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Gartner: Apple's global mobile phone share almost doubled in Q2 2011
Gartner's numbers were released for the second quarter in 2011 and Apple continues to show strong growth. The smartphone manufacturer is number four globally in the mobile phone market trailing Nokia, Samsung and LG. Its market share almost doubled from last year, climbing from 2.4% in 2010 to 4.6% in 2011. These figures are impressive for a company that makes a single smartphone and is competing against companies that produce a variety of smartphones and feature phones. Apple is also the #3 platform with almost 20 million iPhones flying off the production line. It now has 18.2% market share, up from 14.1% in 2010. Much of this growth is due to Apple's partnership with 42 new carriers and its expansion into 15 new countries during Q2 2011. According to Gartner, Apple still trails Symbian which has 22.1% market share, a significant drop from its 40.9% in the same quarter of 2010. Apple also trails Android which now has a 43.4% market share, up from 17.2% in 2010.
Apple jumps to no. 3 in US PC market, even without iPad
Gartner and the market intelligence firm IDC have made their quarterly proclamation about PC retail shipments, and things aren't too great for that market: Growth is much slower than expected, picking up only 2.3%, way off from the predictions of 6.7% or 12% growth made in the first quarter of this year. But even with the iPad and other tablets taking large bites out of the PC market, Apple's Mac sales are doing well, with shipments jumping up as high as 14.7%. Both of these numbers are shipments, not actual consumer sales, but still, the numbers have turned Apple into the third largest vendor of personal computers in the US, behind the lagging Dell and HP. In a press release, Gartner said that "the preliminary findings show Apple's performance far exceed the industry average, partly driven by an iMac refreshment that attracted both consumers and buyers in the education sector." Good news for Apple, then, all around. That's one of the wildest things about this company lately -- even as the folks in Cupertino prioritize mobile computing and emphasize the iPhone and the iPad, Macs continue to grow more popular than ever.
IDC and Gartner: US PC sales still sluggish, Apple, Toshiba see jumps in market share
IDC and Gartner have once again released dueling reports on the state of the PC market and, according to their numbers, the landscape's looking a little different. Gartner estimates that overall PC shipments during Q2 of this year increased by 2.3 percent from the same period last year, more or less concurring with the 2.6 percent global increase that IDC found. Things are looking a bit bleaker in the US, however, where quarterly year-to-year shipments are down (5.6 percent for Gartner, 4.2 percent for IDC), but have increased from Q1 of this year. On the corporate level, HP continues to dominate global shipments according to both reports, followed by Dell and Lenovo, which overtook Acer for third place. Stateside statistics, on the other hand, show a bit more severe shuffling among the top five, with Apple's US market share jumping to nearly 11 percent (good for third place) and Acer tumbling to fifth, thanks to a greater than 20 percent year-to-year decline in market share (see the table, above). In fact, among the top five, only Apple and fourth-place Toshiba increased their market share from Q2 of 2010 -- something that both research firms attributed, in part, to a weak consumer PC market and the rising popularity of tablets, led by the iPad. For a more thorough statistical breakdown, head past the break for a pair of comprehensive press releases.
Apple vaults into top 5 PC maker spot in UK, Western Europe
Earlier this week, Gartner issued a press release about the Western European PC market. For most PC manufacturers, things aren't looking good. For the first quarter of 2011, PC sales in the region were down 18 percent year over year. However, as usual, Apple has bucked the trend. For the same period, Apple's Western European PC sales were up 10-15 percent in the same markets. That growth helped the Mac maker spring into the top five PC vendor list in both the UK and Western Europe. "Apple made its debut among the top five vendors in Western Europe, displacing Toshiba in the first quarter of 2011. Apple was the only one among the top five vendors to increase shipments, with volumes for mobile PCs growing 32 percent in the first quarter of 2011," Gartner said. The top five PC makers for Western Europe are now HP, Acer, Dell, Asus and Apple; in the UK, the top five are HP, Acer, Dell, Toshiba and Apple.
