RSSIDC: Apple drops behind Toshiba in PC market share
By Tim Conneally | Published July 16, 2009, 11:44 AM
Apple has dropped to fifth place in the US market according to preliminary second quarter estimates from market analysis firm IDC. The manufacturer had reached the fourth place position in 2008, but has failed to keep up that momentum in 2009, retaining a steady market share while its two nearest competitors, Acer and Toshiba, race ahead.
In the first quarter, for example, the company's shipments shrank by 1.2% year over year; and in the second quarter, shipments were down by 12.4%, according to IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker report. This negative growth would not have affected Apple all that much, as it has retained a steady 7.6% market share throughout the year, but Acer jumped up 2.1% in market share during the quarter, and Toshiba went up by 1.1%.
Annual growth for those companies is the astounding figure. Acer shipped 51% more computers in the second quarter of 2009 than it did in the same quarter of 2008 (2 million versus 1.3 million). Similarly, Toshiba shipped 33.9% more computers than it did last year (1.2 million versus 915 thousand).
The US market shrank by 3% overall, but still managed to do better than analysts had expected, and would not have shrunk by any appreciable degree had it not been for Dell's singular woes.
Bob O'Donnell, IDC's Vice President of Clients and Displays said, "Despite continued contraction from a year ago, the U.S. market managed a better-than-average sequential performance -- an indication of a stabilizing or improving market. While the sequential growth may be a hint of recovery, the market's focus on lower-price PCs and Mini Notebooks is likely to drag the value of the market to lower levels. The market continues to rely on consumer purchases, with a substantial weakness in the commercial space. We expect to see more of the same as we enter the busy shopping season of the second half of the year. In the longer term, an expected recovery in the commercial segment should boost growth in 2011."
What O'Donnell is saying here is that consumers are keeping the PC industry alive with their purchases of netbooks while the business sector stagnates, but that is no way to grow the industry.
Either way, Apple is still in the top five PC makers in the US. Not bad for a company that only a few short years ago was much further behind its rivals...
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|Yet Gartner says pretty much the opposite: http://arstechnica.com/a...ding-on-who-you-ask.ars
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|honestly, I don't know how much money apple actually makes every year on PC sales. Their game is the gadget and this seems to fund OS/PC development. OSX would see much greater acceptance as an open source product. Then again, I doubt Stevie wants to lift the OSX skirt.
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|The skirt was lifted and Darwin is (and has been) an open source operating system base. Anyone can put any GUI on it that they want.
It wouldn't be wise for Apple, a hardware maker, to give away the other parts of Mac OS X (not OSX) as it drives hardware sales.
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|I think he was implying Apple selling Mac OS X to the masses, usable on systems without the TPM.
That said, your reasoning behind why that won't happen is still quite valid. Mac OS X drives Apple PC sales. Without that, no-one would by the hardware from Apple (as seen during the short period they allowed it and were undercut by every beige-box manufacturer on the planet...almost losing the game completely).
There's scuttlebutt that the whole iPod/iPhone bit is to hedge their bets when they try it again, but that's pretty wild speculation, IMO. Of course, so was the whole PPC to Intel bit, so...
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|makes sense.. apple has not come out with a new OS that forces everyone to re-buy the hardware to stay in the club..
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|Except you would be wrong, just because you can run something on a 867 MHz processor doesn't mean its going to be up to the task for everything.
Vista will run on older hardware but to get optimal performance you would need to upgrade.
And I might be wrong but isn't snow leopard dropping support for the ppc? only intel processors?
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|There is no support for PowerPC processors in Snow Leopard, even IBM's so-called 64-bit processors labeled G5 by Apple, since they only allow a 42-bit address space. Besides, Intel changes the details enough that it's handful to keep up with their processor lines, let alone a whole different ISA.
I'm still using my PowerBook from 2005, but I know that its usefulness will be limited once Mozilla and Apple stop providing security patches.
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|I think you have head your head under a rock. Windows is far better when it comes to supporting the most hardware.
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