The PC market is down again in Q3 of 2017, as are Mac shipments, according to fresh figures from Gartner.
The analyst firm’s latest report estimates that PC shipments hit 67 million units globally, down 3.6% year-on-year – but Apple’s Mac machines slipped to 4.6 million units, a more pronounced decline of 5.6% compared to the third quarter of 2016 (which witnessed nearly 4.9 million units shipped).
This means Apple remains in fifth place in the global league table of PC manufacturers, just behind Asus (which had a really bad quarter, dropping 9% year-on-year).
Apple currently has an overall market share of 6.9% when it comes to global PC sales.
There was even weaker performance for Apple on its home territory of the US – once again – with shipment numbers slipping to 1.88 million, a decline of 7.6% year-on-year.
Although Lenovo slipped further in the States, dropping a staggering 25.2% compared to the same quarter in 2016, which means that Apple is actually the number three PC vendor in the US now.
Mika Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, observed of the US market: “Weak back-to-school sales were further evidence that traditional consumer PC demand drivers for PCs are no longer effective.”
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Righteous refurbs
One argument for why MacBook sales could be softening, and affecting the overall Mac picture negatively, is the weighty price tags which the new MacBook Pro models were burdened with – but there is some good news on this front for consumers.
Namely that for the first time since they were launched, you can now purchase refurbished 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar notebooks from Apple, which might encourage a few more previously reticent buyers to take the plunge.
At the time of writing, in Apple’s UK store the cheapest such offering is a refurbished 15.4-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, Intel Core i7 CPU and 16GB of RAM plus 256GB of storage, which is priced at £1,909 (around AU$3,230), a saving of £340 or 15% compared to new.
Over in the US, that same model has $350 knocked off meaning it retails at $1,949 (around AU$2,500).
Mind you, with Black Friday on the near horizon, it’s likely worth waiting to see what sort of discounts that will bring when it comes to MacBooks.
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