THE latest report of market-research firm IDC did not surprise us; we had already expected the PC industry to shrink in 2016. Based on the data, worldwide shipments of traditional PCs — desktops, notebooks, and workstations combined — fell to 260 million units, down 5.7 percent from 2015. It was the fifth straight year that the industry shrank. And Apple took the biggest hit.

The Cupertino-based company’s PC shipments declined by 9.8 percent. This is something you’ve probably expected if you’ve been closely monitoring the PC market space, considering that Mac shipments dropped faster than the industry average in the second and third quarters of the year as people waited for Apple to give attention to its PC division. It’s no secret that the tech giant’s focus was (and probably still is) on its biggest cash cow, aka the iPhone.

Apple only bounced back in the fourth quarter — experiencing only a 0.9 percent decrease — when it finally introduced new MacBook Pros on October 27, 2016, around one and a half years after it released the last model. The new offering moved the company back into fourth place in the last quarter and stabilized global shipments.

Apple’s fall benefited other manufacturers. The biggest winners were HP and Dell, the second and third PC vendors by market share. The two companies grew their shipments by 1.3 percent and 4.3 percent, respectively — the only ones on the “top 5” list that experienced an increase in 2016. The other two — Lenovo, the largest PC manufacturer, and fourth-placer ASUS — saw its PC shipments tumble by 3 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively.

Whether Apple will make a comeback in 2017 remains to be seen. Unless it will release another redesigned MacBook this year, chances are the answer is no.

Video you may want to watch: Which MacBook is right for you?

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