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.
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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.
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?
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.
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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.
You mean in 5-7 years when those devices are completely outdated?
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
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! :)
My Asus laptop from 2011 is still running with Linux. But, it’s time to change this one after 12 years.
It cost me a huge amount of money at the time but worth it.
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
Meanwhile prices only seem to go up and wages stagnate.
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.
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.
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Why can’t you run Parallels?
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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.
You might want to tell that to the people who make Parallels.
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.
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.
short apple
Oh no, does Tim Apple know???
Still rocking my M1 Air. Battery is good and it’s so much more powerful than I’ll ever need for my casual use. There is literally zero reason for me to buy another Macbook right now and I’m betting that’s the case for most Mac users.
Same machine, but even with the desire to upgrade, it just seems like Apple themselves don’t want me to.
A MacBook Air M1, with the upgraded 8-Core CPU, 16gb ram and 512Gb storage ran me just shy of £1400 2 years ago and has been an excellent device for all my needs.
A similarly specced M2 machine is closer to £1700, and that’s not even the 15in model! Why would I upgrade when the price increase is so drastic? I would’ve happily sold my current MacBook Air and considered the 15in Air, but it simply doesn’t add up.
The base M1 Air as you and many others said, is already such a powerful machine that it really doesn’t need updating, especially when you consider that subsequent machines don’t provide a meaningful boost to productivity from M1 to M2, as intel to M1 did.
One part of the issue is the m1s where so damn good, people aren’t itching to replace every 3 years. With intel every year people were desperate for cores and better battery because it was so bad.
Macbook SE - M1 Chip for 599. Problem solved.
