All I know is Apple’s market share is up
Macs continue to gain ground in U.S. market share, but how much exactly?
Research companies IDC and Gartner both have released their third quarter reports on PC market share. They agree the Mac has picked up U.S. market share from Windows-based PCs, but disagree on how much.
Gartner reports a 37.2 percent increase year-over-year in total Mac units sold (including notebooks and desktops) in the U.S., from 975,000 in 2006 to 1,338,000 in 2007. The increase raises the Mac’s market share from 6.2 percent to 8.1 percent, the largest overall U.S. market share number I’ve seen for the Mac in a very long time. It puts Apple in third place behind Dell with 29.1 percent and Hewlett-Packard at 25.7 percent. Trailing Apple are Toshiba (5.7 percent ) and Gateway (5.2 percent).
IDC puts Apple’s U.S. sales at 1,127,000 Macs in the third quarter of 2007 compared to 973,000 in 2006. That makes Apple’s market share 6.3 percent -- an improvement over the 5.7 percent it had in the third quarter of 2007 but significantly lower than Gartner’s number.
Why is Gartner’s Mac market share so much higher? And who’s right?
Somehow IDC arrived at lower sales for Apple than Gartner did while figuring higher sales for both Dell (5,010,000 units versus 4,833,000) and H-P (4,346,000 versus 4,260,000). Apparently the methodologies IDC and Gartner use differ significantly, though the companies’ press releases contained no clues as to how they calculated their numbers. And both companies advise that these figures are preliminary estimates that precede the actual data the PC companies will release in their earnings reports over the next few weeks.
The real data from the PC companies will give us a more accurate picture of what’s going on, but we never seem to get definitive agreement from the research companies and survey organizations.
Discrepancies aside, one trend appears indisputable: the Mac’s market share has been rising for the past two years. If Apple can keep the momentum going it could crack double digits in U.S. market share for the first time since the early 1990s.
