Digital Home Thoughts: Q4 2009 Windows PC Sales Explode

"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."

Unit sales for HP were up 45%, and unit sales for Toshiba were up 71%. Driving all the growth? Low-cost netbook and notebooks - a realm where Apple doesn't exist today. A big factor was certainly Windows 7 - many people I knew were waiting for Windows 7 computers to ship because they "heard Vista was bad". True or not, the perception was there, and Windows 7 couldn't come soon enough. Now that it's here, people are snapping up affordable computers.