Apple MacBook sales continue to grow, PC sales down

New research claims that global PC shipments were down 4.3% in Q1 2022, compared to the same period in 2021, but MacBook sales were up by 8%.

This latest finding from Counterpoint Research does not break out any difference between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Similar previous reports about Apple sales being up, however, only covered the Mac.

"[However,] Apple continued its success with the M1 MacBook series to see 8% YoY shipment growth in Q1 2022," says Counterpoint Research in a press release, "which boosted its market share by 100 bps [Basis Points] YoY."

In total, global shipments of all PCs, including Macs, were down 4.3% YoY in Q1 2022, meaning 78.7 million units were shipped. Lenovo remained the top seller with a 23.1% share, selling 18.2 million PCs, down 9.5% YoY.

HP saw a 16% YoY decline to a 20.2% share, or 15.9 million PCs sold. Dell saw a small increase in its sales to 13.8 million devices, compared to 13.6 in Q1 2021.

Counterpoint Research says that HP was hit by a weakening demand for Chromebooks, which also saw Acer's shipments decline by 1%.

However, the research firm also attributes to overall drop in sales to component shortages and demand uncertainties caused by the coronavirus. And it says that its research is showing that the gap between demand and supply is narrowing, "signalling an approaching end to supply tightness."

12 Comments

ravnorodom 720 comments · 8 Years

About 2 years ago

PC sucks. I bought my son Dell game laptop for his engineering major in his college. Wifi and bluetooth went busted after 1.5 years. I had to work around it with wifi/bluetooth USB dongles which took up half of USB ports. This is his second Dell and first one had the same issue. My MacBook Pro lasts forever. Never had any issue like this craps.

Japhey 1772 comments · 6 Years

ravnorodom said:

PC sucks. I bought my son Dell game laptop for his engineering major in his college. Wifi and bluetooth went busted after 1.5 years. I had to work around it with wifi/bluetooth USB dongles which took up half of USB ports. This is his second Dell and first one had the same issue. My MacBook Pro lasts forever. Never had any issue like this craps.

Yeah, 1.5 years sounds about right. I have family members that have to replace their pc’s at least every other year. Some more often than that. Meanwhile, my last MacBook still ran like a champ after 8 years before being retired for an M1 model.

muthuk_vanalingam 1367 comments · 8 Years

Japhey said:

ravnorodom said:

PC sucks. I bought my son Dell game laptop for his engineering major in his college. Wifi and bluetooth went busted after 1.5 years. I had to work around it with wifi/bluetooth USB dongles which took up half of USB ports. This is his second Dell and first one had the same issue. My MacBook Pro lasts forever. Never had any issue like this craps.

Yeah, 1.5 years sounds about right. I have family members that have to replace their pc’s at least every other year. Some more often than that. Meanwhile, my last MacBook still ran like a champ after 8 years before being retired for an M1 model.

Wow, replacing PCs/Laptops just after 1.5 years. Unbelievable!!!

A windows PC that I assembled about 15 years ago (Intel Core2Duo CPU, 2GB RAM, 1TB hard disk) was retired about 6 years ago because it became too slow to run windows 7. We packed it and kept it in a box in a corner of the house (did not throw it away luckily). And we needed an additional PC for my son to attend online classes due to COVID lockdowns. We did not want to spend too much money buying a new PC/laptop/tablet, so we decided to bring the old PC back to life and replaced the hard disk with SATA SSD (not the faster M.2 one because the old motherboard does not support it). And guess what? It is able to run windows 7 absolutely fine without any issues. And it was used for 1 year until the school reopened and classes were conducted in offline mode. And my 6 year old windows PC (i3 4th generation, 4GB RAM, 512GB SSD) is also working without any issues, running windows 10. My experience is at the extreme end of other side, when compared to you guys. I must be doing something wrong, to be able to use a 15 year old PC while you guys needed to replace the PCs within 1.5 years.

danvm 1475 comments · 9 Years

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Japhey said:

ravnorodom said:

PC sucks. I bought my son Dell game laptop for his engineering major in his college. Wifi and bluetooth went busted after 1.5 years. I had to work around it with wifi/bluetooth USB dongles which took up half of USB ports. This is his second Dell and first one had the same issue. My MacBook Pro lasts forever. Never had any issue like this craps.

Yeah, 1.5 years sounds about right. I have family members that have to replace their pc’s at least every other year. Some more often than that. Meanwhile, my last MacBook still ran like a champ after 8 years before being retired for an M1 model.

Wow, replacing PCs/Laptops just after 1.5 years. Unbelievable!!!

A windows PC that I assembled about 15 years ago (Intel Core2Duo CPU, 2GB RAM, 1TB hard disk) was retired about 6 years ago because it became too slow to run windows 7. We packed it and kept it in a box in a corner of the house (did not throw it away luckily). And we needed an additional PC for my son to attend online classes due to COVID lockdowns. We did not want to spend too much money buying a new PC/laptop/tablet, so we decided to bring the old PC back to life and replaced the hard disk with SATA SSD (not the faster M.2 one because the old motherboard does not support it). And guess what? It is able to run windows 7 absolutely fine without any issues. And it was used for 1 year until the school reopened and classes were conducted in offline mode. And my 6 year old windows PC (i3 4th generation, 4GB RAM, 512GB SSD) is also working without any issues, running windows 10. My experience is at the extreme end of other side, when compared to you guys. I must be doing something wrong, to be able to use a 15 year old PC while you guys needed to replace the PCs within 1.5 years.

My customers have the same experience with PC's. Some of their devices have 6-8 years, and they are working without issues. Some of them became slow, but the issue was fixed with a SSD upgrade.