How’s Apple doing in PCs? Depends on who you listen to
Official research company opinions differ on how well or how poorly Apple is doing in the PC marketplace. Gartner says they are going great guns while IDC says they are going in the tank.
Benjamin Disraeli said, “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” many years ago and it would seem that it is still true today. Take the question, “How is Apple doing in the personal computer marketplace lately?†That should be a no-brainer. Research the numbers and give an answer. However, when you get into statistics, it all depends on who you ask. Two respected research organization, The Gartner Group and IDC, have just answered that question in very different ways, according to an AppleInsider story.
Were you to ask Gartner about Apple’s latest numbers, they would say that the Cupertino electronics giant’s share of the U.S. computer market grew by 2.5 percent in the second quarter while the PC industry as a whole saw shipments slide 1.2 percent. No matter how you look at it, those are pretty good numbers. Or are they?
Because if you were to ask IDC, another highly respected research specialist group, their answer would be that Apple had an estimated year-over-year decline of 12.4 percent in shipments. So, what happened to all that marketing and revenue joy? It really does depend on how you ask the question, and on who’s basic numbers you decide to depend on.
When Gartner looks at their numbers, they see that Apple sold 8.7 percent of the PCs during that quarter, coming in behind Dell, HP, and (surprise!) Acer. Their numbers also support a growth rate of 2.8 percent, compared to that quarter in the previous year. And when compared to an overall 1.2 decline in PC sales from 2008 to 2009, Apple and Acer are doing very well indeed.
IDC’s numbers tell a very different story. According to them, Apple is one position lower in the sales charts, with the addional company ahead of Apple being Toshiba. IDC says that Apple sales were down, not up, and that the PC industry, overall, lost more than twice what Garter has published for over the same period.
If we were to guess, which is obviously what Gartner, IDC, or both are doing, we would say we didn’t know. It is apparent that at least one of the two most respected watchers of the industry doesn’t know, either. In truth, it is likely that neither one of them have it right. Statistics, lies, and damned lies indeed. Both these companies will get it sorted out eventually. They always do. But right now, no one has the answers but the manufacturers themselves, and each of them only has part of it.
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July 16th, 2009
Well, are they measuring units shipped, gross revenue, net profit, or something else? Depending on what you measure, a company’s fortunes could be rising or falling even with the same base data.
BTW, Acer has been a top manufacturer for years. They aren’t big in the US but on a global scale they’re huge.