User-share of Macs may have hit a five-year-low, but Gartner predicts future Apple domination

Apple's user share (calculated by user-agents detected to be running macOS/OSX) has recently hit a five-year low of 6.1%—the lowest it's been since August 2011, reports Computerworld. Yet, research firm Gartner is predicting that beyond this slump, Apple will overtake Microsoft in 2018.

Gartner is looking at the combined volume of devices running both MacOS and iOS, and is predicting that sometime in 2017, there will be more annual shipments of devices running Apple's OSes than Windows. Gartner predicts that this momentum will continue beyond 2017, with Apple pulling even further ahead of Microsoft in terms of systems running the companies' OSes through 2018 and 2019.

Gartner's data shows that approximately 260 million devices shipped this year running Windows, while iOS and macOS devices reached 248 million. The research firm predicts that it will be the recovery of the iPhone sales in parallel with a decline in Windows-machine sales which will propel Apple past Microsoft this year.

Something that could throw a wrench into this prediction would be popular adoption of Snapdragon-powered devices running full Windows 10 via x86 emulation. The first Snapdragon-powered handhelds capable of this feat are rumored to be out as early as Q2 2017.