Apple just released the results of another phenomenal financial quarter, earning $1.67 billion on revenue of $9.87 billion. According to the company, "Apple sold 3.05 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing a 17 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter." This, of course, allows me to report Apple's worldwide market share number with some accuracy. And we can somewhat guess--since Apple doesn't break out US-only sales--what their US market share is as well.
For worldwide market share, the math is simple. PC makers sold 79.48 million PCs around the world, using my standard system of averaging the IDC and Gartner numbers. That means the Mac now has 3.86 percent market share worldwide. I'm guessing that's a lot lower than you were expecting. But math is math, and as I've tried to explain for several years now, strong quarterly sales growth (17 percent in Apple's case) doesn't amount to much actual real world gain when you're already starting from a very small position comparatively.
(For whatever it's worth, the Mac's 17 percent sales growth pales in comparison to the 26 percent growth experienced by netbook maker Acer.)
For the US number, I've seen a lot of silliness about the Mac hitting 10 percent this quarter. (This is a figure Leo repeated last week on "Windows Weekly," and I suspect that's because he gets his "news" from Mac sites.) Apple's US market share is not (yet?) 10 percent, though. Sorry.
At most, the Mac now has 9.1 percent market share in the US. This figure is obtained, again, by using IDC and Gartner's numbers. However, because I have to also use their numbers for Mac sales, it's a bit less accurate.
However you look at it, the Mac is continuing to gain market share. Back in Q1 2009, the Mac owned 3.36 percent of the entire PC market, and 7.49 percent in the US. Today's figures are actually dramatic gains.