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As 2009 came to a close, the top five PC makers each held their position, but it's the battle for second place that's particularly interesting. According to iSuppli, Acer grew by 21 percent in 2009, ending the year with 38.5 million shipments, up from 31.8 million in 2008. No other top five PC maker enjoyed more growth.
Meanwhile, Dell was the only top five vendor to post a decline in shipments for the year, dropping 9.9 percent from 43.3 million PCs to 38.96 million. That means Dell shipped enough to maintain a lead over Acer as the second largest PC vendor, but only by a hair (0.2 percent).
"Acer's 2009 success was driven by the notebook PC market," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms research, for iSuppli. "Notebooks accounted for nearly 80 percent of Acer's shipments ni 2009. This allowed the company to capitalize on the fast-growing mobile-computing segment while limiting its exposure to the moribund desktop segment."
Acer may have already leapfrogged ahead of Dell by now (we won't know until the quarterly numbers are tallied), but even if it hasn't, given the continued growth of notebooks, we fully expect Acer to stand in the No. 2 spot by the end of the year. Watch out HP.
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avenger48
March 10, 2010 at 4:52pm
For those who like short remarks, Don't buy Acer. What follows is why.
Acer has TERRIBLE products and even worse support. When my friend's Acer laptop failed, due to a heat issue, I called Acer 5 times, and 4 of the 5, they hung up on me. This laptop's problem was that a design flaw caused the RAM to cook the hard drive, and was clearly Acer's fault. After this, he took it to Best Buy (Yeah yeah yeah, but he had gotten the laptop as a gift, and Best Buy would give him free service) only to be told that the hard drive could not be replaced because he had downgraded to XP. Long story short, Acer replaced his Optical drive instead of his hard drive, and only after paying to ship it out TWICE did he get it back, a month and a half after the initial failure, with a working hard drive, some scratches that weren't there before, and the wrong drivers. All of this happened within six months of purchase, and, 8 months later, the hard drive is getting flaky again (Note, this is a new and different hard drive that he bought seprately and new, cooler RAM, and the problem is still there.)
On the other hand, I bought a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop 7 years ago. After four years, the battery stopped charging and the screen started to go a short time later. However, when hooked up to an external monitor and plugged in, it still works beautifully. In addition, the two other dell computers I have (5 and 9 years old) both are chugging along flawlessly as well.
The moral is, don't buy anything Acer, as they will pass Dell, a better OEM.
MrAntiAcer
March 11, 2010 at 9:52am
he forgot to mention that the acer bios v1.24, which i had, corrupts the boot sector in the hard drive conveniently after my warranty expired, as with most of this particular product line. the only operating system the bios natively supported was win xp, not vista, which it shipped with, nor win 7. after which thee comp has never been the same. xp also voids your warranty. acer is the plague.
