Microsoft Passes Acer To Become Top 5 PC Vendors In the US (venturebeat.com)

During the 3rd Quarter of 2018, Microsoft reportedly broke into the top five list of PC vendors in the U.S. for the first time, thanks to its line of Surface computers, laptops, and tablets. VentureBeat reports: Q3 2018 was flat; it did not continue the growth we saw in the previous quarter. Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments increased 0.1 percent to 67.2 million units while IDC counts a 0.9 percent decline to 67.4 million units. Gartner's top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer (in that order) while IDC's were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, and Apple (also in that order). But Gartner also provides a U.S. breakdown every quarter, and Q3 2018 was the first time that Microsoft made an appearance, displacing Acer.

Microsoft is still a far cry from the other players in the top 5, and its shipments were in fact only up slightly by 11,000 units, gaining just 0.1 percentage points (to 4.1 percent market share). Still, Dell and Apple were down, and the overall U.S. market was flat (down some 50,000 units) in Q3 2018, so in that context, Surface sales are doing just fine.

Comments

Of course

[DontBeAMoran]

I don't know about the others, but if you follow Apple's hardware releases, there is a simple reason their sales are down.

- Four years since they barely updated the MacBook Air. Very old tech at today's prices. A minuscule CPU speed bump does not equal an update.

- Four years since they updated the Mac mini. Very old tech at today's prices. Can't even upgrade the RAM anymore. A downgrade from the 2012 models, so six years since the last real update.

- Three updates to a useless no-travel low profile keyboard that nobody asked for. This is the primary input method for a laptop and it got butchered because their industrial designer wanted to make the laptop one millimetre thinner. Also, they removed the function keys including the escape key for a stupid and expensive touch bar that, again, nobody asked for.

- Mac Pro trash that nobody asked for. Real pros are asking Apple to bring back the tower Mac Pro, we'll see in a few months if Apple really ditched pros to sell toy phones and tablets instead.

- Expensive Macbook that doesn't have enough ports to be of any use, ditched USB type A ports about five years too early. Very expensive for a low-power CPU.

After all that bullshit, I hope nobody at Apple is questioning why Mac sales are down.

Re:Shipments

[Anonymous Coward]

gartner and IDC don't use shipped numbers as they have no access to those, they base everything off retailer sales. Not sure why you think they aren't selling them. I see Surface devices everywhere nowadays.