Top Apple analyst says MacBook demand has fallen ‘significantly’::A top Apple analyst said Wednesday that shipments for MacBook computers will decline around 30% year over year.
Part of a manufactured recession is that everyone goes broke from getting laid off or suppressed wages, and they can’t afford to buy your shit. Whodathunk?
Why is everyone making this a price thing? The way I see it, this is because Apple Silicon is so damn good. I replaced an Intel MacBook Pro with an M2 Air and I’m not going to need another machine until this thing stops working. People shouldn’t need to buy new laptops every couple of years. This is a win in my eyes.
Plus everyone bought new tech during the pandemic, and now it’s over people are going outside and touching grass again so they don’t need the latest tech just 2.5 years later.
Plus the M2 MBP is barely an upgrade over the M1.
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Why is everyone making this a price thing? The way I see it, this is because Apple Silicon is so damn good…I’m not going to need another machine until this thing stops working.
Saying that the market has reached a saturation point for Apple Silicon Macbooks is kinda silly. Apple Silicon is good, but it isn’t some miracle tech that defies market dynamics. The only area that Apple Silicon really excels at compared to the competition is battery life, but there’s a lot of other laptops that already beat it in terms of CPU and GPU performance.
There’s still room for Apple to grow, especially since they’re focusing on gaming now. The fact that Mac demand is falling in light of this indicates that there’s more at play than just everyone being content with their current Macs. Even if that was the case, why wouldn’t something so good be attracting new customers? Apple’s userbase is still a tiny fraction compared to Windows. If Apple Silicon is so good, why aren’t people flocking over in droves, especially since Windows literally has no answer to Apple Silicon?
Price is a huge motivating factor, especially since the economy’s going to shit.
I just plug my laptop in most of the time so I don’t need to spend 2k+ for “apple silicon”. If I need mobile computing I have an android phone for that.
The amount of things a mobile phone can do is amazing, unless you are a developer who is away from a power outlet the use cases are dwindling by the day.
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They excel at battery life, sure, but also at heat and power efficiency — things that are really fucking important to a good laptop. Show me another fabless laptop that can transcode 4K video
Power efficiency is battery life. Battery tech hasn’t changed that much. And literally any laptop with a decent GPU these days can transcode 4k video without breaking a sweat. This is not new.
but the existing Mac user base seems to be upgrading less frequently, which says to me that something else has changed. Now what’s a big change that’s taken place in the Mac line in recent years? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the pricing.
Yes, something has changed. The economy. People may have been able to afford $3-4k laptops a few years ago, but not now that food, gas, cost of basic goods has gone way up. The pricing may not have changed, but they’re now priced outside of what most people would be willing to pay when they have to spend so much on more important things.
I just don’t believe that a majority of the Apple community will stop upgrading if they see a more powerful M3. There’s still a lot of situations where the existing Apple Silicon line falls short, particularly in gaming and 3D graphics. Those who can afford it will upgrade. We’ve seen Apple users upgrade for less if you look at how many people used to clamor for the latest iPhone.
Apple Silicon isn’t the end all, be all of laptop technologies that’s going to make people satisfied forever. That’s not how the tech market works, especially not for Apple users. The only thing that’s different is the economy.
I see the ARM Apple machines as less valuable than the Intel ones.
Macbooks from circa 2007 to recently were PC-compatible machines, you could run Windows or a standard version of Linux on them. They were often well-built, and since Apple kept to a fairly limited subset of hardware it was easy to support them.
The M1 and M2 machines cannot run Windows and are pretty incompetent at running Linux, so if your hobby or job requires either of those platforms Apple no longer offers that value to customers.
I’m running Windows ARM just fine with parallels on my M1 MBP. Haven’t had any issues, even weird legacy software that needs serial drivers works fine. MS did a great job with the ARM version of Windows.
I mean, sure, although I think the people who need to do that are a pretty small niche. But you could also just run Parallels and call it a day.
I replaced my surface pronwith a surface pro 9. So went from February 2013 to Nov 2022. Worked well for me sll that time.
