The competition, short of parts in the midst of the pandemic, had to eat Cupertino’s dust.
From “Traditional PC Market Delivers Another Quarter of Double-Digit Growth in Q3 2020, According to IDC” posted Monday:
As the global pandemic rages on and many countries around the world enter the second wave of COVID-19 infections, continuity of business and online schooling remain at the forefront of every economy. This led to double-digit growth in the traditional PC market, comprised of desktops, notebooks, and workstations, as global shipments grew 14.6% year over year to 81.3 million units in the third quarter of 2020 (3Q20), according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker.
“Consumer demand and institutional demand approached record levels in some cases,” said Jitesh Ubrani research manager for IDC’s Mobile Device Trackers. “Gaming, Chromebooks, and in some cases cellular-enabled notebooks were all bright spots during the quarter. Had the market not been hampered by component shortages, notebook shipments would have soared even higher during the third quarter as market appetite was yet unsatiated.”
Unfortunately, shortages of multiple components, such as processors, panels, and other subcomponents, led to missed opportunity for many vendors. “The PC industry rode into the third quarter with a sizeable backlog of unfulfilled orders,” said Linn Huang, research vice president, Devices and Displays at IDC. “And it appears the quarter will end under the same auspices. Given that the shortages have been due more to a shortfall of business planning than a technical glitch, we do not anticipate a sudden surge in capacity. Consequently, this backlog will likely carry into 2021.”
Cue Patently Apple’s version of the spreadsheet:
My take: I’d love to see the revenue spreadsheet.
Haha to all those shallow thinkers who dismissed Tim Cook as an operations ‘guy’. Haha to the cut-and-paste biz school scholars who predicted Apple’s death due to low Mac market share back in the pre-iPhone days.
Tim is a visionary who executes. Listen and learn.
The impact of the pandemic will be long-lasting for hundreds of millions of people and some enterprise adaptations for the COVID-19 health emergency will permanently change where and how millions of us perform our work. Freedom of choice may have provided a new source of growth for Apple in the September quarter and this may endure for years to come.
Apple’s ability to deliver in 2020 is a testament to supply chain management.
Like others have said here recently, the pandemic has accelerated PC and tablet spending and because everyone is home, people get to personally choose their own platform to work from. Seems lots of folks like Apple.