Roger Fingas
Compounding problems stemming from soft iPhone sales, Apple may have seen Mac shipments decline in the December quarter, early research estimates indicated on Thursday.
Apple's unit shipments came in at 4.9 million, down from 5.1 million in the same quarter a year ago, according to Gartner data. That's a decline of 3.8 percent.
The company's share of the market rose marginally from 7.1 to 7.2 percent, a significant uptick given that the overall PC industry saw shipments fall from 71.7 million to 68.6 million units. Some of the toughest blows were suffered by Asus and Acer, which saw their shipments drop 10.7 percent and 18.3 percent, respectively.
Lenovo, however, saw shipments rise 5.9 percent to 16.6 million, making it the dominant computer vendor with a 24.2 percent marketshare. HP ranked second despite a 4.4 percent dip, while Dell rose 1.4 percent to 10.9 million, keeping it securely in third place. Apple claimed fourth.
Gartner reported that top rankings should remain the same for 2018 as a whole, with Lenovo at 58.5 million units, HP at 56.3 million, Dell at 41.9 million, and Apple at 18 million — Apple's numbers are estimated to be down 5 percent versus 2017.
Under pressure from phones and tablets, the PC industry has been in decline for seven years, and is forecast to see a 1.3 percent dip once 2018 data is finalized. Apple has yet to announce its official December-quarter financials.
On Jan. 2, though, it shocked the tech industry and investors by saying it was expecting $84 billion in revenue instead of a previously forecast $89 billion to $93 billion. CEO Tim Cook linked the issue mostly to poor Chinese iPhone sales, but also blamed "foreign exchange headwinds," fewer carrier subsidies, "economic weakness in some emerging markets," and its discounted iPhone battery replacement program.
Apple is allegedly cutting March-quarter iPhone production by 10 percent.
Gartner's PC data can sometimes be dramatically inaccurate. It initially estimated that Apple sold 4.9 million Macs in calendar Q3, when in reality it managed about 5.3 million.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
45 Comments
What! I thought there was all this pent up demand for a new MBA and mini! 200k less units! My cup runneth over!*
Does this mean people aren’t embracing a y series processor and a 300 nit screen at a higher price, while lower priced competitors have u series processors? Or exorbitant prices for extra storage or memory over base config?
What is the world coming to?* remembers its Gartner after all.
Wait that means Tim Cook lied on mad money this week when he told Cramer that Mac sales were up. Who to believe!!!
Until Apple's strategy doesn't change from just selling into high priced premium market to let's expand MAC ecosystem, MACs market share and overall sale will go no where. Some quarter bit higher, some lower. On an average, will be same level year over year. Some help can come from by making lower priced but higher margin MACS by using it's own higher performance(lower cost) CPU/GPU and other components that go into it's products. It is not people don't want to upgrade/buy new MAC Laptops but due to overall value it offers, make buyers staying with their current MAC computers bit longer. Same thing going on in Phone segment.
From Apple’s statement when it revised it’s numbers down:
“Also, as I mentioned earlier, revenue outside of our iPhone business grew by almost 19 percent year-over-year, including all-time record revenue from Services, Wearables and Mac”
While is doesn’t guarantee that sales didn’t decline marginally, and Apple just sold each computer at a high ASP; the picture of Apple not doing well that Gartner is trying to paint, doesn’t correspond with the reality.
More expensive when models are refreshed and many Macs sporting old internals at full pricing. Hardly a surprise that numbers are going down.
Such a shame though, it didn’t have to be this way. The neglect of the Mac platform as a whole is such a let down.