Global PC sales keep getting worse and worse, and now sales of Apple Macs are leading the race to the bottom, as research firm Gartner added to PC forecasts and analysts searched for a bottom in the PC market.
Gartner said Tuesday that global PC shipments fell 30% to 55.2 million units in the first quarter, compared with estimates released earlier in the week from rival firm International Data Group showing a 29% drop to 56.9 million. Gartner said an “unfavorable combination of oversupply and continued low PC demand due to economic uncertainties and a lack of purchase motivation led to the second consecutive quarter of historic year-over-year decline.” That follows a quarter where Gartner reported its largest quarterly shipment decline since it began tracking the PC market in the mid-1990s. And that was worse than the previous worst — last year’s third quarter — and so on. A larger-than-average drop came from Apple Inc.
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shipments, which Gartner said fell 34.2% to 4.8 million units. IDC had said Apple shipment dropped 40.5% to 4.1 million units. IDC and Gartner disagree on certain metrics like Apple’s performance, as has been the case since 2022, but discrepancies appear to be normalizing. A quarter ago, IDC said Apple shipments only slipped 2.1% to 7.5 million units for the holiday-ending quarter, while Gartner said shipments declined 10.2% to 7 million units. Either way, in its last earnings report, Apple reported that fourth-quarter Mac sales fell 29.4% to $7.7 billion from $10.9 billion a year earlier, well short of the Wall Street con …