By
Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple reported "strong double digit growth"
in its Mac sales in the U.S., directly contradicting the earlier
estimates published by IDC and Gartner that stated Apple's U.S. Mac
sales fell year-over-year in the June quarter and calling into question
the legitimacy of market estimates that the tech media uncritically
presents as factual.
Earlier this month, IDC (above)
reported
that Apple's U.S. Mac unit sales in Q2 (Apple's fiscal Q3, the quarter
ending in June) fell by 1.7 percent, while Gartner (below) reported a
drop in Mac unit sales of 1.3 percent. Both firms supplied slightly
different estimates on both Apple's Q2 2014 and previous year Q2 sales,
although their Mac and overall U.S. PC sales differed by less than a
third of one million units in a total market estimated to involve around
16 million total PC sales.
In Apple's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, however,
the company reported a major global surge in Mac sales. "Net sales and
unit sales increased for Mac due to strong demand for MacBook Air which
was updated with faster processors and lower prices in April 2014 and
due to sales of the new Mac Pro which became available in December
2013," the company reported in its 10-Q.
Globally, Apple reported that Mac sales jumped from 3.75 million to 4.41
million year-over-year for its fiscal Q3, a unit increase of 18 percent
and a new June quarter record. [Corrected typo in quarterly sales
figure, originally stated as 5.41 million].
While Apple doesn't detail its product breakdown by region, Apple's
chief executive Tim Cook specifically noted, "we achieved strong double
digit Mac growth across many countries,
including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, China, India and the Middle-East" during the company's earnings call.
"Macs have now gained global market share for 32 of the last 33 quarters" - Tim Cook
"This growth is particularly impressive, given the contraction of the
overall PC market. Macs have now gained global market share for 32 of
the last 33 quarters," Cook added.
Apple didn't resort to channel stuffing to achieve record June Mac
"shipments." Instead, Cook noted that "we ended the quarter with Mac
channel inventory slightly below our four to five week target range."
Record June quarter growth made up for plateauing iPad sales
Apple "had a record June quarter for Mac sales," Cook stated in the
company's fiscal Q3 earnings call, "with growth of 18% year-over-year in
a market that is shrinking by 2% according to IDC's latest estimate.
Demand has been very strong for our portables in particular and we've
have had a great customer response to the new higher performance, lower
priced MacBook Air. It was another strong performance for the App Store
and the other services contributing to the thriving Apple ecosystem."
Cook also drew attention to the "bifurcated" market emerging for iPads,
which have continued to grow rapidly in emerging countries and in
particular BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) even as Apple's tablet
sales appear to have plateaued in the U.S. and other advanced markets,
contributing to a global overall slowdown in iPad sales.
While iPad sales retracted in the U.S., Cook noted that Apple's Mac
sales made up the difference. American buyers opted to buy more powerful
Macs, and in particular Apple's light and thin notebooks. As a result,
despite iPad sales slipping globally by 9 percent, Apple's U.S. and
Retail segment (most Apple Retail stores are in the U.S.) figures were
both up 1 percent over the year ago quarter.
The iPad & Mac cross pollination halo
While consumers may likely choose to buy a Mac in place of an iPad or
vice versa, there are also a variety of scenarios where one sale
directly results in the sale of the other. One example is in education,
where Apple is selling both Macs and iPads. Teachers can use Macs with
iBooks Author to develop custom content for iPad.
"Macs performed well in the U.S. education buying season with
double-digit growth in the K to 12 market," Cook noted, "driven
primarily by large deployments of MacBook Air. The Shawnee Mission
School District in Kansas chose Apple to provide an entire solution that
will equip every teacher with a MacBook Air and an iPad Air, every high
school student with a MacBook Air and every middle school and
elementary student with an iPad."
Additionally, in
the enterprise where iPads are being broadly adopted for use running
custom, internal iOS apps,
companies are buying Macs to develop new apps, because iOS apps are
developed using Apple's Xcode, which remains exclusive to the Mac
platform.
IDC & Garner seriously fumbled their PC market estimates
Apple's sales figures not only contradict both IDC and Gartner figures,
but also both firm's market conclusions. IDC specifically reported that
Apple's Macs "lost market share over the past year. In U.S. shipments,
Apple slipped to become the No. 4 PC maker, dropping from the No. 3 spot
to come in at 10 percent market share, a 1.7 percent decline."
IDC's incorrect assessment of Apple's double digit U.S. growth
percentage as a year-over-year "decline" also calls into question its
ranking of Apple as the fourth largest maker of conventional PCs in the
domestic market, as the narrowest possible interpretation of Cooks'
"double digit" growth would essentially tie Apple with Lenovo in U.S.
sales, according to IDC's own figures.
More importantly, it also means Apple's Mac sales continued to outpace
the overall industry. Both firms reported that Apple lost share in the
quarter. However, IDC estimated the U.S. PC sales increased by just 6.9
percent. Globally, it reported that PC sales fell by 2 percent in the
quarter as Apple's Mac sales grew by 18 percent.