Gartner: 1.6 million Windows Phone 7 devices sold in Q1, consumer interest remains tepid
Direct sales figures for Windows Phone 7 handsets have been remarkably difficult to come by since Microsoft's OS reboot at the end of last year, but here come the stat gurus at Gartner to provide us with their best estimate. 3.6 million of the world's smartphone sales in the past quarter were counted under the Microsoft mobile OS umbrella, of which 1.6 million featured the very latest WP7 software. That means Redmond partners sold more Windows Mobile devices in the first three months of 2011 than ones bearing the sparkling new operating system. Guess now we know what LG meant when it said the Windows Phone launch didn't meet expectations. Gartner sees these numbers as evidencing a failure "to grow in consumer preference" by WP7's launch devices, though it predicts better things ahead, with Nokia's participation helping to accelerate the platform's momentum. For more (much more!) stats relating to the global cellphone market in Q1 2011, click on the source link for Gartner's full disclosure. Update: ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley prodded Microsoft about these figures, but got neither a confirmation nor a denial. The fact Redmond didn't bother to at least dispute Gartner's stats seems to lend them an added sliver of credibility.
Shocker! Microsoft commands 79 percent of worldwide OS revenue (update)
Everyone knows that Windows is installed on the vast majority of computers, but it's always interesting to be reminded of what a cash cow the OS has been for Redmond. According to Gartner, Microsoft owned 78.6 percent of the global market revenue share for desktop operating systems at the end of 2010 -- revenue up almost 9 percent from 2009. That means, of the $30.4 billion in revenue that various companies generated, $23.8 billion lined Microsoft's coffers. But while Windows remains the kingpin, Mac OS X and -- wait for it -- Red Hat, posted more substantial gains. Apple's market revenue shot up almost 16 percent to 1.7 percent, Red Hat surged 18 percent, while dark horse Oracle leaped from ninth place to fourth, with a 7,683 percent growth in income -- no small thanks to its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Only one question remains, then -- who's the loser here? Update: Looks like we got this one wrong, folks, as it's not market share that's being measured here, but rather revenue share -- how much money each company made from its operating systems relative to one another. That means companies that price their operating systems cheaper will be at a disadvantage in the rankings, not to mention those organizations that charge nothing at all -- Ubuntu, anyone? Oh, and as some of you have pointed out in comments, there are both desktop and server operating systems in the chart above.
Apple takes a bite out of PC market
For the first time in six quarters, worldwide shipments of personal computers declined during the first three months of 2011, according to reports from Gartner Inc. and International Data Corp. (IDC) released this week. Despite faltering demand for PCs, Apple enjoyed increased sales and market share compared to the year-ago quarter. IDC's report indicated 80.6 million PCs shipped worldwide during the quarter -- a 3.2% decline from the same time last year. Gartner's figures showed sales dipped by 1.1% to 84.3 million units. In the United States, both firms agreed PC sales dropped from about 17 million units in the first quarter of 2010 to about 16.1 million PCs this year. Meanwhile, Apple watched its figures grow in the US, netting either 8.5% or 9.3% of the market -- a healthy jump from the 7% share the Cupertino-based company saw at the start of 2010. Apple's iPad may have also taken a significant bite out of PC sales. IDC said tablets like the iPad, which weren't included in either reporting firm's PC shipment calculations, contributed to shrinking demand for more powerful -- and more expensive -- notebooks and desktops.
IDC and Gartner's latest PC shipment stats show why Acer needed to make a strategic change
Gianfranco Lanci's departure from Acer last month came as a bit of a surprise, but looking at some fresh PC shipment data from the IDC, we can now understand why it had to happen. In Q1 of 2011, Acer suffered a precipitous 42.1 percent drop in PC shipments to the United States, falling from 2.3 million units in the first quarter of 2010 to 1.3 million in the first three months of this year. That's matched by a global downturn of 15.8 percent for the company's computer business, taking its market share from 12.9 percent down to 11.2. A percentage point and a half might not seem like much, but in the high stakes business of selling high volumes of devices with low profit margins, that can clearly make the difference between winning and losing, between living and dying (as a CEO). On a happier note, Lenovo surged upwards by 16.3 percent globally amid a market that shrunk a little overall. The IDC -- whose numbers are considered preliminary until companies confirm them in their quarterly financial reports -- identifies Acer's exposure to the shrinking interest in netbooks as the chief reason why it's now having to reorganize itself. That overhaul is already underway with a new logo and some attractively priced tablets, but it's likely to be a while before Acer gets back to challenging HP for world domination. Update: Gartner has dropped its figures for the first quarter as well, and while it doesn't see Acer losing out quite so badly in the US (minus 24.9 percent year-on-year), it agrees on its worldwide market struggles, placing its decrease in shipments at 12.2 percent.
