Mac sales can't keep pace with cheap PCs, Apple slips to No. 5

From InfoWorld: While Mac sales in the U.S. were up 31 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, Apple was unable to keep pace with exploding sales of cheap Windows PCs, and fell to the No. 5 spot, research firm IDC said Wednesday.

Rival analysts at Gartner, meanwhile, pegged Apple's year-over-year growth at 23 percent, and also put it in fifth place, behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer and Toshiba. Apple's new position is down one from the same quarter in 2008.

The 40,000-Mac difference between the two research companies' numbers was enough for Apple to outperform the U.S. computer industry average by IDC's account, but come in under the average gain in Gartner's calculations. But even with fourth quarter gains three to four times greater than those in the third quarter, Apple's sales increases couldn't match the numbers of HP , which boosted its unit sales by 45 percent, and Toshiba, which grew its sales by 71 percent.

"The U.S. market last quarter continued to be very price driven," said Mikako Kitagawa, a Gartner analyst. "If a company is not in the low-priced market, it's absolutely difficult for it to increase market share. And Apple did not do as well as others in share because of its prices."

According to Kitagawa, the growth in U.S. PC sales was driven largely by low-priced notebooks and netbooks, which HP, Acer, and Toshiba sold in abundance. Apple's lowest-priced laptop, however, costs twice as much as the $500 Windows notebooks that played a big part in the quarter, Kitagawa added.

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