentage figures. Wintel boxes on the other hand are usually glorified dumb terminals for the companies server that gets blamed for the self-serving inherent disfunctionality of the whole wintel platform. Thus, in great numbers, the wintel PCs get regularly and for the most part needlessly changed. Of course this stranglehold M$ has on the business IT community only serves to perpetuate it’s well orchestrated global fraud. These enterprises are the ignorent or willing victimes of the whole wintel collusion. Until Businesses, Governments, Schools and people in general wake up to these facts computer use in todays business world will continue to be the host to the parasite M$ has become in the past decades. It is imperative for reasons of security, inovation, diversity etc. that business diversify in it’s choice and implementation of platforms and/or computers used in it’s activities and dismiss all IT’s that are unwilling to embark upon this salutary course.
My opinion,
Minions of the
Wintel borg lemming sect
need not reply
WOW! Slyrobber that was incredibly well said! I’d like to read more of your thoughts!
-Tom
There is something wrong with the stats used in this article. The writer needs to be more careful when confirming his sources. The 2% is also a surmised number or the writer, poorly done; macdailynews needs to be more responsible than this. Too, you failed to point out that only Apple and Dell are maintaining a profit with Apple having the strongest margin.
Terry has it EXACTLY correct. For years, morons at IDC and other companies have equated “current sales” with “market share.” If I had sold a million widgets without competition, I would have 100% market share. If, in the next quarter I sold 10 widgets and a new company sold 90 widgets, IDC would say I only had 10% of the market share when, in fact, I would have over 99%.
And the reason their figures are off is because IDC usually doesn’t include sales figures from Apple’s on-line store or Apple’s specialty stores.
You have to be careful about how they state the statistics. Sometimes they state market share for the world and sometimes market share for the US. Apple sells about half its computers overseas. Gateway has closed its overseas operations. Therefore, Gateways numbers are almost certainly their market share in the US.
Now if they only could ditch that crappy Aqua interface…
But seriously, why on earth would anyone want to switch to a more expensive, less-than-spectacular performing beast right now? I mean, as much as XP is seen as “The Hated OS” in the Mac world, it IS stable as hell, there is alot more software available and the hardware is cheaper. Apple needs to wake up and smell the coffee. The one thing that could have saved their butts was way back when they allowed clones. But NO, the clone manufacturers were offering faster systems for better prices and by God we can’t have that.
Innovative: yes; Unique: yes; Cost-effective: No.
Mac owner / lover / hater for 15 years here, so it’s not like I haven’t had my love affair at one time. Yes, I do think that OS-X is great, but I also love FreeBSD and Gentoo on my x86 boxes.
Sorry for the rant… Peace!
Still making productive use of: SE/30, 8100/80AV, iMac Snow.
Re: Fordboy’s post
I like the Aqua interface, and it is 1000 times better than the huge cartoon buttons and garish colors in XP. XP was designed to look flashy in the store, but after you work on it for an hour or two, you want to claw your eyes out. It’s also incredibly easy to teach new users. Who would know to look in the ‘chooser’ to connect to a server?
I was in a conference in Atlanta last weekend and this poor guy doing a presentation had his XP laptop crash and burn twice during his 30 minute presentation. No soft reboot, no force quit, just a completely frozen cursor and a very red face. I talk to a lot of real XP users, and their machines still crash… perhaps less than before XP, but crashes none the less. I contrast this to the 3 OS X machines I work on daily (a Pismo, a dual 500 and a MDD dual 1000) which do not crash EVER. An application may quit every once in a while, but the OS never goes down. Months go by, I’m still up and I have the logs to prove it. I only have to reboot after a system update tells me to.
Clones sucked. They introduced all kinds of hardware compatibility complexity into the mix. Without complete control over the hardware and OS, you can never have true plug-and-play. You end up with the horrible hodge-podge of semi-compatible parts – same as the average PC. It’s a miracle that anyone can get any white box PC to run. I have work to do, and I need reliable tools.
If you want cheaper Macs, buy more of them, and get your friends to do the same. Complaining about the cost in one breath and the market share in the other is pointless. Apple is doing the right thing by leading the industry by example, producing quality stuff, and pricing according to their market.
I am a Technical support agent for Linux/Windows for 14 years now and im fed up, time for a change. Linux RedHat 9 still feels premature for a desktop so i finally purchased a cheap mac (7300) with a G4 Sonnet upgrade and OS X on it, very happy, hasnt crashed yet so far, I use PC’s now only at work. And very proud of my low end mac!
I know the stats aren’t very clear, sales % for quarter or market share, and so on. But here is something to consider: I still have my Mac 128k I bought back in 1984, and another 6 Macs (newest iMac 1Gz). Wouldn’t they count for market share? Should we start to think about how old a computer is before it’s counted? Should it’s productivity mean anything, or just ownership? I mean, many business go through a process of replacing PCs every couple of years, so may be the old PCs shouldn’t be counted as market share anymore? Or should the ability of being able to use the newest OS be the deremining factor? For example, we should have numbers on Mac OS 9, Mac X, Win95, Win98, WinXP, Win2000…, Only use the OS that the computer regularly boots from.
I second the crappy interface comment.
I’ve got both Macs and PCs but Apple has consistantly blown it.
The last boneheaded mistake they made was getting rid of the low end iMacs. Duh? That’s the entry level market. Sure they’ll get a few big buck customers but they’ve always basically hated the poor.
