The fourth quarter of 2011 saw global notebook shipments drop 8.7 percent from the previous quarter, with only Apple seeing a sequential increase, led by the MacBook Air, which sold 1.2 million units. MacBook Air sales were up 200,000 units from the previous quarter, according to Digitimes.
Economic challenges and hard drive supply shortages caused by the flooding in Thailand were the main culprits of the overall downturn, Digitimes noted. Apple, however, has managed to avoid the effects of economic malaise the past few years, and the MacBook Air uses flash storage, rather than a standard hard drive, so the Thai flooding had no impact on that model.
Digitimes didn’t have any insight into sales trends for Apple’s other laptop, the MacBook Pro, which comes with a standard hard drive by default but can be configured with flash storage.