For my whole career, I’ve been aware of babble and noise coming from “research” firms like Gartner and IDC. Their publications are, nearly always, bizarrely wrong or completely irrelevant to reality, designed mostly to please consultants who cite them and clueless CIOs who read them and feel clever, but neither pursuit has traditionally been tightly coupled to reality.
One of the drums they’ve adopted to beat loudly and often is the supposed decline of Apple, so much so that they declared Apple would suffer a DECREASE in Mac shipments this quarter — an announcement they made in advance of Apple’s own quarterly reports.
They were, of course, very very wrong, as Apple reported double-digit Mac sales growth in the period.
Apple’s sales figures not only contradict both IDC and Gartner figures, but also both firm’s market conclusions. IDC specifically reported that Apple’s Macs “lost market share over the past year. In U.S. shipments, Apple slipped to become the No. 4 PC maker, dropping from the No. 3 spot to come in at 10 percent market share, a 1.7 percent decline.”
IDC’s incorrect assessment of Apple’s double digit U.S. growth percentage as a year-over-year “decline” also calls into question its ranking of Apple as the fourth largest maker of conventional PCs in the domestic market, as the narrowest possible interpretation of Maestri’s “double digit” growth would essentially tie Apple with Lenovo in U.S. sales, according to IDC’s own figures.
More importantly, it also means Apple’s Mac sales continued to outpace the overall industry. Both firms reported that Apple lost share in the quarter. However, IDC estimated the U.S. PC sales increased by just 6.9 percent. Globally, it reported that PC sales fell by 2 percent in the quarter as Apple’s Mac sales grew by 18 percent.
Gartner estimated that U.S. PC sales grew at a slightly faster pace of 7.4 percent, still far behind the “strong double digit growth” Maestri reported for Macs. And Gartner’s numbers portray Apple and Lenovo as being even closer than IDC’s, suggesting that there’s no way Apple could have experienced a “double digit” percentage in growth without surpassing Lenovo to become the third largest vendor of conventional PCs in the U.S., behind HP and Dell.
Even more damning is the way they calculate PC vs. tablet sales:
In calculating their PC “market share” numbers, both IDC and Gartner include low end netbook and hybrid devices and Windows tablets. IDC also counts Chromebook web browser devices, but both firms exclude sales of Apple’s iPad from their PC sales figures.
If they had included iPads and other tablets in their PC figures, they would be forced to recognize Apple as being the largest computer maker by a wide margin. Despite much media handwringing about Apple’s year-over-year decrease in iPad sales, the company still sold 13.3 million iPads globally in the quarter, more than Samsung, Lenovo and Asus (the next three largest vendors, according to IDC) combined.
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IDC, Gartner and Strategy Analytics have a long history of presenting carefully contrived data in press releases clearly designed to flatter their clients and denigrate their clients’ competitors, with Apple being a common target.
Beyond just serving the public relations needs of their clients, however, data promulgated by these marketing firms helped to obscure major shifts in the technology landscape, such as the clear and obvious shift away from conventional PCs that began with the appearance of iPad in 2010.
Fortune has an interesting backgrounder on how these estimates are created, and for whom, and (as you may surmise) reality doesn’t enter into it. Pleasing their clients does, and their clients are the other PC makers.
All of this is h/t Daring Fireball.
