14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has been seeing record Mac sales in the past quarters, not only in terms of portables, but also desktops and even servers. In fact, Apple's Xserves have been selling so well recently, that the company has managed to land a spot on the top-10 worldwide server brands list.
Lenovo and Langchao were on the top-10 worldwide server brands in the fourth quarter of 2006, but both were pushed aside in the first quarter of 2007, to be replaced by Hitachi and Apple at the ninth and tenth position, respectively. The International Data Corporation report indicated that Acer, Hitachi and Apple took eighth, ninth and tenth position with shipments of 14,900, 9,000 and 8,700 units, and on-quarter shipments growth of 5%, 26% and 73%, respectively. Meanwhile, overall worldwide server shipments during the first quarter of 2007 declined 11% mainly due to second and third ranked Dell and IBM which saw on-quarter drops of 3% and 17% respectively.
Much like with its Mac line, Apple is seeing significant growth in Xserve sales, and while it is still a relatively small number of machines, it is definitely going up and up. Intel's schedule to cut CPU prices in July and AMD's plans to launch its native quad-core processor (Barcelona) in the second half of 2007 are both seen as reasons for the drop is overall server shipments, but Apple was unaffected. With the launch of the fifth generation of Xserve server and the adoption of Intel Dual Core Xeon processors (Woodcrest), several enterprises adopted the Apple solution, boosting the company's growth in first quarter 2007 significantly.
Despite not being on the top-10 worldwide server brands list, both Lenovo and Langchao had steady shipments compared to the previous quarter, the only reason Apple and Hitachi surpassed them being their large on-quarter shipments growth.