Apple's reign as PC market share leader was short-lived as Hewlett-Packard regained its top spot in the first quarter of 2012 by the narrowest of margins, according to research firm Canalys.
HP shipped 40,000 more client PCs than Apple in the first three months of the year, Canalys reported this week.
The final tally of shipped units for both companies was about 15.8 million with HP just edging out its competitor in final shipment numbers for the first quarter. Apple had passed up HP in the fourth quarter of 2011, the research firm reported earlier this year, but that calculation was not without controversy.
Canalys, counter to some researchers' defining of the PC market, now counts consumer tablets like Apple's hugely popular iPad as client PCs. Apple shipped some 15.4 million iPads in the final three months of 2011, gaining it the PC market share crown in the process by Canalys' reckoning.
But Apple's iPad shipments slipped to 11.8 million units in its March quarter. The decline was steep enough to give long-standing PC market share leader HP its crown back—though with the third-generation iPad now available, HP's title may once again be up for grabs.
Apple's fall from the top spot can be explained by a seasonal drop-off in sales of its consumer-friendly devices from the holiday quarter, plus the late entry of its newest iPad to the market, with just a couple of weeks left in the first quarter.
Overall, the explosive growth of the tablet segment of the market helped drive impressive overall growth for PCs, Canalys said. In the first quarter, computer makers shipped 107 million client PCs, growing the market 21 percent from the same quarter in 2011.
And tablets led the charge. Shipments of pads, as Canalys calls consumer tablets, grew a whopping 200 percent year-over-year, according to the research firm.
"Most of the leading PC vendors have done a reasonable job of offsetting the declines in their netbook shipments over the past year with increased pad business,' Canalys analyst Tom Evans said, noting that netbook shipments slipped 34 percent year-over-year, a sixth straight quarter of decline.
Lenovo, which grew its PC shipments 50 percent year-over-year, finished third in market share in the first quarter of 2012. Acer and Dell rounded out the top five in the PC client market.
The big question for PC makers is how to take part in the rising tablet tide, Evans said. Laptops, including the new thin-and-light Ultrabook category, grew 11 percent in terms of unit shipments from the first quarter of last year, while desktop PC shipments grew 8 percent, Canalys reported.
That's encouraging for vendors like HP and Dell without a real foothold in the consumer tablet market yet, but no one can ignore the fact that tablets are taking up a bigger chunk of the overall PC market with each passing year, the research firm noted. A year ago, tablets represented 7 percent of total PC shipments, but that share had risen to 22 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 and held steady at 19 percent in the first quarter of 2012.
"The challenge is breaking out into the really big volumes to challenge the leaders—Apple and Amazon," Evans said, naming the top two sellers of tablets in the world. "So far, only Samsung has shown it can routinely ship more than a million pads a quarter."
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