M1 Macs juice Apple notebook sales, iPad still leads — analyst

Apple’s M-series Mac range.

Apple Silicon has helped propel Macs to the top of the PC performance league tables, and this has seriously impressed consumers. Apple sold 6.5 million laptops in Q3 2021.

It is a boom time for Macs

This surge in demand has been driven by three primary trends:

• The pandemic has driven PC sales as people work more remotely.
• The emergence of employee choice schemes as where they can, workers will choose Macs.
• Apple’s seriously impressive M-series processors.

A total 66.8 million laptops were shipped in Q3 21, according to data from Strategy Analytics. Apple’s grip grew 10% since last year and means the company now holds 10% of the notebook market. While this is a record for Apple, there’s still room to grow: Lenovo, HP and Dell took 62% of the market, the report informs.

Your portable Mac can now drive up to three Pro Display XDRs and a 4K TV all at once

The Mac ships in enterprise

Strategy Analytics analyst, Chirag Upadhyay said:

“Commercial customer upgrades kicked in as some employees returned to in-person work with the target to improve productivity. Education demand (including consumer) was better in the developed market as back to university discounts gave consumers good reason to upgrade now rather than later. It’s worth noting that the shortage of components and rising prices for manufacturing and freight costs also delayed some orders for many vendors. In other words, shipments could have been even higher.”

The MacBook Air has been a particular success for Apple. Light, frequently sold at a discount (Amazon has been reducing prices, as this affiliate link may show), for many of us the power, performance and price make this the Mac to get. Even so, it is worth noting that this quarter’s data does not include the all-new and seriously impressive MacBook Pro range, which are likely to boost sales in professional markets.

iPad is the world’s favorite tablet

Good news too for Apple in tablet sales. While the overall market for tablets declined 10%, Apple’s share grew 15%. It sold 17.3 million iPads in Q3, giving it a 38% share – more than its closest three competitors (Samsung, Lenovo, Amazon) combined.

Analyst Upadhyay said:

“The China tablet market was hot in Q3 and vendor performance mirrored vendor access and brand perception in China. For example, Apple, Lenovo, Xiaomi, and Honor posted some of the strongest year-on-year growth rates while Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft experienced growth rates declining by double digits.  As the pandemic disrupts life in different regions at different times, we expect supply to remain tight and demand to generally remain higher than pre-pandemic levels.”

But component shortages are a problem

In an ideal world, Apple would be looking forward to this market trajectory to continue, but incoming component shortages are allegedly dampening production and therefore impacting sales. Apple was recently described as reducing iPad production to liberate hard to get components for use in new iPhones.

That may sound bad, but given Apple dominates the tablet market, leads the smartphone market, and continues to see strong growth in the PC space, the inability to make devices fast enough is surely a better challenge to have than declining sales.

And in the tablet space at least, Samsung, Amazon, Huawei and ‘others’ all saw decline. There was just one company other than Apple that didn’t see decline — Lenovo saw its slice of the tablet market grow 5%, the analysts claim.

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