Mac worldwide market share hits 3.5 percent in Q2 2008

Well, it's that time of the quarter again. With Apple today announcing its quarterly results, we can tally the company's market share vs. the rest of the PC market. Once again, Apple recorded a blockbuster quarter, selling a record 2.5 million Macs, a growth rate of 41 percent year over year. (The PC industry, by comparison, grew about 15.8 percent.) Of course, as has often been pointed out, huge growth is much easier when you're small. Nonetheless, let's see how it pans out this quarter. As always, I average the IDC and Gartner numbers to arrive at overall worldwide PC sales and market share. Gartner reports that PC makers sold 71.9 million PCs in the second quarter of 2008, a 16 percent bump from the same quarter a year ago. IDC, meanwhile, says that 70.6 million units were sold, a 15.3 percent jump. The average of those two numbers is 71.25 million units. The top five PC makers worldwide are: HP:    13.2 million units (average, IDC and Gartner) Dell:  11.4 Acer:   8.4 Lenovo: 5.6 Apple, again, sold 2.5 million Macs. Do the math and that works out to 3.5 percent market share for the quarter. This represents yet another quarter of steady gain for Apple: Q2 2008: 3.50 percent Q1 2008: 3.26 percent Q4 2007: 3.12 percent Q3 2007: 3.19 percent But you can see how huge growth doesn't translate to huge market share gains. Even if the PC market stood absolutely still, and it doesn't, 40 percent growth on 3 percent can only get you so far. About one quarter of one percent, to be precise.