Apple’s Mac sales have again shown year-over-year shipment growth in calendar Q1 2022 as global shipments of personal computers, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, declined 5.1% in the first quarter of 2022 (1Q22) but exceeded earlier forecasts, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.
The personal computer market is coming off two years of double-digit growth, so while the first quarter decline is a change in this momentum, it doesn’t mean the industry is in a downward spiral. Despite ongoing supply chain and logistical challenges, vendors still shipped 80.5 million PCs during the quarter. The 1Q22 volume marks the seventh consecutive quarter where global shipments surpassed 80 million, a feat not seen since 2012.
“The focus shouldn’t be on the year-over-year decline in PC volumes because that was to be expected. The focus should be on the PC industry managing to ship more than 80 million PCs at a time when logistics and supply chain are still a mess, accompanied by numerous geopolitical and pandemic-related challenges,” said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers, in a statement. “We have witnessed some slowdown in both the education and consumer markets, but all indicators show demand for commercial PCs remains very strong. We also believe that the consumer market will pick up again in the near future. The result of 1Q22 was PC shipment volumes that were near record levels for a first quarter.”
The rankings among the top vendors remained unchanged in 1Q22 compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. Lenovo remained the top company with 22.7% market share, followed by HP Inc., Dell Technologies, and Apple. ASUS and Acer tied* for the number 5 position in 1Q22. Dell, Apple, and ASUS were the only top-tier vendors that saw year-over-year shipment growth. Apple’s Mac sales grew 4.3% year-over-year. As a result of the on-going supply chain shortages and a challenging comparison to a strong 1Q21, notebook PCs saw a year-over-year decline while desktops grew slightly.
“Even as parts of the market slow due to demand saturation and rising costs, we still see some silver linings in a market that has reached an inflection point towards a slower pace of growth,” said Jay Chou, research manager for IDC’s Quarterly PC Monitor Tracker. “Aside from commercial spending on PCs, there are still emerging markets where demand had been neglected in the earlier periods of the pandemic, and higher end consumer demand also has held up.”
Q1 2022 Mac sales powered Apple to 8.9% market share of the worldwide personal computer market.
Top 5 Companies, Worldwide Traditional PC Shipments, Market Share, and Year-Over-Year Growth, Q1 2022
(Preliminary results, shipments are in thousands of units)
Source: IDC Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, April 11, 2022
*IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide Traditional PC market when there is a difference of one tenth of one percent (0.1%) or less in the shipment shares among two or more vendors.
Notes:
• Some IDC estimates prior to financial earnings reports. Data for all companies are reported for calendar periods.
• Shipments include shipments to distribution channels or end users. OEM sales are counted under the company/brand under which they are sold.
• Traditional PCs include Desktops, Notebooks, and Workstations and do not include Tablets or x86 Servers. Detachable Tablets and Slate Tablets are part of the Personal Computing Device Tracker but are not addressed in this press release.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s indomitable Mac shows continued strength. It’s amazing what can happen when Apple pays attention to the one that brung them.
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Just 9% market share.
So much headroom to grow into!
With Apple silicon in Macs, they can double that, and double it again.
Only if Apple is willing to lower prices will they increase the Mac market share. They should, but the leadership team has obviously chosen not to try.
That’s a shame, because market share could be a better investment than stock buybacks. Every Mac sale is followed by the end user coming back for software, services, and accessories. Attracting more Mac buyers through more aggressive pricing would have a cash flow multiplier effect that stock buybacks simply cannot offer.
Market share and buybacks are not related and have little to do with the long term perspective of a company. Apple has stated repeatedly, and through action, they want to be a revenue neutral company. This will include employee retention, robust reinvestment in R&D tech and new products, and returning monies to the owners. Fyi, the owners are probably half of the U.S. if you have any type of investment or retirement (buybacks and profit sharing are part of the return to ownership). This strategy has even included borrowing huge amounts of money (they have nearly 100Billion in bond issuing debt). Yet minus the debt, they still have about 100billion net cash reserves. For a company the size of Apple, for health reasons they need rainy day fund. As for the rest, they make about a 100billion per year in profit from an inarguably tried and true successful business model of making quality consumer electronic products for not ‘cheap’ prices (and that includes a 40 billion revenue generating Mac computer business), Apple would be insane to change this to thinner margins just to scratch away at Wintel computers that proliferate the computer market at mostly razor thin margins and long term shaky health. No, Apple does not need to change their model to lower margins, and return to owners, by offering cheaper products just to be “13% market share”. Market share is not important, profitability and long term business plan-company health health.
And just an Fyi, Apple offers an M1 Mac Mini starting at 650$ and MacBook Air at 999$. More than a few consider these two offerings among the best dollar for dollar values in the industry. There is currently no need for them to start pushing toward Walmart pricing.
Why sell one glass of lemonade for $1 with $0.20 profit when you can sell 10 glasses of lemonade for $0.10 each and make $0.01 profit per glass? Selling more is always better, right?
When the buyer comes back again and again for snacks to go with his glass of lemonade, YES, high volume is the way to go. Look what Apple has chosen to do with the iPhone.
Apple badly lost the PC battle because the vast majority of software developers chose the higher market share platform. Only increased market share will bring 3rd party software makers back.
Let’s pick another analogy. It does no good to the end user if your superior Sony Betamax technology doesn’t deliver the content that VHS did. VHS won the war by foregoing super high unit profits in the early stages of the competition. Apple should know this, but apparently its leadership doesn’t use Macs anymore.
I suspect Apple will slowly broaden their Mac offering, and introduce more econo-focused models. But they’ve learned buying market share, especially in PCs, is a race to the bottom. That’s not where Apple plays.
If you’re selling hardware to people who don’t see or understand the value, they’re not worth much to you. I suspect it will eventually look a lot like the smartphone market. Apple will take the top half of the market in volume and most of the profit, competitive brands will take the bottom half, and a few outliers will remain making extremely limited volume baubles at the fringes (ie: “gaming rig” PCs and folding Android phones).
“It’s amazing what can happen when Apple pays attention to the one that brung them”
MDN hits it out of the park with this statement. iPhones, iPads, Watches, Hearables, Services — over the last 5 years Apple has executed good plans for all these categories. Notice that Mac is not among that list. While the others each had an individual plan, they also were part of a greater single plan. Mac either was not part of the bigger plan or, and I suspect, Apple had just outright failed in execution on a individual Mac plan as well as making it part of the big single plan.
Obviously one of the glaring weaknesses of Mac versus the rest was Apple had to outfit the Macs with off the shelf CPUs. The company that builds products that differentiate from competition was using the same as the competition. Not good.
It would be interesting to know when the plan to get Macs onto Apple Silicon went full steam ahead. Whenever that was I bet it accelerated in around 2017 when intel fell down and delivered the mundane – overheating mundane at that. Not only was getting Macs onto Apple Silicon one of the greatest feats Apple has ever accomplished, it took the black sheep of the family and made it one of the family. Complete vertical integration control of the entire Apple offering. And what they’ve been able to do with what M series Macs can do, and even pricing while maintaining healthy margins, is quite a turnaround from the meandering Mac of just 3 years ago.