PC sales are finally recovering – and there’s good news for Macs too

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The entire PC industry is experiencing an uptick, and indeed Apple Mac sales are booming, according to the latest figures from analyst firm Gartner.

Going by PC shipments for the second quarter, Mac sales increased 5.1% compared to the same quarter last year, which is a sizeable step up.

That represented 4.3 million Macs sold in Q2 of this year, compared to around 4.1 million the previous year.

Apple has only increased its market share very slightly – by 0.1% in fact – because as mentioned the PC market as a whole has been boosted considerably in Q2, with overall PC sales up 2.8% year-on-year.

Working from home

The reason for the increase in PC sales is Covid-19, in a nutshell, and the fact that the pandemic has meant a lot of people are now working from home, and have bought new hardware for that reason. This is a notable turnaround from the first quarter, when coronavirus disruption to supply channels impacted negatively on PC sales growth (which has been weak overall in recent times, of course).

Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner, observed: “Mobile PC growth was particularly strong, driven by several factors including business continuity for remote working, online education and consumers’ entertainment needs.

“However, this uptick in mobile PC demand will not continue beyond 2020, as shipments were mainly boosted by short-term business needs due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Particularly strong growth was observed in the EMEA region.

Apple is the fourth biggest PC manufacturer currently, just ahead of Acer and Asus. Lenovo is at the top of the tree, just a whisker ahead of HP Inc (which experienced strong growth this quarter), with these vendors having a market share of 25% and 24.9% respectively. Dell is in third place on 16.4%, with Apple next on 6.7%.

Via 9to5 Mac

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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