Apple nabs 5.2% of desktop market


NPD Techworld reports that Apple garnered 5.2 percent of retail desktop sales in October. However, sales of the company's portable computers didn't warrant a top-five listing. The publicly available, summarized version of the report doesn't offer model breakdowns or listings of makers in the bottom half of the top ten.

Compaq and HP, listed as the number one and two vendors, accounted for 32.8 and 26.3 percent of the retail market, respectively, and a whopping 59.1 percent of the market overall. Emachines and IBM filled out the number three and four positions with 14.3 percent and 8.3 percent shares, respectively.

Editor's note: As we have reported previously, PowerMac sales have fallen almost continuously for the last year, which given a stable market share would seem to indicate that an ever larger proportion of the company's unit sales are accounted for by consumers. This of course begs the question, "Are power users defecting or simply waiting until the mothership produces some compelling pro hardware?"

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