Apple just continues to nibble away at the retail PC market one system at a time and the continued hard work is paying off with the news that Apple has moved in to 3rd place in retail sales. The gains show that consumers are turning to Apple in numbers that would never had been thought possible just a year or two ago.

The latest Gartner reports indicate that Apple has shipped 1.4 milion units in the last three months for its second quarter that ended in June. With the move into third place, Apple now only has Dell and HP in front of it and it has passed such leaders as Toshiba and Acer in units shipped for this period.

While Dell continues to be the retail market leader followed by HP, Apple has been able to gain market share due in part to the fact that it has been able to control the Operating System in a way that isn’t possible for vendors selling Windows-based systems.

Many continue to suggest that with Apple’s move to Intel processors it would be easy for them to move to selling the operating system to be used by other vendors, but Apple has had no love for the cloners; and has, in fact, gone out of its way to protect its intellectual property in such a way that anyone who even dares to defy Apple winds up on the bad end of a legal nightmare from hell.

Right now, Apple seems happy to just do things the Apple way and while people complain about the prices and lack of flexibility in the business arena compared to PC products, it does not seem to stop PC users from buying Apple’s to use in their home environment. Still, the lack of software compared to the PC platform continues to be a concern, but Apple seems to be gaining some traction as the number of units grows with top flight developers now releasing their products for the Apple platform as well as the PC. This is a trend that we look to see continue.