Global shipments of traditional personal computers (PCs), including desktops, notebooks, and workstations, grew 55.2% year-over-year during the first quarter of 2021, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. And the news is particularly good for Apple’s Mac.
On a global scale, Apple moved approximately 6.7 million Macs in the first quarter of 2021 compared to 3.2 million units in the first quarter of 2020. That’s year-over-year growth of 111.5% year-over-year.
This places Apple at fourth place among global PC makers with 8% market share. The Mac trails Lenovo (24.3% market share), HP (22.9%), and Dell (15.4%). However, IDC doesn’t count tablets as PCs; if it did, the iPad would move Apple higher on the list, likely to the top spot.
IDC says that, while PCs remain in extremely high demand, the growth rate benefitted from the shortages faced in the first quarter of 2020 when the global pandemic began, resulting in an unusually favorable year-over-year comparison. PC shipments reached 84 million worldwide in the first quarter of 2021, a modest 8% decline from the fourth quarter of 2020. While sequential declines are typical for the first quarter, a decline this small has not been seen since the first quarter of 2012 when the PC market declined 7.5% sequentially.
