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Apple Mac Sales Up or Down? A Tale of Two Researchers

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Researchers Gartner Inc. and IDC released their estimates today for PC shipments in the second quarter, and while they agreed that PC shipments overall stalled, they couldn’t seem to agree on how Apple fared in the U.S. (since it doesn’t ship enough Macs to make the worldwide PC top 5 — at least not yet).

According to Gartner, Apple ranked third in shipments behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell, with a 4.3 percent year-over-year rise to 1.91 million Macs. That gave it a 12 percent share of the U.S. PC market, up from 10.8 percent last year. Gartner added that Apple stood out from the crowd because it was the only one of the top 5 PC makers to report a gain in U.S. shipments; HP, Dell, No. 4 ranked Acer and No. 5 ranked Toshiba all had declines.

So not a bad report overall for Apple.

Then IDC released its numbers and said that Apple — also ranked third in the U.S. behind HP and Dell — saw a 1.1 percent drop in shipments to 1.81 million Macs. That was still good enough to give the Cupertino, California-based company an 11.4 percent share of the U.S. market, up from 10.3 percent a year ago.

Since Apple reports fiscal quarters that don’t line up to the calendar quarters Gartner and IDC use in their numbers, that’s why these are called analyst estimates.

In any case, the Mac accounted for 13 percent of Apple’s revenue in the quarter ended in March. The company reports its fiscal third-quarter results later this month.

As for the total PC market, both Gartner and IDC reported a 0.1 percent drop in shipments in the second quarter from a year earlier.