For the entire year, PC shipments have been down year-on-year. Though sales are expected to pick up this holiday season, the quickly-rising tablet market is taking a large bite out of traditional PC sales. Though Microsoft’s improved Windows 8.1 OS and the death of Windows XP are expected to help drive enterprise hardware sales, the consumer market still seems set on smartphones and tablets – and it appears that not even apple is Immune to the effect it kicked off with the iPad.
A new DigiTimes report states that overall Apple MacBook shipments for this year will be down from 2012 shipment numbers. MacBook shipments his just over 13 million units last year, but are not expected to hit that figure this year.
The report’s unnamed “sources from the upstream supply chain” say this is despite a recent uptick in orders for new MacBooks. Shipments for Apple’s notebooks have been increasing since June, but are not likely to reach last year’s numbers. DigiTimes points out that this could be partly due to a freeze on component shipments Apple put in place for three months earlier this year. The manufacturer shipped only 5.3 million MacBooks during the first half of 2013.
In many ways, the situation is of Apple’s own making. Now that the company’s smartphone and tablet businesses are its leading products, Apple has not been emphasizing its MacBook, iMac, or Mac Pro products heavily in marketing campaigns. This was demonstrated recently by Apple’s announcement of a new iMac lineup. The announcement was made just days after the company’s big iPhone 5S presentation, where no mention of a MacBook was to be found.
