Gartner contradicts IDC, says Mac shipments up in Q4 2012

Last week, IDC estimated that Apple's sales of Macs in the holiday quarter of 2012 were down 0.2 percent year over year. Today, Gartner released contradictory numbers showing an actual growth rate of 5.4 percent from the previous year.

The entire PC market showed a slump in sales from 2011, with numbers pointing to a 4.9 percent drop worldwide for all PCs sold during the quarter. Apple was third in terms of US PC sales in the Gartner ratings, behind HP -- which surprisingly saw a 12.6 percent rise in Q4 2012 in sales year over year -- and Dell, which took a 16.5 percent hit on sales in 2012.

Gartner principal analyst Mikako Kitagawa believes that tablets are having a profound effect on PC sales, "not so much by "cannibalizing" PC sales, but by causing PC users to shift consumption to tablets rather than replacing older PCs. Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC."

All will be revealed next Wednesday on Apple's fiscal first quarter 2013 earnings call. TUAW will be providing a liveblog of the call beginning at 5 PM ET / 2 PM PT on January 23.

[via The Loop]