It’s that time of the quarter again: research firms IDC and Gartner published their PC market share figures for the past quarter, the fourth and last quarter of 2009. Coincidentally, it means I get to break out the chart tools in Word and Excel! Fun (and I’m serious).
The figures are anything but surprising, and more or less continue the trends we saw during the third quarter of 2009. If we look at it from a year-over-year perspective, the fourth quarter of 2009 saw a 22.1% increase in unit shipments over the fourth quarter of 2008 (27.9% according to IDC). This is, of course, good news for the technology industry.
“These preliminary results indicate the recovery of the PC market on a global level,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, “The US and Asia/Pacific had already shown positive indicators last quarter, however the fourth quarter 2009 results were more concrete evidence of the recovery. The Europe, Middle East and Africa region entered the economic downturn later than the US and Asia/Pacific, so it has been slower to recover. The EMEA region returned to positive shipment growth for the first time in three quarters, and Latin America and Japan also recorded shipment increases.”
The worldwide market share figures look like this (the decimal character is a comma, which is the norm in Dutch. I forgot to change locales):
“Shipment growth was largely driven by low-priced consumer mobile PCs, both in regular notebooks and mini-notebooks. As economic weakness continued, buyers became extremely price sensitive. Low-priced PCs were good enough for many average consumers,” Ms. Kitagawa said, “Windows 7 was launched during the fourth quarter of 2009. Though the new operating system launch did not create additional PC demand, the launch was a good market tool during holiday sales.”
Apple is of course not present in the worldwide figures, as the company would need to nearly double its worldwide sales before it enters the top five. If we focus on the US market alone, it depends on which of the two research firms you believe to know how Apple has been doing on the other side (my perspective) of the Atlantic.
Both IDC and Gartner’s figures see Apple dropping from fourth place to fifth in US market share, losing its place to Toshiba, who, according to both firms, saw unit shipments grow over 70% (!). In Gartner’s figures, HP, Acer, and Toshiba all saw a lot more growth than Apple did, who performed slightly below industry average. According to IDC, however, Apple performed above industry average, and was outperformed by HP and Toshiba alone.
And here I thought you wanted your Pet Charts to be perfect.
ugh, I hate when commas are used
It just looks weird.
And to other parts of the world, periods just look weird.
(But coming from the US, I agree with you.)
They make tough laptops at a great price and I think word is getting around. I had to take an HP notebook back to office depot after it started acting goofy and they seemed annoyed as if it happens all the time. They then offered me a discount on a Toshiba and weren’t even interested in showing me another HP. It seems that Sony has gone down in quality as well. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the latest Vaio series running too hot.
I agree – very happy with my Toshie, running XP, 7 and Fedora on it. I would also go along with your assessment of Sony: I have experienced 5 Sony Vaios over the past 4 years, belonging either to myself or work colleagues. Problems with battery clips, build-up of static, software/hardware conflicts severely affecting wireless connectivity, hard drive failure. Finally, had written off Dell for many years (don’t ask why) but have recently had the chance to see one (laptop) operating at close quarters – I was quite impressed with the solidity of the build and its effective speed and responsiveness under XP.
My HP lappy (purchased from Office Depot) starting acting goofy, as well … until I removed all the HP and Norton crapware that was on it.
SInce then, smooth sailing. Also works great with Fedora, so I dunno that HP lappy hardware is to blame.
Mine had a malfunctioning keyboard that would misinterpret the key entered, even when in BIOS. So no it wasn’t adware.
It seems other people have had problems with HP laptops as well.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/laptop-reliability-survey-asus-a…
Edited 2010-01-15 19:31 UTC
Many PC are overdue for replacement. My company have large numbers of broken DELL PC. They don’t make them like they use to.
We are replacing them with Fujisu PC. The windows 7 is better than vista. This give more incentives for companies to change.
Am I getting it all wrong ? I’m under the impression that laptops are really faulty most of the time. Every laptop conversation eventually gets to the point of complaining about failures ? While I’m not a laptop hater, I’ve used different ones many times at work when mobile computer was needed, I see a growing number of complaints about either build quality or hardware quality ? Is this for real ? My (home) PC experience is with only two computers, and the old one still acts OK, it’s just needed a lot of upgrades to run W7, so I bought a new one. It’s incredibly cheap I have to say : around 350$
We hear it year after year, and the doomsayers are always wrong. People aren’t replacing PCs with phones. They’re simply buying smaller mobile PCs.