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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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.
