A New Milestone for the Mac: 5 Percent of the Global PC Market

Apple has finally made it past the PC market’s “magic 5 percent mark.”

Buoyed by increasing sales in enterprise and explosive growth in the Asia Pacific, the company’s share of the global PC market passed the 5 percent mark last quarter, for the first time in 15 years, according to analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co.

Mac shipments grew 24.6 percent in the September quarter, a period during which the broader PC market grew just 5.3 percent. It was the 22nd consecutive quarter that the growth of Mac shipments has outpaced the market. And beyond this, shipments for the past year represented 20 percent of the growth in worldwide PC shipments.

The Mac’s got serious momentum.

In the business market, its growth was a staggering 43.8 percent, more than nine times greater than the 4.8 percent growth posted by the rest of the business market.

And in the home market? There, the Mac saw 25.6 percent growth, compared to overall growth of only 4.0 percent.

Interesting, because in the home market, the iPad was expected to cannibalize at least some Mac sales. In fact, during Apple’s third-quarter earnings call, CEO Tim Cook conceded that point. But evidently that cannibalization is minor at most, and far worse for Apple’s rivals. As Wolf observes, Mac sales in the home market have continued to increase, while sales of Windows notebook PCs have slowed.

“The iPad is undoubtedly cannibalizing some Mac sales,” Wolf writes. “But it appears to be cannibalizing PC sales a lot more. In our view, this underscores the power of the halo effect in overwhelming the impact of any cannibalization the Mac might have experienced following the launch of the iPad.”

Which is essentially what Tim Cook said, back in July.

“Some customers chose to purchase an iPad instead of a Mac, but even more decided to buy an iPad over a Windows PC,” he remarked at the time. “There are a lot more Windows PCs to cannibalize than Macs.”