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Apple's share of the US computer market climbed again last quarter, say two research firms, and the company now has a solid lock on third place behind Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
Both Gartner and IDC put Apple in the third spot for US shipments, with 1.34 million machines sold for Dell and 1.13 million for HP. Rounding out the top five in the US were Toshiba and Gateway.
Although Apple's system sales paled compared to Dell's numbers — Dell shipped between 4.83 million and 5.01 million PCs in the US — or HP's figures, Apple's year-to-year growth rate ranged from 15.9% to 37.2%. That's a far cry from the decline of Dell and the more modest increases posted by HP.
Gartner pegged Apple's US market share at 8.1%, while IDC, which posted more conservative Apple numbers across the board, put its third-quarter share at 6.3%. The prior quarter, IDC had Apple at 5.3% of the US market. Since the first of the year, the Framingham, Mass., research company's data showed that Apple has grown its piece of the pie by 1.6 percentage points.
While Gartner's and IDC's numbers for Apple differed wildly, their figures pointed out that Apple's year-to-year growth rate remained significantly higher than the PC industry average. Gartner, for example, said that Apple's growth was nearly eight times the average during the quarter, while IDC put it at just over three times greater than the average.
In global sales statistics, however, Apple is but a blip, with its numbers buried in the "Others" category by both research firms. Worldwide, for example, No. 1 HP sold between 12.8 million and 13.1 million machines during the quarter; second-place Dell, between 9.9 million and 10.2 million PCs globally.
Apple will release definitive sales figures on Monday, when it holds its fiscal fourth-quarter conference call with Wall Street analysts.
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