Gartner has released a report today that contradicts a previous report from rival IDC, saying domestic Mac shipments for the holiday quarter actually grew 5% year-over-year!
Apple’s U.S.-based shipments were up 5.4 percent while the overall PC market slid 2.1 percent, according to Gartner’s preliminary data for the fourth quarter of 2012. Apple is believed to have shipped more than 2.1 million Macs in the quarter, up from 2 million in the same period in 2011.
The report also says that Apple’s share of U.S. PC shipments grew from 11.4% during the 2011 holiday shopping period t0 12.3% during the same season in 2012.
These numbers contradict a report last week from IDC which said Mac shipments were DOWN by 0.2% year-over-year. IDC claimed Apple sold around 2 million Macs, to grab 11.4% of the market.
The actual Mac sales numbers for the quarter will be released next week when it reports its earnings for the first quarter of the 2013 fiscal year, which ended in January. A big quarter for the Mac is not anticipated by analysts, as the company’s new iMac launched late in the quarter, and still remains in scarce supply.
Gartner and IDC do agree on one thing, the PC market overall is doing worse than Apple. IDC reported PC shipments were off 4.5% while Gartner reports the numbers of PCs ship during the same period slipped 2.1% for the same period in 2011.
“Tablets have dramatically changed the device landscape for PCs, not so much by ‘cannibalizing’ PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC.”
