Apple falls to 6th place among laptop manufacturers; new MacBook may be on the way

THE TrendForce yesterday released its latest survey on the performance of the main manufacturers in the global laptop market and the news is not the best for Apple – as you might imagine, considering that Apple sold fewer Macs in the last quarter than in all previous ones since 2010.

With 3.72 million Macs dispatched in the second quarter, the Cupertino giant fell to the sixth place among portable computer manufacturers – in the first quarter of 2018, Apple was fourth in the ranking. In absolute numbers of units shipped, Apple fell 2.8% year-on-year or 10.2% over the previous quarter. Its market share also fell by 7.7% (at the beginning of the year) for the current 6.5%.

Sales of laptop manufacturers, Q2 2018, TrendForce

Things are even more delicate for Apple considering that it is falling in a market that grows every quarter. The notebook segment as a whole saw a 10.2% jump compared to the previous quarter and all manufacturers above Apple in the ranking, with the exception of ASUS, also grew – with emphasis on the HP, market leader that saw a jump of 19.7%, and mainly for the third place Dell, which rose by 30%.

Of course, of course: it is good to note that, in the last quarter, all lines of portable Macs were out of date and this may have contributed a lot to the fall. Now, MacBooks Pro have received attention from Apple and it is possible that we will start to see some reaction from Cupertino on the list. But is it enough? Well… according to the same TrendForce, maybe more help is on the way.

According to the firm, Apple is planning to launch a new MacBook Air (or is it MacBook?) at the end of the current quarter, as the conclusion of a transition phase in which the company would update all of its portable Macs. According to the Taiwanese:

The second quarter was the transition period for the launch of the upcoming new MacBook devices for the rest of the year. TrendForce therefore expects MacBook shipments to grow again in the third quarter, considering that Apple will launch a new MacBook Pro at the beginning of the period and a new MacBook Air at the end.

The new MacBook Pro to which the firm refers, of course, has already been launched – who knows why the note speaks of an event that has already occurred as something that is yet to happen. TrendForce does not cite the sources from which it obtained this information, so we should take everything with a certain degree of skepticism, but wait to see more news in this regard. The rumors are in full swing, after all.

via Cult of Mac