Lenovo's Leads in Computer Growth and Market Share
Eric Slivka takes a look at computer unit sales estimates from research firms Gartner and IDC for MacRumors. The two firms contradict each other with respect to Apple: Gartner has them slightly down, and IDC has them slightly up. But they both agree that the big winner is Lenovo. Lenovo is Apple’s closest laptop competitor, their ThinkPad line is the most common recommendation for a PC laptop with a similar build quality as a MacBook.
These numbers don’t mean much on their own, and the fact that these firms sometimes contradict each other speaks volumes about the accuracy of this kind of analysis, but the recent success of Lenovo is more smoke to the fire that Apple’s Mac strategy isn’t working. Apple’s push for policies like sandboxing and focus on iOS at the expense of macOS, is intended to move apps towards the Mac App Store, and ideally iOS, but the more significant impact is that it’s moving customers towards other platforms, ones more amicable to their workflows. In other words, the big winners from Apple’s Mac App Store strategy will be Lenovo, Windows, and Linux, not Apple, iOS, or the Mac.