Mac growth at 25 percent

Apple's worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2004, nearly doubling the overall PC growth rate in the same quarter. IDC said that worldwide shipments of PCs grew 13.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2004 on strong demand from small- and medium-sized businesses as well as holiday shoppers. Apple's tremendous growth rate was driven in part by the new iMac G5 and the "halo effect;" however, it was not enough to land Apple among the top PC vendors in terms of marketshare and overall unit sales for the quarter: Dell (17%), HP (16%), IBM (5.7%), Acer (4.3%), and Fujitsu/Siemens (4%) were in the top 5, respectively. IDC forecasts growth in worldwide PC shipments will moderate to about 10 percent this year, according to the AP report.

by MacNN Staff