RSSAnalysts: Dell reclaims market share, but HP is gaining faster
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 27, 2008, 6:18 PM
Somebody needed to tell the world's PC manufacturers there was a recession scheduled for the first quarter of 2008. Anyway, they didn't seem to pay much attention to those warnings, and iSuppli thinks the industry looks pretty healthy.
For the last two years, analysts both with iSuppli and other firms have said that a healthy worldwide PC market had to grow at an annual rate of 12%. Despite what's generally perceived as a global economic slowdown, the annual rate of PC shipments was 12.1% at the end of March, based on numbers released by iSuppli today.
All of the world's top five suppliers got good news from this report, and it may be Dell that needed it most. It gained half a point of market share in Q1 2008 over Q4 2007, and is now shipping 15.4% of the world's PCs -- just under 8.9 million units, 20% more than at this time last year, though Dell had a lot of ground to gain back.
Acer's brand consolidation strategy is paying off, at least in the numbers department. Its market share is now in the double-digits, shipping an estimated 6.1 million units, or 10.5% of the world's market share, now that Acer has thoroughly incorporated Packard Bell, Gateway, and eMachines brands. Believe it or not, that's not as fast a rate of growth of any of the other top five, but Acer certainly isn't slowing down.
Yet the runaway freight train continues to be Hewlett-Packard, whose general direction still defies gravity. HP shipped an astonishing 13.2 million units in the first quarter of the year, up 23.3% over Q1 2007. Estimates for the previous holiday quarter had HP shipments at nearly 15 million units, so only slipping that much into the seasonally slower first quarter is a clear sign of health and well-being.
Lenovo and Toshiba round out iSuppli's top five, with 6.9% and 4.4% market share, respectively.
One of the big advantages Dell has over HP is that the recovery disks come with the computer. They're a separate purchase with HP. All the HP systems I've purchased were either sold or given to friends and family members.
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|I don't see what the big deal is. HP lets you burn your own. DVD+/-Rs are cheap. I will take reliable hardware over no recovery disc any day.
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|If you are using recovery disks, I think that would be a software problem.
As for the hardware, Dell and HP are selling the same 'quality' merchandise.
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|Company I work for buys Dells desktops/servers almost exclusively and we've had very few problems that were not resolved in a day or so. Printers are all HP.
I'm amazed that HP is able to sell so much consumer level computers. I would never buy HP and recommend everyone to go with Dell.
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|That's brand loyalty at its best.
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|I think HP and Dell compare pretty well in desktops and laptops, but HP is far superior in Servers and Printers. I've had far more issues with Dell servers then I've ever had with HP Servers. And HP Printers always just seem to work flawlessly.
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|Apple needs to catch up.. I love the Microsoft world but Apple just has been easy to use and work on.
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|Apple probably could catch up if they didn't require proprietary hardware.
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|probably overnight.
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|They tried that before and it didn't help.
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|Apple needs to work on a few key points before they get a reasonable chunk of the market share:
-Stop selling their service packs. They're not fooling anybody with their new versions of OS X that have extremely minor changes.
-When a mac crashes, it crashes and burns man. The screen just goes to all kinds of crazy colors or it will give you some pointless message telling you to restart, either way it's horribly uninformative if you're one of the few mac users who is capable of troubleshooting an issue.
-The binary software packages are huge. They pack x86, x86_64, and PPC in a single package with all possible languages.
-Hotkeys. This is more of a power user thing but there are pretty much no hotkeys in OS X. This drives me insane when I use one.
-Get the arrogant and egotistical Steve Jobs out of there.
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|"Get the arrogant and egotistical Steve Jobs out of there. "
That is my one reason for despising Apple:arrogance. I recognize that they make a pretty good product, but I refuse to have that man and that company tell me so.
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|When did they try that?
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|*In my experience* HP puts out much better quality hardware than Dell. Although it looks like neither one of them will be getting my money for the laptop I am getting here pretty quick. Gateway is coming out with 2 new laptops pretty soon that the specs look awesome for the price to me. The specs I got were not "official" yet, but since they are planning on launching them as soon as the old models sell out(which they only have like 30 left of)they are launching. Therefore I am guessing it is not going to change in that short amount of time. It is also noteworthy that Gateway is the only laptop maker(that I could find) that has an 8800 GTS graphics card in a 17". HP has one in a 20.1", but that is just too big!
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|I was just curious if you have personal experience with the thousands of products these two companies put out each year, and if your judgment was based on a mean average, or other statistical method?
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|Lol not at all. This is just from experience with my personal computers and the computers of my friends.
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|The place that I work has a mix of HP and Dell pcs with about the same count of each. When the Dells break tsice as much then the HP's my questions about reliability are answered.
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