“Mac shipments in the U.S. during the third quarter fell at a dramatically steeper rate than that of sales of other PCs, including those powered by Microsoft’s Windows, IDC said Wednesday,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld.
“According to the research firm, Apple’s personal computer shipments in the United States slumped 11.2% year-over-year to 1.9 million machines. The PC business as a whole contracted just 0.2% as sales picked up more momentum than had been expected, with all four of the remaining top 5 — HP, Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba — posting positive growth numbers for the quarter,” Keizer reports. “Apple’s decline was 56 times that of the industry average.”
“Why the plummet in growth? ‘Mac unit sales are correlated to product launches, so when Apple ships a new [Mac], sales zoom up,’ said Rajani Singh, an IDC analyst, in an interview Thursday,” Keizer reports. “And when Apple doesn’t, sales take a dive.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re all waiting for the elusive MacBook Air with Retina display, that’s why (and, some of us, for the Mac Pro). Also, this is the time of the year when we know we’ll be wanting to buy new iPhones and iPads, too.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “theloniousMac” for the heads up.]
I think the dysfunctional design of the new iMac is responsible for slumping sales, which will continue to slump. With no optical drive, and not one SD card slot or USB port in a convenient location, the new iMacs are user hostile!. All ports and slots are on the back. That’s very convenient!
The new iMacs should prove to be unpopular for corporate use as well. Think about it — You get a new iMac on your desk at work and somebody from another department hands you a DVD to read. Oh, that’s right, you have to run out and by an external drive and hang it off the back. Then someone else hands you a USB drive with data — You have to get behind your Mac just to plug it in, or hang extension cables off of it. The same is true of an SD card.
No other all in one on the market today has these deficiencies. Apple should go back to a 1″ thick design, with ports and slots in a convenient location.
Just another slime-bag pundit, dribbling all over the carpet with NO clue WHAT You’re talking about. You people are just lunatics…
I’m waiting for the portable FusionDrive. Or a steep drop in SSD prices.