Gartner: Apple will dominate tablet space for years, Android won't drink its milkshake until after 2015
The inundation of tablets upon these very pages from day to day should give you an idea that manufacturers see this as a golden opportunity to grab a big chunk of a fledgling market. According to Gartner, though, the prospects are a little less rosy -- for the next five years, anyway. Analyst estimates indicate that the tablet market will boom over the next five years, from 17,610,000 units last year to 294,093,000 in 2015. No, not 294,092,000. 294,093,000. Apple will be the dominant force, its market share not dropping below 50 percent until the terminal year of this study. Android will take up the lion share of the other half, with the remaining dredges shared by MeeGo, WebOS, and QNX. The latter, which powers RIM's upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook, is scheduled to have a 10 percent share. That'll be the closest thing to a threat that Google and Apple will face -- if you believe any of this. Update: The figures above are in thousands of units.
Gartner says Microsoft will surpass Apple in mobile by 2015
That's the prediction from analysts at Gartner today. In a new report, Gartner's experts say the Microsoft-Nokia partnership will give Windows the number 2 spot in 2015, with a 20 percent market share after the Android OS grabs 48.8 percent of the smartphone market. Gartner predicts Apple will have a 17.2 percent share by 2015, just behind Microsoft, but will remain a solid number 2 in the worldwide market through 2014. IDC had a similar prediction last month. Gartner bases its Apple predictions on a belief that Apple will be more interested in maintaining margins rather than market share. Perhaps. Somehow, the gurus at Gartner missed the fact that Apple is maintaining leadership in the tablet space with some of the lowest prices and feature-rich products available. Like most research firms, Gartner is pretty good at predicting the near future, which, frankly, is pretty easy, but not so good at looking out into the distance. Gartner was raving about netbooks a few years ago, and sales of netbooks have all but collapsed after the launch of the iPad last year. Gartner has rather consistently missed the rise of Android until lately, but hardly anyone saw that juggernaut coming. The truth is, predicting the future accurately is pretty tough. Take a look at the 1939 World's Fair movie that predicted the 1960s. Hmmmm. Not so good. [Via BusinessInsider]
Gartner: Android grabbing over 38 percent of smartphone market in 2011 on Symbian's demise
We like, ok, love poking fun at analysts' long term forecasts given the volatility of the smartphone market. Nobody, neither Gartner nor IDC, predicted the meteoric rise of Android and iOS, thus making their four-year projections (measured to a decimal point) laughable, to say the least. Shorten that timeline to the end of the year, however, and the accuracy of these forecasts tends to increase dramatically. Gartner just released its smartphone projections that align very closely with the numbers released by IDC a few weeks ago. Both research firms see Nokia hemorrhaging its smartphone dominance in 2011 after announcing plans to adopt the Windows Phone platform. Gartner sees Symbian pulling in a remarkably low 19.2 percent (down from 37.6 percent in 2010 or an impressive 46.9 percent share held back in 2009) regardless of Nokia's insistence that it still has some 150 million Symbian handsets to ship -- IDC, as you'll recall, was a bit more gracious with a 20.9 percent projection for Symbian in 2011. Like IDC, Gartner sees Microsoft making a dramatic comeback just as soon as Nokia can flood its global channels with mid-tier handsets by the end of 2012 with the Windows Phone operating system ultimately rising to the number two spot in global marketshare (Gartner says 19.5 percent to IDC's 20.9 percent) by, eh hem, 2015. Gartner expects the iOS smartphone slice to peak with a 19.4 percent share (to IDC's 15.7 percent) in 2011 before dipping a bit under the strain of an Android juggernaut and Apple's reluctance to sacrifice margins (and profits) for market share. Gartner expects Android to increase the 22.7 market share it enjoyed in 2010 to 38.5 percent in 2011 (compared to the IDC's slightly more aggressive 39.5 percent share) on the way to dominating the competition with a 49.2 percent share in 2012. Bringing up the rear then is RIM with an estimated chunk of just 13.4 percent in 2011 (compared to 16 percent in 2010) with further declines through 2015 even after the BlackBerry maker migrates to QNX in 2012. Ouch. As for WebOS: sorry HP, you're in the "other" category along with Bada.