Surface pro 9 won’t get replaced until the 30s
Just don’t buy cheap shit
Just don’t buy cheap shit
For a lot of people that’s easier said than done, shits expensive yo
That said, I had bought a Sony Vaio in 2012 that just crapped out last year, and I replaced it with an upper end Lenovo Thinkpad that’ll hopefully get similar mileage. Same with phones, I bought a OnePlus 8 Pro in 2020 that is still humming along seamlessly. Before that, I had a Nexus that I had had forever (and kept working thanks to CyanogenMod/LineageOS).
There’s a huge benefit in buying high quality stuff in that they usually tend to last a lot longer than middle of the road/low end. Then again, I’m extremely thankful that I’ve worked my way into a financial position to do so. But alas, it’s Vimes Boots Theory at work.
Save up longer to buy a higher quality device or be prepared to replace the device more often
My surface pro 4 is still awesome and does everything I expect it to be able to do.
I only replaced my original pro because of the battery life. Now I use it in my basement for my 3d printers
Right on! :)
I remember buying a surface pro 2 when it came out. Battery crapped after 2 years of light use. Hinges failed on keyboard. All around very cheaply built. I heard they got better after that but I never bothered going back to the surface lineup. It was a really disappointing product compared to it’s apple counterparts.
I had never experienced that. My pro 1 is still working but the battery life after a decade is less than an hour.
Apple has had a slew of problem models like butterfly keyboards and other crapple issues. But of you enjoy them more power to you.
I’m not following — what’s the cheap shit you’re referring to here?
It’s cool that you were able to keep your Surface for so long though. I wish more people would hang onto their tech until it actually needs replacing.
Cheap laptops. When you buy a quality / smilingly priced windows laptop they can last as long as a Mac book
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I often find myself pushing friends and family to spend a little bit more on laptops (regardless of brand) because I know they could keep them for longer if they did. I always remind them that it’s cheaper to buy a good laptop once than it is to buy three shitty ones.
Yup. Buy a $500 windows laptop and kf course it would end up failing before a $2000 Mac book
My personal Mac laptop lost connection from video card to board. It is a well known issue in older models.
That was the last Mac I bought. I didn’t see a reason to drop $3k when I could get something as good for half the price.
But I risked if Linux would run on hardware…
Okay? I don’t get what that has to do with what I said though. I’d love to see the half-the-price-but-just-as-good options today though, I’m not aware of any.
Right? Thats what “falling demand” should be attributed to. It’s a computer which will last years because of how capable it is. I’m not sure expecting people to upgrade computers year over year is the right metric for how well a product lineup is doing.
Apple Silicon chips are game changers, the rate of adoption is going to different compared to phones or a different product category however.
Or until Apple decides that, for some reason, your M2 can’t run their newest operating system and eventually apps don’t support your operating system anymore.
So like 7-10 years?
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Well the surface pro 2013 launched with windows 8 amd you camnupgrade for free to windows 10 that ends support in 2025. So that is 12 years of support. You cam modify the windows 11 installer to install on a surface pro also
You cam modify the windows 11 installer to install on a surface pro also
You can technically install MacOS on old, unsupported Macs too. I’ve never done it personally but I know people who’ve been running the latest software on long-unsupported hardware with no issues for years.
My MacBook Pro is 10 next year. It still does MacBook stuff last time I checked.
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Apple has done this multiple times. Power oc to Intel, 32 bit Intel support to 64bit Intel support to arm. They actually don’t care and just know their loyal base will buy up new hardware ro deal woth the changes
I’m confused. Are you upset that they’re switching to better chip architectures as they become available? Because you can still run Intel Mac apps with Rosetta and some of them actually run better now than they did on Intel hardware.
You’re complaining about something that’s just a byproduct of technological progress.
This is going to blow your mind, but your computer doesn’t explode when it stops getting updates. You can keep using it as long as the tools you use don’t specifically require a new OS. I know, it’s crazy, but it’s true.
This is going to blow your mind but from a security perspective this is the dumbest thing you can do
Older Macs often get extra security updates even after they stop getting new OS updates. But if you’re the type of person to use a decade-old machine, I suspect that security isn’t your top concern.
Also, you can pretty easily get new versions of MacOS running on unsupported hardware, so it’s a non-issue no matter how you look at it.
That’s great but the initial statement was very ignorant
Not really, but you’re welcome to your opinion I guess.
But you already can’t install MS 365 on Big Sur.
And? Not everyone uses MS 365.
