Lenovo topples Apple from PC summit by declining less slowly

In what could be seen by some as a slightly hollow victory, Lenovo knocked Apple off the top spot in the global PC race by declining more slowly than its rival. Canalys stats show the total market dropped 11.8 per cent year-on-year in Q2 to a little over 109m desktops, notebooks and tabs. For the record, this equates to 1.46m …

[Mage]

70% of Apple's PCs are Tabs

"Lenovo was down 5.6 per cent to 15.9m machines, giving it a market share of 14.6 per cent, just leapfrogging Apple, whose unit sales declined 11.1 per cent to 15.72m, giving it a 14.4 per cent share of the spoils.

Tim Coulling, senior analyst at Canalys, told us that 70 per cent of Apple’s PC shipments are tabs and tab sales made by the company dropped 17.7 per cent – though it remains the dominant force in that particular sector"

So does that mean "real" Apple PCs are not 15.7M but 4.71M, less than 4% of the market?

(About 5% were Macs before Vista, so even with only Win7 the bright spark of Desktop since XP, 14 years, Apple STILL hasn't made much progress even though MS are annoying everyone?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 70% of Apple's PCs are Tabs

"So does that mean "real" Apple PCs are not 15.7M but 4.71M, less than 4% of the market?"

Apple has a big share of the top of the range laptop market, which is part of why they are so profitable. If you're a developer on £50k plus then a Macbook is not a significant expense for you or your company every couple of years, and it has the advantage that it can dual boot Unix (OS X) and Windows officially, while your Windows/Linux job like this one I'm using is only half supported. (I am tight with money where IT kit is concerned.) Expensive Windows laptops seem to be more games orientated and so more power hungry and heavier.

The Apple equivalent of cheap is its tablets, and they are still not nearly as good as something with a proper keyboard. It looks to me like a dead end product differentiation.

So really a nice steady 4% of the market at the most profitable and hard to replace end isn't bad. It almost makes me wonder if Microsoft could paradoxically crush Apple by bringing out a really good Unix or Linux variant and bundle it with Windows 10 as a "Developer edition". I might buy it...But Microsoft don't want to crush Apple because they need them to prove they are not a monopoly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Microsoft don't want to crush Apple ...

"... because they need them to prove they are not a monopoly"

Both parts of this statement are no longer true

[Lee D]

Re: Microsoft don't want to crush Apple ...

I'd expect any developer worth their salt to understand virtualisation.

However, I think what drives MacBook sales to developers is more that you can ONLY compile Mac apps on a Mac if you want to put them on the app stores, etc. and the only legal way to run Mac OS X is with Mac hardware.

I can't imagine that accounts for even a fraction of one percent of the Mac part of the PC market, however. It's the same story - people buy Macbooks because they're Apple. That's it. There's nothing stopping a Windows developer having a VM (with Windows 8 Pro, Hyper-V is built-in, ffs!) with a Linux development environment.

And classing OS X as a UNIX is... well, stretching it somewhat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: classing OS X as a UNIX

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm

[Lee D]

Re: classing OS X as a UNIX

The commands are the same as UNIX (not hard, given their base).

The C Language is the same as UNIX (not hard, given that it's C!).

System Calls as the same as UNIX (again, not hard, but try using them to interact with anything past the base system).

That's except for the missing NFS, sockets, X-Windows, etc. certifications that they DON'T have.

This does not make it "Unix", except by a very broad definition. Technically, even Linux isn't certified on those lists! And they are literally a handful of "certified" UNIX on those lists at all - AIX, IRIX, Solaris, and that junk that "The SCO Group" put out.

Having a command-line, syscall compatible interface doesn't make it UNIX. Or else Cygwin would be UNIX too (I have no doubt Cygwin could be made UNIX-standard compatible, but it's probably very expensive to actually get it certified? Have at look at their fee schedule!).

[Eddy Ito]

Re: 70% of Apple's PCs are Tabs

Yes, 4.796M Macs actually according to their report (pdf). I get that folks don't know where to put tablets but it seems silly to lump iOS and Android in the PC category. Next they'll be putting anything in a tower case in with server category since the cpu comes in a box separate from the display and PC will mean tablets and laptops.

[John Bailey]

"So does that mean "real" Apple PCs are not 15.7M but 4.71M, less than 4% of the market?"

Looks like it. It does depend on the particular tRuth being recited though.

Definitions it seems, like goalposts in Pippinopolis, quite frequently movable.

[Randall Shimizu]

It's a bit of a misnomer to count tablets and PC's as the same market. It's clear that Apple is much stronger in the tablet market. Since Lenovo has concentrated on the Windows tablet market they do not have as much market share as could have.

[Eddy Ito]

It's true that Apple still rules the tablet roost but the latest numbers from IDC shows that while the two dominant players, Apple and Samsung, are showing decreased sales, the next three much smaller players, Lenovo, Huawei, and LG, actually posted gains.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I don't think tablets should be included, except maybe for Surface Pro like devices that are really full fledged laptops that are extra thin and light and feature extra shitty keyboards.

[RPF]

Declining LESS slowly? Problem with the title.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it should be 'declining fewer slowly'.

[David 138]

Lenovo wont last their stuff is too unreliable.

On the other hand i do think the Apple bubble is bursting.

[Unicornpiss]

What do you expect?

Except for maybe hard core gamers and the delusional rich, people just aren't buying a new PC every couple of years any more. And why would they? The market is glutted. Nearly everyone has at least a laptop, a tablet of some kind and a mobe. And the tablets and phones are approaching the capabilities of laptops, at least for what most people use a PC for, which is email, social media, casual web surfing, YouTube, and other entertainments, with light office work and bill paying thrown in. Even businesses are deploying less desktops and laptops for more tablets and other devices and keeping them in users' hands longer.

Maybe with Windows 10 we'll see a surge of touch screen devices that Win 8 didn't bring. And the refresh cycle may be shorter as tablets just don't last as long as more traditional devices and there is still some innovation there. But it may just make the situation worse as it's been confirmed that Win 10 seems to run faster on existing hardware. With "free" upgrades, why buy a new PC? And if Linux ever gets a bigger foothold, more of the same, as Linux effectively resurrects older PCs from the recycle bin. Either way, I can't think of anything that will bring the desktop back as the primary PC for most people.