Apple’s fall has a silent effect on an old enemy

While Microsoft remains at the top of the desktop OS market with Windows 10, Apple ‘s long position as a key opponent is second to none. Through 2020, sales of Google’s Chrome OS hardware have surpassed macOS, pushing Apple back to third place. Take it a step further than that headline message, and I think you get numbers that are good news for Apple.

The numbers come from IDC (via Geekwire), which shows that Google has replaced Apple as the main rival for Microsoft and Windows 10.

First, Apple’s market share is up. From the 2019 share of 6.7 percent to 7.5 percent in 2020. Part of this is the release of the M1-powered MacBooks at the end of the year as the desire of the geekerati upgraded to Apple Silicon was unleashed; but with the increase in work-from-home due to coronavirus pandemic there has been a long cycle of updating for almost every bit of consumer technology; that includes the Mac platform in general and the MacBook family in particular.

Microsoft was arguably the biggest loser, moving from the 2019 share of 85.4 percent down to 80.5. That still runs on more than four out of every five PCs, but after rushing to update technology, Microsoft has lost out.

Apple’s macOS picked up some of that lost share, but most of the share has shifted to Google’s Chrome OS platform; moving from 6.4 percent to 10.8 percent. The move to work from home (and home monitoring) has seen demand for Chrome OS products jump sixty percent compared to previous years ’sales. With Chrome OS approaching its tenth anniversary, Google will welcome this leap.

All three companies can take heart in the numbers. Microsoft may have gone out of business, but in an unusual year where more options are seen for users to change platforms as a result of an increase in that update, it still retains the lion’s share of the market… no doubt with the enterprise market and so long-term buying design still in place offers a lot of stability.

With Chrome OS tied to Google’s online services, upgrading the platform to more than one in ten PCs is a valuable growth both for the hardware and capturing users into the its cloud-based services rather than those of its competitors.

And of course Apple is continuing its own path, bringing users into the macOS ecosystem and the cloud-based servers themselves. Google may have seen the biggest sales surge year-over-year, but there’s no doubt that Apple’s uptrend will rise as the new Apple Silicon chipset that is embedded in benchmark spreads. -out to the MacBooks, iMacs, and Mac Pros eventually. world.

The question for 2021, at least for me, is whether Apple can join forces with Google in breaking the psychologically powerful ten percent share rate; and how far ahead Chrome OS will be compared to macOS.

Now read the latest headlines in Apple Loop, here on Forbes …