That was true for windows machines until Win 11 started forcing the TPM requirement
You mean in 5-7 years when those devices are completely outdated?
It could be that.
My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a “post-Covid” mentality, relative to their competition.
Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.
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My 5 year old 2015 model macbook pro still works the same as the day I bought it. I have zero need for upgrading to a newer model.
Same with my 2012 one! However I am a video editor, so the M1 Max is my current system. Not sure my 2012 mbp could handle 4k video unfortunately! 😂
If you’ve gotten on apple silicon there really isn’t any reason to upgrade within the ecosystem yet. M1 is still amazing in terms of processing power to battery.
And with Macs fetching premium prices, people are going to use their device longer and longer
M1 Macbooks were also the first “Not Completely Shit” Macbooks after many years of awful problems so there was pent up demand from Apple users for something worth buying. Now that the demand is satisfied, sales will return to a baseline.
I think we can probably also toss in demand from the pandemic. Lots of people suddenly had need for a new computer and now with return to school/office lots of those machines are probably seeing a lot less use. A couple of years ago the articles were “record demand for MacBooks.”
That’s pretty much describes me. I was a notorious macOS hater for a long time. But the battery life, quiet cooling, and overall power of the m1/2 has totally converted me.
Eh, I have a MB from work and I’m still an unrepentant Mac hater. All the badass hardware in the world won’t save you from crippled software. MacOS will never be keyboard friendly and “MacOS UNIX” will never hold a candle to real Linux.
This is just not correct. Keyboard support in particularly is a checkbox or two in prefs, and then you have out of the box support for mapping/remapping any menu command, remapping mod keys, text expansion macros, remapping all kinds of OS controls like spotlight/mission control, etc, easily typing your favorite symbols like º or ® just by holding a modifier… Toss in Keyboard Maestro and Raycast/Launchbar/Alfred, and you’re going to have difficulty finding any GUI OS that handles keyboards as well.
“MacOS UNIX” will never hold a candle to real Linux.
This is another just purely nonsense statement. “Real” Linux is itself an open source reimplementation of Unix, more or less, and macOS is posix compliant. Idk what this comment is even supposed to mean - open a terminal, install whatever packages you like, carry about your day. I’ve had to spend a significant amount of time in linux/macOS terminals, and in practice all that I usually have to remember is which package manager I have to use or whether it’s bash/zsh.
Does this mean
brew install nvidia-driversworks for you?“Posix compliant”? I’m not sure you fully understand the gap here. Linux has containers, performant and feature rich virtualization, robust networking, user friendly GNU utils, case sensitive filesystems, etc. It’s not stuff you can duct tape on by recompiling Linux tools and be all set. You’re trying to keep up with a Ferrari using a Fiat.
Apple hasn’t shipped with an Nvidia GPU in like a decade, and has only shipped a machine that can add a third party GPU twice in as long, so I am going to guess no? I’m not sure what the point of this comment even is? If I can find a package you can’t install on linux do I win the argument? And of all things in the world you want to count as a win for Linux, you’re going with Nvidia drivers? Lol.
Most of the rest that you’re describing are also mostly optional packages on most Linux distros/macOS or things you’re just getting wrong. Case-sensitive filesystems on macOS are an option. You don’t think macOS has containers, virtualization, robust networking or can’t use GNU utils? You don’t know what posix compliance is, and you’re trying to convince me that GNU utils, many/most of which likely existed before Linux somehow can’t be “duct-taped” on.
I’m not sure you fully understand the gap here.
It’s entirely clear you don’t understand the gap. Linux is a kernel. All of the things you’re describing are packages or pieces of software that are going to differ from distro to distro. Most of coreutils ship in macOS out of the box. All of the things you count as wins are easily added on macOS (where they aren’t out of the box already.)
like, you can just say “I don’t like macOS.” This set of comments read like “Well all of Linux is garbage because Mint doesn’t ship with Solitaire, a game and program invented by Microsoft.”
As much as I love making fun of Apple, isn’t it all Apple silicone made in house? If they’re not coming with Nvidia cards and Apple is not open to the idea of people modifying their computers it shouldn’t matter how easy it is to install Nvidia graphics (not to mention Nvidia Drivers are a pain on Linux sometimes too).