IMHO Jobs is not the great leader he’s made out to be. He’s had a couple of luck breaks at the right moments, but considering those breaks he’s screw up Apple. Apple should be BIGGER than Microsoft.
Now if they only could ditch that crappy Aqua interface…
But seriously, why on earth would anyone want to switch to a more expensive, less-than-spectacular performing beast right now? I mean, as much as XP is seen as “The Hated OS” in the Mac world, it IS stable as hell, there is alot more software available and the hardware is cheaper. Apple needs to wake up and smell the coffee. The one thing that could have saved their butts was way back when they allowed clones. But NO, the clone manufacturers were offering faster systems for better prices and by God we can’t have that.
Innovative: yes; Unique: yes; Cost-effective: No.
Mac owner / lover / hater for 15 years here, so it’s not like I haven’t had my love affair at one time. Yes, I do think that OS-X is great, but I also love FreeBSD and Gentoo on my x86 boxes.
~_~_~_~_~_~~_~_~_
Aqua is beautiful – no 2 ways about it. These market share things are based mainly on browsing stats so if you ever waste time at work browsing on your shitey peecee it’s added to the stats.
OSX is the best OS ever written – it’s worthing paying a bit more for.
Once again it’s ALL in the machines sold to the parasitic HOSTS business has become world wide for the Wintel platform. I’m in office towers here in Montreal all day and you wouldn’t believe the number of Dell, Compact etc. boxes delivered by Purolator, UPS, Fedex, each and every day !! Not to mention what gets thrown away to recyclers liquidator, and the like. It’s maddening. The in stalled base doesn’t really change but that’s another number. Once in a while you see a salutary Mac box but by the numbers at once you KNOW it’s for niche usage. Even in households Macs don’t do very well because they just last longer. Who keeps a beige box very long when obsolescence is measured in months not in years as in Macs? Apple’s salvation for numbers of sales pass by the Xserve and nothing else. This is the only way Apple can break out of being limited to the home market and niche markets like graphics. The other secret weapon would be total integration of Windows emulation in a wicked fast machine as in SoftWindows or the open-source Emulators. Having OSX and almost complete compatibility on a machine would be a mighty powerful argument for individual buyers not to mention more adventurous businessmen.
Two percent for Two reasons; Too expensive, too slow.
Remove all you opinions (i.e OSX is better, iApps are better) and you have 2 machines that perform the same tasks, one does them faster at less cost.
to smelt…
you obvoiusly don’t push XP at all, as i ahve seen it crash and burn many times when trying to multitask.
do more with your machine and it will crash.
“to smelt…
you obvoiusly don’t push XP at all, as i ahve seen it crash and burn many times when trying to multitask.
do more with your machine and it will crash.”
I’m sure the world wide computer market will take your personal observations as shattering breaking news and drive Apple to 99% market share by Friday.
A concept you koolaide Maclots never seem to grasp is the computer market does not give a fece about your personal observations or anticdotes.
Nobody cares that you think iApps rule, OSX is great, or a G4 really is as fast as a P4. Apple is at 2% because people know better.
Sorry but you’re just going to have to live with that.
OK, here I go. Read on; I’m kinda pithy.
Smelt: Personal observations like “Apple is at 2% because people know better”? This is, by contrast, a fact? Or was that in the IDC report as well?
Fact is, Apple has it’s current market share (probably greater than 2%, see below) because of corporate licensing greed 20 years ago for which it still pays. Once the Wintel monopoly took hold, that is where things have stood. The Mac has always been a better machine and everyone knows it. Apple has such a high consumer loyalty index that authors write books marveling at the fact and economics professors give lecures on the subject. The Wall Street Journal states, “Macintosh computers are the best-designed computers on the market, and handle every common computing task as well as, or better than, a Windows PC,” “Mac prices compare favorably with Windows competitors in many cases,” and “Another bonus to using a Mac: You won’t have to worry much about viruses, because almost none are written for the Mac.” [WSJ, 2002]
If folks want to show blind devotion to Windows, that’s fine. But let’s at least have a sense of reality; computer consumers usually say one of two things: 1) I’m getting a Mac ’cause I really like it! or 2) I’m getting Windows because that’s what they have at work. I’ve only heard ONE GUY exclaim with glee, “Dude, I’m gettin’ a Dell.”
Windows is probably a reasonable choice for people who:
1) Need Windows-only niche software (applies to few)
2) Prioritize hard-core Windows-only gaming (applies to few; and besides, get a friggin’ Nintendo and leave the computing community alone)
3) Are nervous about nonconformity (understandable, and applies to many)
As others here have observed, the figure in the IDC report folks have pounced on is misleading, as it reflects sales. Sales figures correlate with profits. Apple’s OWNERSHIP, though, is undoubtedly higher since the machine I bought in 1998 (still have yours?) can’t count towards 2003Q1 profits. If I must replace my Hewlett GateDell every year or 2 and those sales count toward “market share,” is that a good thing? I ask rhetorically, of course.
As Apple continues to smooth platform compatibility, as Macs continue to equalize in price, and as consumer fears about compatibility continue to be allayed, Apples berth will be assured. That, dear reader is my opinion and the end of my rant. Feel free to e-mail me with yours.
-Kabeyun
kabeyun at mac dot com
>>”Another bonus to using a Mac: You won’t have to worry much about viruses, because almost none are written for the Mac.”
yeah, same goes with software.
GOOD, now I ONLY get the best software, not ALL the dysfunctional drivel and swill written, no thrown together, by greedy little hands thats usually a rip-off of other software. GAMES included.