Worldwide PC  shipments are down, tablets continue to change the PC landscape, and the Mac has increased sales in the U.S. Those are the key findings in Gartner 's report on the fourth quarter, released Monday.
Gartner's report agrees with a similar one from IDC on Thursday, in that both showed a global drop in PC sales -- 4.9 percent for Gartner, 6.4 percent for IDC. And both show the continuing importance of tablets.
But Gartner found that Apple sold 5.4 percent more Macs in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2012 compared with 2011, boosting market share to 12.3 percent, while IDC found a 0.2 percent drop that kept Mac's market share at 11.4 percent. Next week, Apple is expected to reveal its actual sales figures for the quarter.
Exception, Not the Norm
Overall computer sales in the U.S. declined by 2.1 percent, according to Gartner, compared with Q4 2011.
Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said in a statement that, while tablets have "dramatically changed" the overall picture for PCs, it is "not so much by 'cannibalizing' PC sales," as it is because PC users are turning to tablets instead of replacing older PCs.
"Whereas once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices," she added, "we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC." Kitagawa predicted that some individuals will have both a PC and a tablet, but they "will be the exception and not the norm."
If accurate, this analysis means that many users will simply let their PC "age out," as Gartner said, and then buy a tablet when they are ready for a new computing device. In this scenario, the installed base for PCs will continue to decline, as the availability of low-cost tablets continues to grow.
Promising Platform
Gartner also noted that Windows 8 "did not have a significant impact on PC shipments in the fourth quarter." Sales of both mobile and desktop PCs declined in the fourth quarter, by 11 percent and 6 percent respectively year over year, but Gartner said that all-in-one form factors from Asus, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard "look like a promising platform for the future." (continued...)
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