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Mac sales slowest in two years, say researchers, but still well ahead of the rest of the PC industry

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While research firms IDC and Gartner disagree on whether Mac sales are falling or rising, they do agree on two things: Q3 Mac sales were at their most sluggish for two years, but still well ahead of the rest of the PC industry.

Ahead of new retina 4K iMac and likley accessories launch next week, IDC estimated that Apple sold 5.3M Macs in Q3 2015, a year-on-year fall of 3.4%. Gartner instead estimated 5.6M sales, representing a 1.5% increase. Both firms did, however, agree on two pieces of good news for Apple … 
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Apple expands IBM partnership to distribute & support enterprise Macs for other companies

Apple CEO Tim Cook with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

Apple CEO Tim Cook with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty

Apple and IBM are continuing to develop their partnership first established just over a year ago as IBM announced today a new program to help large enterprises use Macs within their IT infrastructures. IBM’s MobileFirst Managed Mobility Services will allow its commercial clients to integrate Macs in their workplace with IBM supporting the deployment. Interestingly, IBM says it’s able to roll out the new program to commercial clients thanks to its own internal trial that we previously reported.
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Final IDC numbers for U.S. PC shipments confirm Mac hit highest ever market share

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IDC has finalized the preliminary PC shipment numbers released last month, confirming that the Mac hit its highest ever share of the U.S. market at 13%. Apple regained the place in lost to Lenovo back in April, moving back into third place behind HP at 28% and Dell with 24%.

Apple reported year-on-year growth of more than 20% in its Q4 earnings report, with Mac sales of 5.52M. In a subsequent interview with the WSJ, Tim Cook asked:

Would you rather own the Mac business or any of the Windows OEMs?

We learned recently that Apple’s share of the worldwide tablet market fell markedly from 29.2% last year to 22.8% this year, thanks to both falling sales and an increase in the number of competitor tablets, especially at the low end. The news was not all bad, however, with U.S. data showing that the iPad continues to dominate web usage, accounting for almost 80% of North American tablet traffic on the web, leaving its three largest competitors all down in single digits.

AAPL will announce record quarter, predict analysts, with earnings up 11.9%

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Analysts are predicting that Apple (AAPL) will announce record sales and earnings in today’s fiscal Q4 (calendar Q3) earnings call, reports Fortune.

I’ve got the collected fiscal Q4 estimates of 33 Apple analysts — 21 professionals and 12 amateurs. They are all to a man (and one woman) predicting record Q4 sales and earnings (up 7.1% and 11.9%, respectively).

The analysts also expect earnings per share to be up 12% year-on-year, to $1.32 … 
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NPD data: Back-to-school Mac sales up 16 percent, year-on-year

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Data from the NPD group indicates that MacBook sales grew 16 percent year-on-year during the 10-week back-to-school period, measured from 4th July to Labor Day week. The most significant sales were seen during the last three weeks of the period, where sales were up 27 percent.

Overall Mac back-to-school market share climbed from 24.2% last year to 26.8% this year, while Windows fell from 72.3% to 64.8%. The most dramatic growth, though, was seen in low-cost Chrome OS devices, up from 0.2% in 2012 to 3.3% last year and 4.5% now.

It’s interesting to see Mac sales continue to climb despite competition from low-cost notebooks. IDC data last month showed that iOS market share declined slightly due to competition from low-cost Android devices.

While everyone is looking back, the analysts look forward to Monday’s Mac numbers

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While there’s plenty of looking back going on todayFortune has gathered together analyst forecasts of the Mac numbers we can expect Apple to reveal at its earnings call on Monday. This follows earlier forecasts for iPhone and iPad.

The average prediction is for 13 percent year-on-year growth, predicting that Apple sold 4.6 million Macs in the final quarter of 2013 (Apple’s fiscal Q1). This is slap bang in the middle of the growth predictions for iPads (10 percent) and iPhones (16 percent) … 
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Total Apple device sales will equal Windows PCs this year, predicts analyst

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The total number of Apple devices sold will equal the number of Windows PCs by some point this year, predicts Asymco’s Horace Dediu in an interesting piece of analysis.

The dark shaded area compares all Apple hardware – Mac plus iPad plus iPhone – with Windows PCs, and shows that by last year there were only 1.18 more Windows PCs than Apple devices. It’s of course a somewhat artificial comparison, as Dediu is including iPhones while excluding Windows Phones and tablets, but given the very limited success of Windows mobile devices to date, correcting that wouldn’t change the patterns too much.

What’s particularly interesting here, as John Gruber notes, is that the dramatic reversal kicked in well before the launch of the iPhone. Dediu and Gruber between them put forward a number of theories for this, and of these I think three are likely key …


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US Mac sales down as PC decline stablizes, but wildly-differing estimates by Gartner and IDC

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US Mac sales fell year-on-year as part of the global decline in the PC market as consumers switch to tablets, phablets and smartphones – but the two major market analysts produced wildly differing estimates of the size of that fall.

IDC has a dramatic drop of 11.2 percent, from 2.14M in the third quarter of 2012 to 1.9M in the same quarter this year, while Gartner shows a much more modest decline of 2.3 percent from 2.2M (close to IDC’s number) to 2.1M. The only point on which both agree is this is the first Q3 decline in Mac sales since 2002, a quarter usually assisted by the back-to-school market …


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