Macs drop down to the fourth best-selling computer in the U.S.

Apple’s share of the U.S. computer hardware market slipped during the first quarter of 2014, with both IDC and Gartner seeing a year-over-year decline in worldwide PC shipments as consumers trend toward mobile. Unlike last quarter’s stellar performance, which saw Apple’s Mac buck the declining PC sales trend with a 30 percent year-to-year increase, the quarter ending in March proved to be more of a struggle for the company, according to market research firms IDC and Gartner.

PC shipment estimates for the first quarter of 2014 are out from both IDC and Gartner, and as usual the two companies disagree. IDC shows Apple falling to 4th place in the U.S., behind Lenovo, while Gartner has the company remaining in 3rd place just ahead of Lenovo. Both agree, however, that Apple’s U.S. market share has fallen somewhat year-on-year, IDC showing a drop from 11 to 10.3 percent, while Gartner’s numbers show a decline from 11.5 to 10.8 percent. The differences are relatively small, however, with both sets of numbers show that around 1.5 million Macs were sold in the first quarter of the year. Apple’s share of the global PC market has mostly climbed year-on-year over the past decade.