While the PC industry is shrinking as a whole, Apple"s Mac sales are up according to new data from NPD showing sales are significantly higher this year.
All Things D says the NPD data cited by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster shows Mac sales rose by an impressive 31 percent year over year for the month of January. Munster believes that the reason for this significant improvement is due to Apple catching up with iMac supply, however the Apple Store still has a wait of two-to-four week shipping times so it seems Apple could still do more to meet demand.
In Apple"s last earnings report, CEO Tim Cook said that iMac supplies had not been what the company had hoped:
We left the quarter with significant constraints on the iMac. And we believe … that our sales would have been materially higher if those constraints weren’t there.”
Cook then went on to promise that Apple would work to increase iMac production, however he warned that the supply-demand balance may be something of a moving target in the short term.
On iMac, we are confident that we are going to significantly increase the supply. But the demand here is very strong, and we are not certain that we will achieve a supply-demand balance during the quarter.
Another likely reason for the major bump in Mac sales is that more users want to be in Apple"s entire ecosystem having already picked up iPhones and/or iPads. The benefits of syncing services between devices may be driving users to purchase Macs.
Source: All Things D | Image: Apple