Gartner estimated that U.S. PC sales grew at a slightly faster pace of
7.4 percent, still far behind the "strong double digit growth" Cook
reported for Macs. And Gartner's numbers portray Apple and Lenovo as
being even closer than IDC's, suggesting that there's no way Apple could
have experienced a "double digit" percentage in growth without
surpassing Lenovo to become the third largest vendor of conventional PCs
in the U.S., behind HP and Dell.
IDC & Garner ignore iPads for good reason
In calculating their PC "market share" numbers, both IDC and Gartner
include low end netbook and hybrid devices and Windows tablets. IDC also
counts Chromebook web browser devices, but both firms exclude sales of
Apple's iPad from their PC sales figures.
If they had included iPads and other tablets in their PC figures, they
would be forced to recognize Apple as being the largest computer maker
by a wide margin. Despite much media handwringing about Apple's
year-over-year decrease in iPad sales, the company still sold 13.3
million iPads globally in the quarter, more than Samsung, Lenovo and
Asus (the next three largest vendors, according to IDC) combined.
Canalys is one market research company that does report combined sales
of PCs and tablets without excluding iPads, although it has not yet
publicly released its figures for Q2. For Q1, Canalys
noted
that Apple was the largest global vendor of computers, with Lenovo in
second place and HP, Samsung and Dell nearly tied for third place, with
each selling about half the total number of computing devices (not
including phones or iPods) as Apple.
Apple first
surpassed HP in combined sales of tablets and PCs in the holiday quarter of 2011.
This was not due some obscure counting methodology by Canalys, but a
reality acknowledged by HP's chief executive Meg Whitman, who
noted
to journalists in late 2011 that Apple might likely pass her company in
computer sales in 2012. As it turned out, Apple did so that very
quarter.
Desperate denigration data from IDC, Garner and Strategy Analytics
IDC, Garner and Strategy Analytics
have a long history of presenting carefully contrived data in press
releases clearly designed to flatter their clients and denigrate their
clients' competitors, with Apple being a common target.
Beyond just serving the public relations needs of their clients,
however, data promulgated by these marketing firms helped to obscure
major shifts in the technology landscape, such as the clear and obvious
shift away from conventional PCs that began with the appearance of iPad
in 2010.
Thanks to regular press releases clouding the facts on phone, PC and tablet sales, there appears to be a
mass delusion
among consumers and journalists as to why and how Apple is earning the
vast majority of profits in phones, tablets and conventional PCs.
In addition to excluding iPads from their PC sales (while counting
Windows tablets and including every other new form of PC device), IDC
has also (like
Strategy Analytics)
radically revised
its tablet figures after the fact, inventing, for example, Samsung
tablet shipments that retroactively disappeared in the next year's
figures.
At the same time, IDC inflated its year ago estimates of the number of tablets attributed to unnamed "other" vendors by
nearly ten million units,
creating unflattering market share numbers for Apple in 2012, followed
by unflattering market share growth figures for Apple in 2013, all
coaxed from shifting numbers presented without any verifiable source.
Apart from Apple, no other significant tablet vendor reports its unit
sales.
IDC has also obscured the reality of Apple's iPad sales by comparing them to
kids tablets and toys,
in order to water down Apple's "market share" and imply that iPads are
falling out of fashion—while distracting all attention away from the
fact that nobody is selling premium tablets in volumes like Apple with
margins like Apple.
Earlier this year, IDC was
found to have
added Windows 8.1 "2 in 1" PC notebooks into its reports of tablet
shipments, another effort to portray Apple's "share" of the "market" as
diminishing, and a direct reversal of IDC's staunch policy of not
counting iPads as PCs, ostensibly because they are completely different
product categories with no perceivable market impact on each other.
Bad market data isn't hurting Apple
IDC's latest tablet figures for Q2 2014 assert that an incredible 44
percent of the world's tablets are now attributable to "Other," a series
of unnamed vendors who each must ship fewer than 1 million devices per
quarter (the figure cited for Acer, the fifth largest tablet maker in
IDC's numbers).
If the intent of these market research firms were to actually inform the
public about market trends, they wouldn't need to jump through such
logical hoops, invent contradictory market definitions nor invent or
erase millions of "shipments" when nobody's looking.
Samsung, Lenovo, Asus and Acer simply can't sell tablets the way Apple consistently can—
in volumes greater than ten million units per quarter.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google—despite the best wishes of Apple's
detractors—can't maintain shipments of even 1 million tablets per
quarter to keep them listed on IDC's charts, despite heavy discounting,
clearance sales and product giveaways on top of their already loss
leader pricing.
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Google has just taken down a mobile game from its Play Store that simulates Israeli military bombings in Gaza.
The
app, which was developed by PlayFTW, first appeared on the Play Store on
July 26. On the app's page, the developer promised "improved
performance" for its most recent update, which included the addition of
"Israel's theme music."
