Apple's Share of U.S. PC Market Leaps to 12.9% in 3Q 2011
Apple's U.S. Market Share Trend: 1Q06-3Q11 (Gartner)
Research firm Gartner today released its preliminary personal computer shipment data for the third quarter of 2011, offering up a picture of market performance during the quarter. Riding the strength of the MacBook Air, Apple experienced aggressive 21.5% year-over-year growth to take third place in a U.S. market that grew by only 1.1% overall.
Gartner's early study shows that Apple experienced the strongest growth among the top five vendors in the U.S. PC market. Apple's PC shipments increased 21.5 percent in the third quarter of 2011. The robust growth of the MacBook Air continued to lead Apple's overall growth in the U.S. market.
With the boost, Apple's market share in the U.S. grew to 12.9% during the third quarter, up from 10.8% in the year-ago quarter and 10.7% last quarter.
Gartner's Preliminary U.S. PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q11 (Thousands of Units)
As usual, Gartner did not cover Apple's worldwide market share for the quarter, as the company does not rank among the top five vendors on a worldwide basis.
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Its a growing segment of a huge market.
And that is before we even consider the strategic value of the mac to Apple's business.
The real question is how much longer this market will really matter.
As long as Apple's market share, but more importantly (for Apple) Apple's sales numbers are growing. 43 percent in the US from last year. That _really_ matters.
If and when Apple hits 25% market share for the personal computer sector I wonder if we'll see a huge increase in malware and viruses on the Mac. That's my biggest concern about an ever increasing market share.
Apple is working on that on two levels: By making it harder to attack applications running on MacOS X, and through sandboxing which makes it harder to exploit successful attacks.
The real question is how much longer this market will really matter.
If one can make money at it, it matters.
I think the trend will continue, there's no other system that performs as seamlessly as the iMac and MBP.
If and when Apple hits 25% market share for the personal computer sector I wonder if we'll see a huge increase in malware and viruses on the Mac. That's my biggest concern about an ever increasing market share.
Apple keeps improving security despite the lack of current threats. Mac OS X can be incredibly secure, if developers are smart enough to take advantage of what it offers. For example, you can very easily code your program so it's in the safest operating mode possible, totally isolated from everything else, but at the same time giving specific threads within the application the ability to do what it needs to do, system-wide, whether that is reading files, writing files, or whatever, and only those things. Apple does it now with their own software, having secure, isolated processes doing the potentially dangerous stuff in things like Safari. You can use an exploit in the application, but it doesn't help you do anything dangerous.
The difference between Mac OS X and Windows (historically) is that Mac OS X was designed from the ground up to be a secure operating system. The design methodologies kept security at the top of the list, even in cases where people really weren't thinking yet about new kinds of attacks, but they wanted to preempt them.
Greater market share will certainly attract more attention from malware coders and hackers, but Mac OS X is starting from a higher level of safety.
Chrome has a pdf and flashsupport built-in so I dont think you should go around and call ppl novices.
Indeed.
(cue sad trombone)
I hear people all the time saying Macs have a 3% or 5% market share.
Outside the US.
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