It's Official: Apple's Number Three In The U.S.

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on October 17

The latest PC market share figures from Gartner just landed in my inbox about an hour ago, and they are very interesting.

By Gartner’s reckoning — and it should be noted that these are estimates — Apple has finally surpassed both Gateway (now part of Acer) and Toshiba to make it into third place in the U.S. PC market behind leaders Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Gartner pegs Apple’s unit shipments in the third quarter at 1,338,000, besting Toshiba by nearly 400,000 and Gateway by 473,000. Last year at this time, Apple was behind Gateway by a mere 36,000 units, per Gartner’s estimates.

It says Apple’s share of the U.S. market is up over 8%, versus 6.2% a year ago. That’s an improvement of more than 37% year-on-year, making Apple the fastest-growing computer vendor domestically. It grew at more than twice the rate that HP and Toshiba did in the period.

Still, 1.34 million computers won’t get you into the top five on a global basis. Toshiba came in fifth there with more than 3 million units sold in the quarter, or more than twice Apple’s estimated domestic sales.

Incidentally, Gartner really under-estimated Apple’s domestic volume last quarter and left it out of the top five. Oops. The picture will be a lot clearer when Apple reports earnings next week. Stay tuned.

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