IDC Says Mac Shipments Rose in the Most Recent Calendar Quarter ⇥ idc.com

IDC, explaining an estimated 13.4% year-over-year decline in PC shipments:

The overall weak demand has caused inventory levels to remain above normal for longer than expected. This includes finished systems at the channel level, as well as the supply chain. So far, no PC maker has been immune to the challenges presented by the market. Except for Apple and HP Inc., all the leading companies experienced double-digit declines during the quarter. But Apple benefited from a favorable year-over-year comparison as the company suffered supply issues during 2Q22 due to COVID-related shutdowns within the supply chain.

Compared to their estimated 40% decline in Mac sales for January through March — see previous commentary — this is notable to me because it includes only a couple of weeks of shipments for the Macs newest announced at WWDC. IDC’s press release for the same quarter a year ago blamed the supply chain for a drop in Mac sales.

Bizarrely, though Apple is the only brand to record growth, CNBC’s Rohan Goswami somehow framed it as both a positive and a negative:

Apple saw year-over-year growth of 10.3%, the only PC maker out of the top five globally to return to positive results. Apple’s Mac computers now account for 8.6% of global market share, as the company shipped 5.3 million Mac units in the second quarter alone.

That number is still markedly down relative to the quarter a year ago, which had 4.8 million Mac shipments total. It’s a decline mirrored by the broader market, which experienced a total fall of 13.4% in PC shipments year over year, from 71.1 million units to 61.6 million units, according to IDC.

I feel like a dummy because I cannot figure out how the second paragraph here fits with the first. The number of Mac shipments, as Goswami acknowledges, grew; it was not “markedly down” and did not “mirror […] the broader market”. It was the complete opposite. Market share is also up — from 6.8% to 8.6%. I might be reading this wrong, but it looks a little like the second paragraph here was prewritten in anticipation of a sales slide and Goswami forgot to delete it.