Apple loses U.S. market share
There are severe rumblings on the Steve Jobs front, and other Apple financial news is not very promising, but at least is still mixed. Apple’s share of the U.S. computer market fell by 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.
The Gartner group released their preliminary estimates for 2008 this week. They show that Apple sold 8% more computers in the fourth quarter this year than last year, which is good news. That number represents a million and a quarter computers. Yet, Apples performance fell 23 percent from the third quarter of 2008, a huge drop no matter how you look at it.
The bad fourth quarter dropped Apple back one spot in the leading sellers list for the year, which now reads Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Apple. Historically, the fourth quarter is not a good one for Apple. It always comes off a high volume third quarter which is driven by back-to-school sales, and therefore generally looks bad by comparison the following quarter. This year, Apple was joined in that fourth-quarter downturn by Dell and Hewlett-Packard, down 16.4 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively, according to figures published by Computerworld. That is thought to be mainly the result of the economy.
The news is not all bad. Apple outperformed the U.S. economy as a whole, though that was not a difficult task in the fourth quarter of 2008. Acer, however, soundly trounced Apples numbers. In fact, their fourth-quarter numbers doubled those of Apple, and Acer ended the year with a 55 percent gain from from 2007 to 2008. Those are very impressive statistics. Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa says that Acer’s success came with increased sales of inexpensive mini-notebooks. Those smaller, lower-power laptops, usually called “netbooks,” sold very well during the world economic down.
There is some chance that part of Apple’s downturn in the fourth quarter was the lack of an inexpensive laptop. Not only did Acer overtake Apple mainly on the strength of thrifty netbooks, but the notebook as a class overtook the desktop as the machine of choice for the first time in 2008. The lack of a notebook less expensive that the base $999 plastic MacBook could continue to be a problem for Apple in 2009, a year which is expected to be sluggish economically. Product line gaps such as that could prove to be much more costly to Apple than the loss of Steve Jobs.
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January 17th, 2009
Apple has released some great products in recent years, but it’s unrealistic to expect that the company can keep it up year after year after year. One day, all lucky streaks come to an end. Look Microsoft, they got lucky (and yes it was luck) when they begrudgingly got the opportunity to develop DOS. And then it’s been downhill ever since.
March 18th, 2009
Yeah Brian just like Jobs got lucky(and yes it was luck) with his technological thievery and at least M$ had a HUGE hill to come down something that Apple Macs will never HAVE and will always been seen an inferior choice to WIN BY FAR THE MAJORITY when its comes to the whole word market share – in the UK Macs are regarded as a complete JOKE (for the minority that even know they exist) – the ideal computer for people who can’t use a computer
October 9th, 2009
MS have been stealing Mac technology since Windows 2 in 1994. GUI was Mac, USB was Mac etc etc. The latest theft is the row of icons that Mac calls the Dock. That is coming out in Windows 7.