Android vs. iPhone in 'flawed' mobile browser performance test
Post edited to clarify that the browser testing is not representative of Safari performance, and included Blaze response to CNET. –Ed. Blaze Software, a Canadian software company, today released the results of what it calls a "definitive" research effort to discover "which [mobile] browser is really faster from a user's point of view." The study concluded that Android's browser is 52% faster than the iPhone's. Before you trade in your iPhone for a device powered by Android, The Loop suggests Blaze's study is "flawed." According to its report, Blaze's testing methodology relied on "custom apps, which use the platform's embedded browser. This means WebView (based on Chrome) for Android, and UIWebView (based on Safari) for iPhone." As we've been hearing from developers of iPhone web apps over the past few weeks, Apple's improvements to the Mobile Safari JavaScript engine and other rendering speedups have not been extended to the internal browser tool used by apps, nor to standalone web apps that are pinned as icons to the home screen. It's not yet completely clear if or when the Safari performance boost will make it to the embedded browser view; John Gruber cites some security-related concerns that may be involved. The tests don't reflect performance of the official web browsers included with each platform. UIWebView did not include this performance boost; it may be "disingenuous" to conclude Android beat Safari, according to The Loop. Using an embedded browser is not the same as using the official browser where customers spend the most time interacting with websites. "Obviously someone is looking to make a mountain out of a molehill," Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg told The Loop. "It's not an apples to apples test." Apple's Natalie Kerris was equally dismissive, speaking to CNET: "Their testing is flawed. They didn't actually test the Safari browser on the iPhone. Instead they only tested their own proprietary app, which uses an embedded Web viewer that doesn't actually take advantage of Safari's Web performance optimizations." Kerris also noted that even without the true Safari match-up, the testing only showed about a second of difference browsing pages. Blaze's CTO Guy Podjarny admitted to CNET that the testing methodology made an invalid assumption that the embedded browsers would work as fast as Safari: "This test leveraged the embedded browser which is the only available option for iPhone applications. Blaze was under the assumption that Apple would apply the same updates to their embedded browser as they would their regular browser. If this is not the case and according to Apple's response, it's certainly possible the embedded browser might produce different results. If Apple decides to apply their optimizations across their embedded browser as well, then we would be more than willing to create a new report with the new performance results." Even so, the results of Blaze's research should still disappoint Apple's fans. Apple touted significant web technology performance gains in its latest iOS release. It seems reasonable to expect these gains to appear simultaneously in both the Safari browser and the underlying UIWebView framework used in nearly any app that relies on web technologies like JavaScript. Blaze's researchers built custom apps to compare the iPhone 4 and Google Nexus S using websites from Fortune 1000 companies. Each site included in the test was loaded multiple times over several days using a Wi-Fi connection. The final results reflect a median benchmark from over 45,000 page loads. "Android 2.3 was 52% faster than iPhone 4.3, with a median load time of 2.144 seconds vs. iPhone's median load time of 3.254 seconds," Blaze reports on its blog, adding, "Android was faster than iPhone in 84% of the tested websites, and iPhone beat Android in 16% of the races. Android...provided a faster browsing experience 4 times out of 5."
