Jul 17

Apple Computer Market Share

Last time when we talked about Apple's share on the US computer market they were just climbing above Toshiba, grabbing the fourth place, if I recall it well. Anyway, it's not Toshiba the one to be concerned, because now they have the third position in the US, and beating Acer wasn't that hard. As you can see below, the difference between Apple and Acer is very small, less than 5 percent, and this happens as the Cupertino-based company finished a quarter with a very healthy growth, and Acer went down almost 21 percent. Next target, HP, won't be that easy, you can bet on that!

According to preliminary Q2 2008 data from Gartner, Mac's sales have risen more than 38 percent in the US, reaching 1.4 million units, while Dell and HP, the ones dominating the market, sold 5.25 million and 4.167 million units, but only saw sales rise 11.9 percent, respectively 5.6 percent. Comparing Apple's sales for this year's second quarter to the same period of 2007, they managed to have more than 2 percent of the market, reaching 8.5 percent, compared to 6.4, last year.

Regarding Apple's strongest competitor, Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst for Gartner's Client Computing Markets group, said "Dell continued to be the market leader with PC shipments accounting for 31.9 percent of the U.S. market in the second quarter of 2008," but also noted that "The home PC segment continued to be the strongest driver for Apple, as well as sales into the education segment," when talking about the Mac, iPod and iPhone maker.

On the other hand, IDC placed Apple on the fourth place, basically having the same market share as Acer, 7.8 percent, and only 1,329,000 computer sold vs 1,331,000 estimated to have been sold by Acer.

If you were curious about how well Apple Computer market share looks, I hope you got an idea. Considering the "iPhone 3G madness" and the overall tendency for Apple to go higher, I think third place will be secured and enforced by the end of this year, but getting higher, that would be one of the toughest challenges Apple faced so far. All I can do is bid them "good luck," and hope for the best user experience possible for every user of Apple products out there!