It’s not surprising that Mac sales dropped for Apple in 2016 as they experienced their first year over year sales decline since 2001. What is interesting, however, is that as Mac sales dropped roughly 10% and personal computers overall dropped 5.7% for the year, the top four leaders in the market all saw growth as Apple was pushed to number five.
Although Mac sales were up in Q4 2016 compared to Q4 2015, an analyst note today from Bloomberg’s Anand Srinivasan and Wei Mok has revealed Apple has dropped to the fifth largest PC vendor, with ASUS (ASUSTeK) overtaking fourth place. The top four vendors are now Lenovo, HP, Dell, and ASUS.
While the top four vendors all saw growth in large part due to Apple’s weak year, Dell saw the most growth at just over 10%.
Although they have a smaller share of the hardware market, Microsoft has recently been touting that Mac users are switching to the Surface in greater numbers than ever before. Microsoft is included in the ‘Others’ category in the graph above.
We’ve yet to see how much the release of Apple’s new MacBook Pros will affect their 2017 Q1 Mac sales, but Srinivasan and Mok suggest that Apple needs to leverage new markets with their high priced computers to continue growth.
We recently took a look at what may be in store for Mac updates this year, and Tim Cook has told desktop Mac fans not to worry after a year without a desktop hardware refresh: “We’ve got a ton of things on our roadmap that I can’t talk about, but that I’m incredibly excited about.”