Gartner and IDC dispute Android's dominance over Symbian in Q4 2010
According to Gartner's latest mobile sales numbers, the rise of Android hasn't been quite as meteoric as you might think -- even with 888.8 percent growth in 2010. Last month, Canalys quoted Android as the top earner for smartphone platforms in Q4 of last year, beating out Symbian for the top spot, but Gartner says it ain't so. In fact, IDC already quietly chimed in on the topic a few days ago saying that Symbian was still the smartphone OS "market leader." Gartner's numbers do show Android overtaking Nokia's Symbian devices in unit sales, but it points out that the OS' use across a variety of brands in Q4 actually "kept Symbian slightly ahead of Android." Symbian ultimately outsold Android by more than 44 million units last year, but considering the little green robot's astronomical growth in 2010, we'd say even super star is an understatement. Check out the PR after the jump to see how the rest of the competition stacks up.
IDC and Gartner: US PC sales drop as tablets shake things up
It's time again to look at the rapidly changing face of home computing. The last time we got an IDC report on US PC sales it showed generally rosy figures, with everyone other than Dell growing and Apple making a huge jump. This time we have numbers from both IDC and Gartner, and while they don't agree on everything, it's clear things are rather less positive. Overall growth in this quarter is negative (6.6 percent decline for Gartner, 4.8 for IDC) and Apple is now in position number five, dropping from number three, with the other top four comprised of HP, Dell, Toshiba, and Acer -- though Toshiba and Acer swap places as you move from IDC to Gartner. Both reports cite tablet sales (i.e. the iPad) as being at least partly responsible for the decline in traditional computer sales, a trend that's predicted to continue in 2011. Based on what we saw at CES, we'd say that's a safe bet.
Gartner predicts Apple growth, but spurns iPad
Gartner has added its take on Apple's Q4 earnings to a growing list of other predictions. Gartner predicts that Mac sales grew by nearly 24 percent, helping Apple to take a 9.7 percent share in Q4. However, it claims that any reason for a lagging growth for PC makers was simply to be blamed on the iPad, which it did not count as part of PC sales and lumped it in among "media tablets." "Overall, holiday PC sales were weak in many key regions due to the intensifying competition in consumer spending. Media tablets, such as the iPad, as well as other consumer electronic (CE) devices, such as game consoles, all competed against PCs," said Mikako Kitagawa, a principal analyst at Gartner. Gartner did include netbooks in PC sales for other companies. It did not explain why they excluded the iPad from PC sales, but did count netbooks. Doing so would significantly boost Apple's revenue for Q4. But, Gartner did say that Apple and Toshiba were the only top-5 vendors to increase shipments, with Apple's 23.7 percent being far higher than Toshiba's 14.4 percent growth. Apple most likely will announce its Q4 earnings next week. [via AppleInsider]
Combined sales of smartphones and tablets to surpass the humble PC in 18 months, says IDC
Our supply checks say that 10 out of 10 analysts are insanely bullish about tablets -- despite the fact that there are only 2.5 competitive products on the market, and one of them only came out a month ago. So, naturally, it isn't difficult to scrounge up sales predictions that show the tablet rocketing into the stratosphere, cutting into PC market share, while also expanding the market outright to accommodate its post-PC ways. Gartner's guess is 55 million tablets next year, while IDC has a more conservative estimate of 42 million, but both predict a sharp, exponential rise in the following years, and IDC takes it one step further: 18 months from now, combined smartphone and tablet sales will eclipse the PC, it claims, with both categories hovering in the mid-400 million range. Now, that number is mostly smartphones, which isn't an unprecedented shift in and of itself -- the PC took a major hit in popularity in Japan once the kids got ahold of these newfangled phone things -- but overall it represents a shift from the open-ended, flexible, and powerful PC to the narrow, task-specific, app-driven nature of the iOS and Android kind. Or you could spin it the completely opposite way: people need phones, so they buy a nice phone. No PC death knell in that behavior, and the tablet is still a very niche product with some good PR. Either way, we'll be much more impressed with this sort of market battle when it's the tablet (perhaps with a little help from the smartbook or netbook-lite category) going up against the Windows and Mac PC head-on, without smartphones shouldering most of the load.
