Score another one for the Apple doom-and-gloom crowd

Score another one for the Apple doom-and-gloom crowd. "Apple's Mac Shipments Decline In US PC Market Fashion Dresses In Q3 As Tablets Continue To Erode Worldwide PC Sales," declared the International Business Times. Why the focus on the U.S. you might ask? Because the "data" such as it is comes from reports by IDC and Gartner, which themselves are nothing but surveys. Apple will release actual sales results on October 28, where it will tell the world precisely how many computers it sold in the quarter. While it's quite probable the total will be down versus a year ago,Fashion Dresses here's an equally accurate headline: "Apple On Verge Of Becoming Top 5 Global PC Maker For The First Time Since 1996."

To clarify, neither Gartner nor IDC believes Apple is in that top 5 though it's possible they're wrong. And however close Apple is, the only reason it's on the cusp is because sales at Asus are collapsing, down at least 22% and perhaps 34%, depending on which of the two firms' numbers you believe. Things are scarcely better for fourth place Acer, which has seen similar sales declines in the past year. The good news for the market overall, though,Fashion Dresses is that the top three: Lenovo, HP and Dell, have each eked out small gains. Unfortunately, they're becoming bigger in a market that's still becoming smaller: Total PC shipments are down 8% versus 2012 and IDC doesn't like the immediate future: "Despite being a little ahead of forecast, and the work that's being done on new designs and integration of features like touch, the third quarter results suggest that there's still a high probability that we will see another decline in worldwide shipments in 2014."

Gartner notes this time of year is often strong: "The third quarter is often referred to as the 'back-to-school' quarter for PC sales, and sales this quarter dropped to their lowest volume since 2008," said Mikako Kitagawa,Fashion Dresses principal analyst at Gartner. That's Great Recession-level volumes. Not surprisingly it puts the blame on increasing use of tablets. ""Consumers' shift from PCs to tablets for daily content consumption continued to decrease the installed base of PCs both in mature as well as in emerging markets." But the continued myopic look at tablets as consumption devices misses the disruptive impact both they and smartphones have had. Consider the chart from Asymco.

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