With more than 20 million combined Mac and iPad shipments, Apple handily retained its title as the world's largest PC vendor in the first quarter of 2014, the latest data from Canalys shows.
Apple's share of the U.S. computer hardware market slipped during the first quarter of 2014, with both IDC and Gartner seeing a year-over-year decline in worldwide PC shipments as consumers trend toward mobile.
Mac sales have continued to grow in the face of a recession and declining overall PC market, but Apple's iPhone could not escape shifting trends in the smartphone space, analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham said on Tuesday.
A new survey of IT decision makers in the enterprise found that almost half of businesses now offer their workers Macs, while the vast majority feel Apple's Mac platform is more reliable than PCs running Microsoft's Windows.
The Mac's long history of success in the education market hasn't been slowed by the introduction of Apple's more affordable iPad, as Mac sales to schools and students have instead grown since the iPad first launched in 2010.
While some pundits speculate that Mac lineup could be on the way out in favor of the iPad, Apple's traditional notebooks and desktops outpaced the overall PC market by nearly 25 percent last quarter, representing the largest margin separating the two in five years.
As PC sales continue to decline at the hands of tablets like Apple's iPad, the Mac platform is quietly growing its install base while maintaining an average selling price well above the rest of the market.
While research firms Gartner and IDC have very different projections on how Apple's Mac lineup performed in the holiday quarter, both sides can agree on one thing: PC shipments continued to shrink over the holidays, as consumers once again opted for tablets over traditional computers.
U.S. Mac sales spiked 28.5 percent year over year in the just-concluded fourth quarter of calendar 2013, according to the latest figures from Gartner, giving Apple a 13.7 percent share of its home market while the rest of the industry continues to struggle.
Domestic Mac sales were up 29 percent in the first two months of the current holiday quarter, benefitting from an iMac shortfall that plagued Apple during the same quarter a year ago.
The latest quarterly PC market tracking data from both Gartner and IDC shows that Apple's U.S. Mac shipments shrunk in the third quarter of calendar 2013, as the overall PC market outpaced Mac hardware.
As the larger PC market continues to struggle, Apple, too, has seen its Mac sales decline year over year — a trend that is on pace to continue in the current September quarter.
The PC market will continue its downward spiral in spite of the debuts of Microsoft's Windows 8.1 update and Intel's latest-generation Haswell processors, a new analysis contends.
The latest data from the NPD Group shows that domestic sales of Mac computers were about even year over year in the month of April, which one analyst interprets as potentially a positive sign for Apple.
The struggling PC market is forecast to go from bad to worse, as one analyst believes a number of market factors will push gross margins even lower in the already-cutthroat business.
As the PC market continues to shrink even after the heavily hyped launch of Microsoft's Windows 8, consolidation among hardware makers and an industry-wide shakeup is likely "inevitable" in the coming years, according to a new analysis.
After a disappointing holiday quarter, signs continue to show that Mac sales are on the rebound, with the latest data from the NPD Group revealing a 14% year over year increase in January and February.
Mac sales outgrew the overall PC market for 26 consecutive quarters until December, but Apple is expected to see sales improve in the current quarter.
Gartner on Monday contradicted its rival IDC and claimed that domestic Mac shipments actually grew for Apple by 5 percent year over year in the holiday quarter.
Estimated Mac shipments for Apple declined 0.2 percent year over year in the U.S., according to IDC. But those figures don't account for international shipments, where Apple is expected to see more growth.
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Neil Hughes
AppleInsider Staff
