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.
Friday November 6, 2026 3:27 pm PST by Juli Clover
When the iPhone Duo launched, we shared a list of some of the fun apps developers created for the new form factor. Two weeks out, developers are continuing to come up with fresh ideas, so we thought we'd share some of our favorites.
Games
Marbles Unhinged ($2.99) - Marbles Unhinged is a marble maze designed for the Duo. When you fold it, the floor turns into a ramp. If you stand the top...
Thursday November 5, 2026 12:59 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Apple is launching five new products on Friday, November 6, following pre-orders that opened last week, including its first touchscreen MacBook Pro models.
The following new products will be available from today:
iPad mini with OLED display and A20 Pro chip
iMac with M6 chip
14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 chip
14-inch MacBook Pro with OLED touchscreen
16-inch MacBook Pro with OLED...
Apple plans to merge the iPhone's Action button with the Camera Control starting next year, according to the leaker known as "Instant Digital."
In a new post on Weibo, the leaker claimed that a single press of the combined button would open the camera, while a long press would trigger the function assigned to the Action button. They explicitly clarified that the dedicated Action button would ...
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.