iPhone and Android shares rise while BlackBerry, Symbian fall
It's definitely a good time to be an iPhone or an Android smartphone. Gartner is reporting that while the iPhone's total smartphone market share fell slightly from 17.1 percent to 16.7 percent (while still selling more total units than RIM) and Android's jumped from 3.5 percent to 25.5 percent in the past year, BlackBerry has seen a decline from 20.7 percent to 14.8 percent and Symbian from 44.6 percent to 36.6 percent. Windows Mobile's share has been sliced by more than half, from 7.9 percent down to just 2.8 percent of the market. In terms of total worldwide mobile sales, Apple's share is up to 3.2 percent from 2.3 percent this time last year, with 13,484,400 units sold in Q3 2010. Analysts project Apple to sell 36 million iPhones worldwide for the year, followed by 100 million by the end of 2011.
Gartner's global phone sales rankings match IDC's, but say the big guys have less of the pie; Android moves to number two overall
At a 30,000-foot level, the global mobile phone sales numbers for the third quarter of 2010 just released by Gartner match up with what IDC posted a few days ago, but you might say the devil's in the details. These guys have all of the top five players -- Nokia, Samsung, LG, Apple, and RIM -- at noticeably lower total market shares than IDC did, suggesting that second-tier players like Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and HTC (if you can really call them "second-tier") are grabbing more hearts and minds. And hey, considering Motorola's prominent role at Verizon and HTC's ever-growing global presence, we could totally believe it. Notably, Nokia is well below 30 percent in Gartner's report at 28.2, a whopping drop of 8.5 percent year-over-year -- way more than the 4.1 percent drop that IDC's got pegged. Of course, there's no way of knowing which of the two reports is more accurate -- and you know how margins of error work with these things. Hey, at least the rankings are the same, right? [Thanks, Tad] Update: As commenters have pointed out, the Gartner report also puts Android at 25.5 percent market share, moving past BlackBerry OS to become the number two smartphone platform behind Symbian (they've got iOS at third, BlackBerry fourth). Considering the platform's trajectory this year and sheer variety of Android phones now being solid worldwide, it's no surprise.
Ballmer: next release of Windows will be Microsoft's 'riskiest product bet' (video)
Windows 7 might be a massive commercial success and an undeniably rock solid piece of software, but Microsoft is apparently unwilling to rest on those soft and cozy laurels. Asked about the riskiest product bet the Redmond crew is currently developing, its fearless leader Steve Ballmer took no time in answering "the next release of Windows." His interviewers sadly failed to probe any deeper on the subject, but it might be notable that Steve calls it the next release rather than simply Windows 8, while the idea of it being risky also ties in with previous indications that Microsoft is aiming for a revolutionary leap between iterations. We'll have to just be patient and wait for more on that, though if you'd like a peek at Steve dodging question on tablets and the potential for Windows Phone 7 appearing on them, you need only jump past the break for the video. Update: It's also worth noting that Ballmer may not have been talking about revolutionary leaps as much as he's referencing the past issues the company has had when it's issued a major OS update (hello, Vista). The idea that making any big change to the operating system most of the world runs would invite a certain amount of high risk makes sense to us.
IDC: Apple's now third largest PC vendor in US with 10.6 percent market share
Apple might be billing its next big event as "Back to the Mac," but don't let that fool you into thinking its computer platform has been waning. Quite to the contrary, according to IDC, which reports the Cupertino team has grabbed third spot in the US PC sales charts with a 10.6 percent market share, bumping the incumbent Acer into fourth. Two million Mac shipments during the period represented an increase of 24.1 percent relative to last year, while the overall PC market turned in a somewhat morose 3.8 percent growth. Gartner's also unleashed its numbers unto the world today, giving Acer the lead for third by the slimmest of margins, but both stat teams agree that the Taiwanese vendor has suffered a bad year along with Dell, which has also experienced some shrinkage. Toshiba's the only major Windows machine seller to see its fortunes improve with double-digit growth, while HP seems to be hanging on to the top spot nice and steadily. Hit the source links for worldwide numbers.
