The “iPad Effect” has catapulted Apple into the #3 spot in mobile PCs during the September quarter, according to research firm DisplaySearch. The company said that the iPad alone accounted for some 8% of mobile PCs sales around the planet during the quarter, though 95% of them were to the developed world, and most of those went to North America.
In a report released Tuesday, DisplaySearch said that Apple accounted for 12.4% of global PC shipments, a market the company defines as notebooks, netbooks, and tablets. Apple was also #1 in the U.S. market.
“A lack of competitive tablet PC products from other brands continues to drive Apple’s. market share in the mobile PC segment,” Chris Connery, Vice President of Large Format Displays at DisplaySearch, said in a statement. “As other players come to market with tablet PCs it will be interesting to see if they can move beyond the Western-centric nature of Apple’s product and develop an infrastructure to support local needs, especially with the growth of consumer spending in China on personal computing devices.”
The firm noted, that one developed market that has not embraced the iPad is Japan, and DisplaySearch said that local language content and language-specific apps have “slowed acceptance in the tech savvy region.”
“On a global scale, the adoption of iPad is not without its challenges,” Hidetoshi Himuro, Director of IT Market Research at DisplaySearch, said. “Localized content in non-English speaking regions is sparse, and iPad owners must have a PC for downloading content from iTunes. As a result, penetration in developing regions will be slow.”
HP maintained its own spot atop DisplaySearch’s rankings, with 9.5 million units shipped during the quarter. That represents 17.3% market share, as noted in the chart below. Acer was #2 with 16.5% market share and 9.1 million units shipped. Apple’s longtime foe Dell was #4, with 11% share on 6.1 million units shipped.
All told, global shipments of laptops, netbooks, and tablets rose to 55 million units int he September quarter, which represents 9.6% year-over-year growth, and the highest volume the company has registered since starting this report in 1999. Most of the increase in demand, according to the report, came from, “new personal computing devices such as netbooks and tablet PCs, as well as lower-priced notebooks.”