POSIX is just a set of Unix-like standards for software. Mac is based on BSD if I recall correctly, they had Xorg and stuff as an option to install and things aren’t 1 to 1 compatible but closely related.
robust networking
Dude you just gave me flashbacks to traumatic times trying to get Wifi to work on Linux
The Nvidia thing was a subtle way to point out that you can’t “brew install” your way out of every bit of missing OS functionality. The subtly was sadly too subtle.
“Posix” is such a trivial set of APIs that until recently Windows claimed to be Posix compatible (and basically still is???). Darwin, the MacOS kernel, lacks pretty much everything above that slim foundation. No user or network namespaces. No capabilities. Even if you switch to GNU coreutils (ls, ps, netstat, etc), you get a reduced featureset because Darwin lacks /proc, /sys, ioctls, and other knobs&levers to make stuff work the way it does on Linux. Xorg works because X11 was common across all Unixen back then. And on the built in BSD utils, stuff gets weird like
ls ~/Downloads -ldoesn’t work and case insensitivity leads to weird bugs in things like shell wildcards (likels ~/downlo*/*).The Linux network stack is complicated because it can do absolutely everything, at insane speeds and scales. MacOS’ network features are geared towards being a laptop and not much else. I won’t defend Linux as user friendly but it’s been my daily desktop for 25 years, I guess I’ve figured it out. I use and appreciate stuff like VLANs, bridging, nftables, ebtables, etc. If you need to change behavior, there’s probably a /proc/net flag that will do it. It’s stuff that MacOS hides or simply doesn’t have.
Agreed, I’ve never been into the Apple ecosystem, but last time I needed a new laptop I bought an open box M1 MacBook Pro from Best Buy. I boight it solely off the Apple silicon being Arm based for power and efficiency. It’s been a great laptop and probably won’t need to upgrade it for a long time. When the battery finally gives out I’ll just replace that myself and keep going. Plenty of compute power to keep it going for what I do with it.
They’re definitely going to overheating or slow older Mac’s with the next OS update while adding very little.
That isn’t how Apple handles it. Macbook models have a finite update support window. They will receive security updates after that window closes but no longer get major MacOS versions. That is how they incentivise upgrades.
No need, they’ve already stopped receiving macOS updates
I… what? No. This is patently incorrect and can be disproven with a simple google search. I know it’s cool to hate apple, but misinformation is never cool. Idk where you got this information, but it’s not true.
They should make hardware people want to buy.
Hardware that’s worth the price.
Lately they failed on both counts and failed 1st means never had a chance at 2nd.
My wife’s 3 years old MacBook with the software bar is such a nightmare to use. I get really pissed off whenever I get close to this thing. Between the poorly placed bar and the weird touchpad, never again.
Oh no people can’t afford anything how can we fix this? Maybe more pizza parties? Or how about forcing people to come back to the office and burn their own money in gas and other expenses? Maybe try raising prices more while keeping wages low, that will fix it!
I’ve never seen companies do more user- and employee-hostile shit than in the last couple of years.
These companies, who stayed afloat because almost everyone worked from home during the pandemic and got shit done while millions of humans died, are now trying to say WFH doesn’t work. Let me just check your earnings reports. Oh look, billions and billions of dollars per quarter while you lay off staff to bump your bottom line.
This shit makes me so angry.
I partly think m1 is just so good no one has any appetite to upgrade. But also shit do be expensive. For me it’s repairability. I’m seriously considering not getting another Mac at my next upgrade cycle unless something changes soon.
New MacBook: M1 RISC 8GB RAM 250 SSD 1440x900 resolution Touchbar that prevents touch typing? No touch screen $2200+
Decline in demand is sooooo mysterious.
Meanwhile prices only seem to go up and wages stagnate.
All pc sales are down. Other PC companies profits are terrible. Everyone stocked up for work from home and now are good.
Plus everyone buying Mac in 2020 were buying the new (at the time) M1 MacBooks which are phenomenal and will easily last a long ass time. M2 has been a marginal upgrade over the M1 and really only applies to people who need to upgrade now, but won’t be a real upgrade for people who just bought an M1.
Plus they’re soon to announce the M3 chips so I would wager a lot of people are hanging on to what they have to see what that’s gonna look like before pulling the trigger.
I wonder how this compares to PC sales, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is an industry-wide decline.
I’ll be that guy: MacBooks are PCs.
