HP Crushes Dell, Acer in Q4 2010 PC Shipments
Hewlett-Packard showed strong PC sales in the final quarter of last year and was able to beat its rivals. Dell remained in the second spot and increased its lead over Acer.
HP sold 18.0 million units, up from 15.9 million PCs in the third quarter, IHS iSuppli said. Dell's shipments were flat at 11.3 million units, while Acer dropped from 11.0 million to 9.5 million PCs. For the entire year, HP sold 64.8 million computers, followed by Dell with 43.8 million and Acer with 41.5 million.
"A little more than one year after a prolonged decline in shipments caused Dell to lose its customary second-place ranking to rival Acer, Dell now seems to have regained a firm hold on the No. 2 rank," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms, for IHS.
"Acer in the third quarter of 2009 had surged to the No. 2 spot on the strength of its strong sales of netbook PCs to consumers and a generally buoyant consumer market. However, with momentum for consumer PCs waning and in light of growing competition from media tablets, Acer’s gains have been reversed."
Overall PC sales were 93.1 million in the fourth quarter of last year, up 5.7% from 88.1 million in the third quarter and a 4.7% improvement from 88.9 million PCs in Q4 2009. iSuppli expects the PC market to break the 100 million mark per quarter soon. It is interesting to note that it was the desktop market that drove PC sales in the fourth quarter and not the notebook.
"Desktop sales in the fourth quarter were buoyed by strong corporate demand," Wilkins said.
"The corporate PC segment continues to outperform the consumer market as companies replace systems with newer, faster, more efficient computers."
Total sales for the year were 345.4 million units, up 14.2% from 302.4 million in 2009, Wilkins said.

Now, not only did they lose thousands of dollars of future business from me, but also the company I work for, as I'll be the primary person to do the tech ordering, in addition to all of my friends and family that come to me for suggestions on tech, since I'm a big technophile and am always in the know when it comes to computers and electronics.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/customer_service
^^ it's amazing how being on commission affects someone's attitude
^+1..
The HP suffered the NV chipset defect - as, I suspect, do some of the computers mentioned by @windowsmelover above. I knew about the defect before it manifested on that laptop, though, so when it did begin to fail I was able to contact HP support, describe the problems, describe how they were similar to the symptoms caused by the chipset defect, and they promptly offered to repair the laptop and ship both ways at no charge. This, even though the laptop was out of warranty by 6 months. I can't find any fault at all with HP for that. After all, there was no way for them to know in advance that NV had screwed up its chipset manufacturing in a way that would only manifest after a substantial period of time.
To the posters above with faulty HPs, if your equipment suffered the same type of failure and you were treated differently, then I can sympathize with you and would agree that HP owes you a better experience. But I personally cannot find anything wrong with what they did for me.
Windows smart phones are a different story. I had an HP iPAQ 6945. HP barely offered ANY updates on the firmware / software for the phone. And because of a cumulative hanging problem, I had to reboot the thing about once every few days. It seemed that a defect in the installed Outlook software would cause the thing to run out of memory, but HP didn't offer any Outlook updates even though other phone vendors offered updates to their entire platforms (both O/S and apps).
I do not really see how that's possible if Dell is #1 in business...?
Remember way back in the days when IBM was king.? LOL