Apple Industry News

Apple’s Mac gained more than one percentage point of worldwide personal computer market share in the third quarter of 2026, reaching 11.7%, even as global PC shipments fell sharply, according to new research from Omdia.

Worldwide shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations declined 21.2% year on year to 58.1 million units in the third quarter, Omdia said Friday. Desktop shipments, including desktop workstations, fell 23.5% to 11.7 million units, while notebook shipments, including mobile workstations, declined 20.6% to 46.4 million units.

Apple held fourth place, shipping 6.8 million units, down 11% from a year earlier. Its share rose to 11.7% as its premium positioning helped limit the impact of higher prices.

“After sustained pull-forward activity buoyed the PC market in the first half of the year, this sharp drop in shipment volumes comes as no surprise,” Ishan Dutt, research director at Omdia, said in a statement. “The scale of the decline is consistent with what the industry signaled throughout the last earnings cycle, with leading OEMs forecasting double-digit unit contractions in H2 and retailers reporting double-digit increases in average selling prices (ASPs) alongside falling sales. The impact of upstream component cost increases has now fully worked its way through to end-market pricing, with consumers and IT decision-makers responding accordingly. On the supply side, vendors and their ODM partners began scaling back production in 3Q, while channel partners continued working through elevated inventory levels.”

Supply-chain pressure has intensified in recent months. Along with continued increases in memory and storage prices, shortages of processors, graphics cards, and numerous IC components have made supply-chain and inventory management more difficult for PC vendors.

“The cost share of DRAM and SSDs in PCs has risen sharply from a typical level of around 15% to nearly 40%, with price increases more than fourfold,” Ben Yeh, principal analyst at Omdia, said in a statement. “Although PC vendors have raised prices multiple times over the past few quarters, these increases have yet to fully offset the impact. These pressures are expected to persist, and the current decline may be just the beginning of a new downward cycle.”

Omdia forecasts the PC market will decline 24% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2026, with a further 7% decline expected for full-year 2027.

Rankings among the leading vendors were largely unchanged both sequentially and year on year. Lenovo remained in first place, shipping 14.9 million units and holding a 26% market share. HP recorded the largest decline among the top vendors, at 31%, and ranked second with 10.3 million units. Its share fell to 18%, nearly three percentage points lower than a year earlier.

Dell remained third, shipping 7.6 million units and accounting for 13% of the market. Asus rounded out the top five with the smallest decline among the leading vendors, shipping 5.4 million units as its market share improved to 9.3% year on year.

Different, and better, numbers than IDC managed to divine.

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Source link: https://macdailynews.com/2026/10/09/apples-mac-increases-share-of-worldwide-personal-computer-market-to-11-7-omdia/

SpaceX said this week it has agreed to acquire a nationwide portfolio of low-band spectrum that it calls one of the last technical pieces needed for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the United States.

The deal covers up to 14 megahertz of paired spectrum in the 800 MHz band. SpaceX said the airwaves are meant to fill a coverage gap that higher-frequency spectrum does not: penetration through walls and other obstacles so phones can stay connected indoors. The company also noted that most existing mobile devices already support the band, which it described as underused.

The purchase still needs final approval from the Federal Communications Commission. Once that is in hand, SpaceX said Starlink Mobile will use a hybrid architecture that combines its satellite-to-mobile constellation with a terrestrial network so devices can hand off between space and ground. Mid-band spectrum around 2 GHz, which SpaceX has previously lined up for global use, would supply capacity, while the new low-band licenses would act as a coverage layer for buildings, rural areas, and dead zones.

Separately, the FCC approved Starlink Mobile’s Gen2 constellation application, authorizing SpaceX to launch 15,000 satellites optimized for 2 GHz spectrum worldwide. SpaceX said those V2 satellites will deliver more than 100 times the bandwidth of the current generation and bring high-speed service directly to unmodified phones. The FCC also authorized the full range of Ka-, V-, E-, and W-band backhaul frequencies used by Starlink’s V3 broadband satellites so they can work with the existing gateway network.

SpaceX framed the two steps as a path to a single network that works indoors, outdoors, and in places conventional cellular coverage does not reach. “With this new low-band spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can now become the first network operator to deploy both satellite and terrestrial spectrum,” the company said.

The announcement identified the seller as Grain Management, which had acquired the 800 MHz licenses from T-Mobile earlier this year. No purchase price was disclosed in SpaceX’s update. Carrier shares fell after the news, and Verizon said spectrum alone is not a network.
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The EchoStar spectrum deal that underpins much of Starlink Mobile’s mid-band plan is not expected to fully close until late 2027, so commercial use of that capacity remains on a longer timeline than the announcement’s framing suggests.

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Source link: https://macdailynews.com/2026/10/09/spacex-buys-800-mhz-spectrum-aims-to-make-starlink-mobile-a-major-u-s-carrier/