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.
Tuesday September 15, 2026 1:43 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple today announced a new subscription initiative that turns paid iCloud+ subscriptions into a broader services bundle in more than 100 countries.
In select countries, Apple says every paid iCloud+ plan, including the cheapest 50GB tier, now includes Apple TV and Apple Arcade "at no additional cost," while family sharing extends the storage, TV and Arcade access to up to five people....
Monday September 14, 2026 10:48 pm PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple released iOS 27 this week, and despite the company's focus this year on refining its flagship operating system and nixing bugs, there are still many additional features to explore, not least of which is Apple's new context-aware Siri, re-tooled for the generative AI era.
Which iPhones Support Every iOS 27 Feature?
This year's major iPhone software update isn't all about AI, though,...
Monday September 14, 2026 9:00 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Update — 10 a.m. Pacific Time: Apple has released iOS 27.
During its iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo event last week, Apple announced that iOS 27 will be released widely on Monday, September 14.
iOS 27 should be available around 10 a.m. Pacific Time / 1 p.m. Eastern Time today via the Settings app, under General → Software Update.
Below, we have highlighted eight new features and...
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.
