“According to IDC, Apple sold fewer Macs in the U.S. during the second quarter than it did in the same period a year earlier. If the research firm’s forecast is accurate, the decline would be Apple’s first in three years,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld. “IDC estimated that Apple sold 1.81 million Macs in the U.S. during the quarter that ended June 30, down 1.1% from the 1.83 million machines sold in the same quarter of 2011.”
“Of course, there’s no guarantee that IDC’s estimate is on target. Ballparking Apple’s U.S. sales, said IDC analyst David Daoud, is a ‘very difficult exercise,'” Keizer reports. “Case in point: Gartner has a different take on Apple’s U.S. Mac sales. While it also put the Cupertino, Calif., company in the No. 3 slot on Thursday, behind both Hewlett-Packard and Dell, it set domestic sales at 1.91 million Macs for a 4.3% increase over the 1.83 million sold the year before.”
Keizer reports, “IDC said that HP’s sales were off 12% and Dell’s 9.2% for the quarter, while the overall U.S. PC business contracted by 10.6%. Gartner estimated HP and Dell were down — 12.7% and 9.5% — respectively, and that U.S. PC sales fell 5.5%. So even if IDC’s more pessimistic prognostication proves correct, Apple will be able to boast that it beat the PC average for another quarter. Another positive in both IDC’s and Gartner’s forecasts of Thursday: Because of the large sales decline overall, Apple gained ground in U.S. market share. IDC said Apple’s share of U.S. sales for the quarter climbed to 11.4%, up over a percentage point, while Gartner had Apple accounting for 12% of all personal computer sales during the period.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple does not report U.S. Mac unit sales, just total worldwide Mac unit sales each quarter. Unless an Apple executive specifically states U.S. Mac unit sales in a conference call or elsewhere, there is simply no way to tell if Gartner or IDC are ever correct with their estimates, but their estimates do differ from each other, sometimes rather widely:
Here’s the same data with Apple’s actual worldwide Mac unit sales alongside:
One thing is four certain. The computers Apple sold this quarter are not the same ones that it sold last year. That is of course, unless they snuck into people’s homes and stole them in the middle of the night.
I did my part… bought a 2012 11′ MacBook Air. Awesome! Bring on Mountain Lion!
11 foot Macbook Air?!? Oh, that must be the one with the optional hot air balloon.
Nope, it’s the one with it’s own solar farm!
Why do Gartner and IDC even bother?
Both IDC and Gartner have Apple’s worldwide sales estimation — since globally Apple is not in the top five, the figures do not get into press-releases. How much IDC and Gartner are accurate or not could be only measured by comparing those worldwide estimations with Apple’s official result.
So we need somehow who has access to full IDC and Gartner reports before we could see which of the two firms is more accurate now.
Apparently, from looking at MDN’s 2nd chart:
Gartner estimates + IDC estimates = Actual Sales
All of these estimates seem to be as accurate as political polls these days.
I think it’d be funny if Oppenheimer dropped a number for the U.S. sales at the conference call, just to highlight how fictitious the numbers generated by analysts are.
Wait. IDC and Gartner keep releasing estimates for US sales only when the only real numbers are Apple’s numbers for worldwide sales?
Who *gives* a shit what the US sales are?
Apple does not report U.S. Mac unit sales
Well… That’s one way to never be wrong.
Well that’s one way to never be wrong.
Who *gives* a shit what the US sales are?
Apple does, tard.
Probably not to be honest. US Domestic is just one of many markets for Apple these days, just as the Mac is just one of many products.
Apple cares about every dollar it makes, period.
IDC and Gartner are full of crap.
Say what you want about any of the IT research firms such as IDC and Gartner but they are not stupid. They have all sorts of ways to make their estimates (by monitoring channel sales, for one example).