“It isn’t easy making a living in this country [U.S.A.] as a box seller, unless your name just happens to be Apple,” Rick Aristotle Munarriz reports for The Motley Fool.
“Gartner published its PC sales metrics for the fourth quarter last night. The industry tracker estimates that 17.9 million computers were shipped during the holiday period, a 5.9% decline from last year,” Munarriz reports. “The category includes traditional PCs, laptops, and mini notebooks, excluding the tablets and smartphones that are selling briskly these days.”
Munarriz reports, “If you want to make an ugly number even uglier, back out Apple. Take away the more than 300,000 computers it sold this past quarter relative to last year and this country’s non-Apple PC shipments fell by a staggering 8.6%.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: <If you want to make the numbers realistic, add in iPads and tablets, and you'll find that Apple is the #1 personal computer maker in the world.
Related articles:
U.S. Windows PC shipments drop 6% in holiday quarter as Apple Macs surge 21% – January 11, 2012
J.P. Morgan: Apple’s MacBook Air to dominate ultrabook market – December 12, 2011
Why Apple will be the world’s #1 personal computer maker in 2012 – December 5, 2011
Apple on track to overtake HP, become leading global PC vendor – November 21, 2011
Gartner: Apple Mac share up 20% in Europe YOY as PC shipments plunge 11.4% – November 14, 2011
Surging iPad shipments propel Apple to #1 in worldwide mobile computer market share – February 16, 2011
Canalys unafraid to count iPad, puts Apple third in worldwide PC market share – January 26, 2011
DisplaySearch not afraid to count iPad: Apple #1 mobile PC maker in North America, #3 in world – December 7, 2010
I want the numbers to be realistic, but, apparently, “they” do not.
I firmly believe that the enterprise, until just recently, basically poo-pooed Apple as a consumer-oriented solution and nothing more. Referring back to the MDN article on how MS missed the boat with innovation over the past 10 years, it’s easy to see why that tide is turning. MS clearly is losing market share with their POS operating system. I suspect there will be versions of SQL Server and Oracle in an OS X – based environment sooner than later. If the enterprise is finally starting to embrace the Mac, coupled with this extraordinary rate of growth, it has to happen. A few years ago I would have thought that close to impossible.
Here’s hoping that Balmer the sweaty Monkey Boy stays in power as long as possible.
They made the big mistake of looking at people in the corporate world as robots, not as consumers themselves.
I agree. Especially to the writing of native software for the mac OS.
Remember how Autocad was totally rewritten? more and more solutions like that will be written for Mac OS, and companies that do so will be able to survive the next 10 years.
One by one the deserters come straggling back, leaving a trail of crow feathers
The crow feathers are in their poop.
Maybe I’m tired, but you just made me laugh a French Fry onto the floor.
Don’t worry. The dog got it.
Oracle has been available in an OSX format since mid-2009. However, OSX is actually a full release of Unix BSD and as such can support a great many applications that are not “OSX” designated.
If I remember correctly, MySQL is already there in OSX. If not, it’s an easy install. I use Sequel Pro as a client.
http://www.comentum.com/mysql-administration.html
I use PostgreSQL and Java in my MacBook Pro / Lion laptop, for enterprise-class application development.
Works like a charm.
+1. Me too. Love pgsql.
It’s actually SQL lite.
I love Ballmer ……. Go MicroSuck ……
Finally! It is about time. Who cares which PC box company has the best seat on a sinking ship! They should have always looked at the OS market share. The PC boxes are interchangeable.
Does the tail wag the dog? Macs represent <5% of the world's PC market. If anything, Ballmer is killing the PC, not the Mac, with Byzantine levels of contortionist naming convention like Windows Home, Home Premium, Ultimate, Business, Business Light, and so on. It's self inflicted fragmentation ala the Android market that is leaving users confused and mad at MS.
And market share is the only metric that matters, right?
Things like profit are wasted things??? Lol
The third world will always buy mostly super cheap pc computers , with little profit.
Apple can triple in sales and still not reach a limit.
Just a thought.
Market share is competition gone nihilistically mad.
Ain’t that the truth. Kick out the marketing jackasses that cooked up that swill, hell while they’re at it disappear the rest of them plookers, get off the high horse, go whole hog on the candy ass Metro, is what I say. Face it Microsoft you are soft.
300,000 seems awfully low considering Apple sold 4.89 Million Macs in Q4 2011, or the 4.13 Million it sold in Q1 2011.
I’m thinking we should be looking at 5.5 Million when Apple announces there numbers next week.
My thoughts too…300,000 is this report from 2003?
The 300 K number is the difference (increase) against same quarter a year before.
This is pretty rich:
“PC buyers have been holding back on Microsoft-powered machines until Windows 8 rolls out later this year”
Who are they kidding????
That’s stupid. It’s not like people couldn’t just buy Windows 8 when it comes out in 2015 and in stall it on their PCs anyway.
Very few Windows users by the upgraded OS for installing. It is easier to just buy a new computer with the new OS installed.
Considering what a mess the old OS did to your old computer, that is a wise course of action.
Did I hear you way 2015. Guess I’ll stick with XP a while longer.
Part of a larger, emerging picture in which Intel, Dell and the other OEMs, the tech press and the rest of the crumbling, Soviet-style Wintel monopoly are on the defensive, in a reactive not proactive stance, flailing around embarassingly, stonewalling and shoving bumbling apparatchiks to the microphone and reviving doublespeak and, basically, lying like a rug.
Clearly it’s too soon to trot out the “beleaguered” label for Microsoft, but I can hardly wait.
+1
No, it’s not.
You almost feel sorry for the box assemblers, until you recall that it was they who commoditized the PC market and basically drove profit margins down so low that even they can’t make money without selling huge numbers of boxes.
Then you look at the utter lack of design and innovation they put into their boxes, and it’s no wonder people flock to Macs.
And when you add in the profit – wow! That cheap PC stuff that doesn’t work doesn’t make the profit that Mac does, as previous articles report. And really, how can MS charge so much for stuff that doesn’t work well?
Tablets won’t be considered “real computers” until Windows 8 is released – at least that’s what I’m guessing?
That’s right. When Microsoft has a dog in this hunt, tablets will become computers overnight.