Apple shipped 6.2 million Macs during the first quarter of 2026, up from 5.7 million in the year-earlier period, according to new estimates from research firm IDC. The 9.1% year-over-year increase comfortably outpaced the broader PC market, which grew just 2.5% over the same period as component shortages and uncertain economic conditions weighed on the industry.
A caveat belongs early. Figures of this kind are estimates of units shipped into the channel rather than sales to customers, and they are estimates because Apple stopped disclosing hardware unit numbers in 2018; rival research firms model the same quarter and routinely land on different totals. The direction of travel is more dependable than the decimal places.
Apple's performance lifted its global PC market share to 9.5%, up from 8.9% a year ago — a meaningful gain for a company that has historically operated at the premium end of a market dominated by volume players. Apple ranked fourth among the world's largest PC vendors, behind Lenovo (16.5 million units), HP (12.1 million units), and Dell (10.3 million units). ASUS, in fifth place, posted the strongest growth rate of any major vendor at 17.1%.
Some of the distance between the two growth rates is arithmetic rather than achievement. Apple ships a fraction of what Lenovo or HP ships, so one strong product can move its percentage in a way simply unavailable to a vendor counting in the tens of millions. It is also insulated at the top of the market, where machines are replaced on a professional cycle instead of when prices fall.
The longer arc matters too, for a company that has spent most of the Mac's modern life in the mid single digits of global share. The move to Apple's own processors, announced in 2020 and completed across the line by 2023, gave the Mac two things it lacked in the Intel years: a performance-per-watt advantage that was immediately visible in laptops, and a chip cadence Apple controls, which turns each generation into a scheduled reason to upgrade rather than a wait on someone else's roadmap.
The broader market has a driver of its own this year. Support for Windows 10 ended in October 2025, and the corporate replacement cycle that followed lifts shipments for every vendor selling into offices — including, at the margin, Apple, since a fleet obliged to replace hardware is a fleet briefly willing to reconsider what it buys. Shipment estimates cannot say whether Apple's gain came from switchers or from existing Mac owners upgrading, which is the more interesting of the two questions.
The main engine behind Apple's acceleration was the M5 MacBook Pro, which arrived in late 2025 and drove a significant wave of upgrades among professional users. The newer M5 MacBook Air models, released more recently, arrived too late in the quarter to materially influence Q1 figures — meaning their contribution is likely to show up in the April–June period instead.
Supply constraints are also part of the story. Demand for certain Mac configurations has outstripped availability: Mac Studio units with the highest RAM options were reporting delivery estimates of four to five months at the time of purchase, a sign that Apple's production capacity has not yet caught up with professional appetite for its most powerful desktop machines.
Those lead times cut both ways in the data. A months-long wait is evidence of demand, but it also means the quarter understates that demand, because machines that cannot be built are units recorded later. Memory is the component the whole industry is currently competing for, so constraint at the top of the range flatters the following quarter roughly as much as it penalises this one.
The IDC data offers a preview of what Apple's own financial results may show when the company reports its second-quarter earnings on April 30. Apple had guided for total revenue growth of 13 to 16 percent year over year in the quarter, with expected revenue of $107.8 billion to $110.7 billion. Mac is typically a modest but steady contributor to those numbers — and the Q1 data suggests the category remains in solid health.
Revenue will be the more informative line on the day. Company-wide guidance says nothing about the category specifically, and the figure worth reading is Mac revenue set against these estimated units: the relationship between the two indicates whether a MacBook Pro cycle delivered volume, higher average prices, or both. Apple discloses the revenue and not the units, which is the reverse of what the research firms provide.
One quarter of outperformance is a data point rather than a trend. The June period, with the M5 MacBook Air counted in full and any Mac Studio backlog cleared, will be the more revealing comparison, and the one that shows whether a chip-driven upgrade wave has broadened into something steadier.