Chinese market research firm Sigmaintell expects Apple to be the only company to see growth in the laptop market this year.

Overall, Sigmaintel predicts global notebook shipments will reach 181.1 million units this year, a decline of 8%. That drop will, in part, be caused by memory and component shortages and also by slowing market demand. That’s going to damage all of the notebook vendors, bar Apple,. 

Apple laptop sales expected to rise more than 20%

Sigmaintell calculates Apple will ship 28 million laptop in the year, up 21.7% from 2025. This puts Apple in third place in laptop shipments, a demand the company will be able to meet despite component shortages because of the efficient use of memory inherent to its systems. That memory efficiency acts as a protection against the impact of climbing costs, even as competitors struggle with the affects on their business.

Apple’s incoming CEO, John Ternan, is being presented as a hardware man, so he will no doubt be pleased to experience the benefit of MacBook Neo’s massive attack on the lower echelons of the market. The Neo is already generating millions of additional sales, something Apple’s diversified revenue engine, including services, can further capitalize on.

PC makers face steep decline

There’s quite stark news for PC manufacturers. The report predicts Lenovo, Dell, HP, and ASUS will see sharp sales declines and warns that the entire industry will need to quickly transition from hardware-based sales toward full ecosystem plays. 

That’s going to be extraordinarily difficult for most PC makers. Not only do most of them use operating systems they don’t build themselves, but most lack a successful range of services customers will happily choose to use. 

For the most part, while Apple offers Apple Music, competitors only offer Spotify, a situation that generates far less revenue for them. That lack of successful monetization in terms of attached income across the customer base meant less when the PC market was growing, but in an environment buffeted by multiple business challenges it becomes a vulnerability that cannot be ignored. It exposes the inherent weakness of a strategy in which hardware manufacturers rely on third parties for operating systems and services, as the lion’s share of income doesn’t reach those hardware makers. 

You can go your own way

There’s little doubt that part of the reason Apple is in such a strong position is because of its highly strategic outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, who led efforts to build a strong services business, accompanied by a wide ecosystem of complementary accessories. You don’t just buy an iPhone, you buy a Mac, AirPods, and Apple Music. You don’t just get an iPad, but you likely also acquire Apple Arcade. 

To a great extent, Apple’s strength now owes a big debt to the many years in which the company was marginalized. Forced to follow its own path, Apple deliberately developed its own unique platform-based approach. That approach meant the company remained profitable even when it held just a few percentage points of the PC market; as its market share improves, we can also see its profitability climb. 

The way that you do it

This good news may not matter as much as you might think to Apple’s leadership team. To them, while becoming the industry’s fastest-growing notebook manufacturer is nice, what matters more is crafting a platform experience that means something to the people using it. That, after all, is how to generate the high user satisfaction Apple’s platform loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations come from.

That 16% of everyone purchasing a notebook this year will choose a Mac suggests a watershed moment for all Apple’s platforms.

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