Apple shipped 6.8 million Macs in Q3 2026, an 11% drop from the same quarter last year. That is a far smaller decline than the rest of the industry saw, with global PC shipments falling 21.2% to 58.1 million units.
The figures come from new research by Omdia, which tracks desktops, notebooks, and workstations. Desktop shipments fell 23.5% to 11.7 million units, while notebook shipments dropped 20.6% to 46.4 million. Omdia links the slump to fading pull-forward demand and higher component costs that have now reached retail prices.
Premium Pricing Kept Mac Shipments Falling Slower Than the Market
Apple held fourth place in the rankings and gained more than one percentage point of market share, which puts its share near 12%. Omdia says Apple’s premium positioning helped limit the impact of higher prices on its shipments.
The decline follows a strong stretch for the Mac. Apple had grown Mac shipments by 10% in the previous quarter while the wider PC market was already shrinking.
Omdia’s top five finished in largely the same order as a year ago, though the gaps between them shifted.
- Lenovo: 14.9 million units and 26% market share
- HP: 10.3 million units, down 31%, with share falling to 18%
- Dell: 7.6 million units and 13% market share
- Apple: 6.8 million units, down 11%
- Asus: 5.4 million units, with share up to 9.3%
HP took the biggest hit among the top vendors, and its share is nearly three percentage points lower than a year ago. Asus recorded the smallest decline of the group.
Memory and Storage Costs Are Behind the Industry-Wide Slump
Ben Yeh, Principal Analyst at Omdia, says DRAM and SSDs now make up nearly 40% of a PC’s cost, up from around 15%, with prices more than four times higher. PC vendors have raised prices several times over the past few quarters, and Yeh says those increases have not fully covered the added cost. Shortages of processors, graphics cards, and other IC components have made inventory harder to manage on top of that.
Apple raised Mac prices in June, which moved the MacBook Neo from $599 to $699 for most buyers, and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said tight DRAM supply is already affecting Apple’s hardware planning.
Ishan Dutt, Research Director at Omdia, says the scale of the drop is no surprise after leading OEMs warned of double-digit unit declines in the second half. Retailers reported double-digit increases in average selling prices alongside falling sales. Vendors and their ODM partners began cutting production in Q3, while channel partners are still working through elevated inventory. With regards to what comes next, Yeh said:
“The current decline may be just the beginning of a new downward cycle.”
Omdia forecasts the PC market to fall 24% year over year in Q4 2026, followed by a further 7% decline for full-year 2027.