But yes it’s industry wide. There was a huge boom of computer and computer accessory sales during the pandemic due to work from home and other factors. Now a lot of people have stuff that’s only 2 or 3 years old and they have no need to upgrade.
Why be so unnecessarily pedantic though? Mac/PC has been a ubiquitous colloquial distinction for 20+ years, and it’s one that both Mac and non-Mac vendors have leaned into for a very long time. This is in no way a new trend, and you’re not going to change a single person’s vernacular with this ackchyually, so why go out of your way to be that guy? Sometimes language evolves in ways that defy logic. Just accept it and move on.
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Because sometimes prople don’t want to play into biggest corp’s in the world marketing scheme. It is a personal computer.
That’s revisionist history. “Mac” and “Linux machine” were used to distinguish them from the overwhelming majority of windows computers that were commonly referred to as PCs years before the “I’m a Mac/Im a PC” ads. As I said, Apple simply leaned into that already established trend. I remember when I was in high school around the turn of the Millenium, vendors like CompUSA would have an Apple section separate from the PC section. Apple was nowhere close to the largest corp in the world back then, and they did not have the selling power to make any retailer follow their ample propaganda until much much later.
Laptop sales are expected to rise year on year.
This is an Apple problem, likely because of their price point. Apple’s previous advantage was usability, but they pivoted to luxury. Luxury demand goes down when markets are surpressed, but the demand for utility does not.
No, most computer sales are way down this year compared to last year.
IDC shows Apple’s sales are down 23% year over year this most recent quarter (Q3 2023), worse than the overall market of down 7.6%.
But in Q2 2023, the last quarter before that, Apple was the only manufacturer to show an increase, up 10.3% when the overall market was down 13.4%.
In Q1 2023, Apple’s shipments dropped 40.5%, while the market as a whole dropped 29%.
Q4 2022, Apple was down 2.1% while the industry as a whole was down 28.1%
If I were at a computer I’d be able to pull these things up more comprehensively, but you get the point. Apple is in a weird position because they released a big change right in the middle of the pandemic when demand for computers was already through the roof, but they’re still in the same basic boat as everyone else, with the booms of 2021 to 2022 giving less demand for upgrades so soon afterward.
I was looking at total revenue, for the global market, but you’re right that I probably should have been looking at units.
Slightly different picture it seems.
I’ve been wanting to buy one for a while, but they are a bit too expensive.
If the base model had at least 512gb ssd and 16gb ram, then I would have purchased one. I just keep waiting to buy until this is the case.
I think people can’t afford Apple hardware and not at the numbers Wall Street wants
Maybe we would buy their shit if our housing didn’t cost more than an entire paycheck
The cause could be that they’re lasting longer. Or it could be the fact that they’re not repairable, don’t support virtual machines or windows, have cut corners internally to increase profits margins and for the most part don’t play games. The company I work for, previous the ARM CPU switch bought MacBooks exclusively and either ran windows in parallels or used boot camp. We can no longer do that to run any of the tools we use for machine programming or troubleshooting so we buy razer blade 15s now. That battery isn’t as great but they’re powerhouses and have awesome repairability.
Apple and repairability are two opposites. Am not convinced about lasting longer either. Gluing and soldering everything doesn’t help with replacing parts, especially since they fought tooth and nail to ban independent repairs.
Why can’t you run Parallels?
I am not sure if you can not, but ARM doesn’t come with hardware level virtualization features many of the solutions today depend on. VBox for example doesn’t want to run until I enable those in BIOS. It’s certainly is possible to emulate anything, but probably less efficiently.
We can use parallels, just not to run x86 windows.
For the same reason you can’t run Windows 11 Pro on your phone. The chip architecture.
As weird as it sounds you can (with poor performance). With something like Limbo or Termux you can actually get Windows or any x86 OS running underneath Android on a phone.
Fun project maybe, but not really utilitarian though. Never used apple so can’t actually report on how well their emulation and/or translation layer is working on Arm.
You might want to tell that to the people who make Parallels.
short apple
I was out when they did the thunderbolt only thing. and of course when they realized it was a mistake, they not only fixed it but also added a massive unnecessary notch in the display to make it match the iphone. it’s like the joke writes itself in my case.
Oh no, does Tim Apple know???
