If You Count Tablets As PCs, Apple Lost 12% Marketshare Last Quarter

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11-_MacBook_Air_compared_to_iPad_(1)

We’re living in a post-PC age. You know it. I know it. Steve Jobs knew it when he coined the phrase three years ago at the original iPad launch event, and of course, it was the iPad that was in many ways the final nail in the coffin of decades of PC market growth.

Apple’s still the number one PC maker by unit sales, but even the growth of the Mac has been shrinking, while other PC Makers numbers are in freefall. Analysis firm Canalys, which does a lot of business analyzing PC sales, made a bizarre decision a while back to inflate their numbers by including tablets as PCs.

Even by that measure, though, Apple’s still the number one “PC” maker. But because Apple hasn’t released an iPad or iPad mini so far this year, they find that the “PC” Market was flat in Q2 2013.

According to Canalys, Apple lost market share of about 11.5% year-over-year in the last quarter, and now holds 19.4 percent of the overall market. Again, this has nothing to do with the performance of the Mac, and everything to do with the fact that Apple hasn’t released a new iPad in a while. Talking about tablets as PCs is so confusing!

You know who is doing pretty well against Apple, though? Not Samsung. Lenovo, of all companies. The business PC maker with its slick laptop and tablet designs now controls 12.1% of the market, with a 7.3% year-o-ver-year growth. ‘It is striking how successful it has been in globalizing its PC business and breaking the 1 million unit barrier is an important milestone for its tablet shipments,’ noted Canalys Analyst James Wang. ‘Lenovo is on an upward curve with its tablets, expanding in mainland China and Latin America, where there is little competition from the likes of Google or Amazon.’

Not bad! Of course, counting tablets as PCs just obscures the truth: the iPad has killed laptop sales, and the only laptop brand not in freefall is Apple’s own.

Source: Canalys

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