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.
Haha this is so true.
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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I’ve had my 15" Air since a week or two after launch, and am still amazed by it.
A couple of months back I tentatively downloaded No Man’s Sky to see how it would cope, it being fanless and all. Started playing, fully expecting it to either set fire to my legs or throttle so hard that it was unplayable.
Neither happened. It was absolutely fine.
Even more amazing; when the weather was nice, I’d take it outside and sit on my deck where I’d get at least three hours from the battery. While playing NMS on ultra.
Maybe that’s common in the Windows gaming laptop world, but as someone who’s had several MacBooks since 2007, I still can’t wrap my head around how good it is.
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 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.
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…
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.
The M2 chips and presumably the M3 as well are incredibly sophisticated but they’re not powerful exactly, they’re just power efficient. They deliver excellent performance for their power draw.
But if I actually want to high performance chip I can get better options as long as I don’t care about battery life, and if I need a high performance chip I probably don’t actually care about battery life.
So it’s good for people that want reasonably good performance on the go but no power use really cares.
The bigger point here is that if you need that kind of power, it comes with compromises to battery life, heat, and device longevity.
Apple silicon is just fast enough for most workloads you want on a laptop, and can handle surprisingly heavy video workloads. For anything more, a desktop is a better idea than a laptop anyways.
There’s definitely a niche for desktop replacement class laptops, but that is a niche. Gaming laptops are still king though. You don’t buy a macbook for gaming.
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.
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.
That was true for windows machines until Win 11 started forcing the TPM requirement
Windows should generally be treated like malware for this sort of reason
So like 7-10 years?
You mean in 5-7 years when those devices are completely outdated?
Can you name a major commercial OS that doesn’t do this?
My BSD and Linux installs will run on anything, but last I checked that wasn’t true of Windows or especially Android.
(Okay, you can technically install Windows on old machines, but is so incredibly bloated now that it’s impractical)
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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I had to search for how far back support goes for Sonoma, and it was surprisingly short.
I think Apple is intentionally shortening the support cycle right now to get everyone on ARM chips for a variety of reasons. They come with neural cores and are incredibly fast to their predecessors.
It’s tough to change architectures, and I think we’re frustratingly caught in the growing pains right now.
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.
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Official Sonoma support might be reasonably short, but if you’ve got a 2008 MacBook Pro, have I got some good news for you…
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
have I got some good news for you…
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
This is 70-80% of my thinking as well. I purposefully held out for an M1 Pro for a couple extra years. I expect it to be good for at least 5.
I run Al Dente on it, and the battery is still sitting at 100% health (I ordered mine on release day).
It’s light years ahead of the Lenovo X1 I had been using, which lasted me quite a while.
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.
All the higher ups at work used to run macbooks mostly because they were built well and looked good. But they ran windows because we don’t make any software for Mac. An M1 is useless to them (our software is not compatible with parallels as the 3d support just isn’t good enough)
It’s not even that unusual based on the support queries we get… still get the occasional salesman who has ‘upgraded’ to an M1 and has to be given the bad news.
I will say, my one concern for my 15" Air is the shelf life is currently limited to whatever Apple decides it to be. With my previous Intel MacBooks, I could string a few extra years out of them with Opencore, but as it stands that won’t be an option when Apple drop OS support for my M2. The same is true of those Intel machines though; what will happen to them once macOS no longer supports non AS hardware?
Perhaps by then, the devs behind Opencore will have figured out how to get AS software working on Intel hardware, and will have cracked being able to run the latest macOS on unsupported M1/2 chips, but we’ll have to wait and see.
All that said, my Air is only a few months old, and should reasonably expect to see updates for a good 5/6 years, by which time Asahi Linux ought to be a rock solid alternative if needs be.
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.
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! 😂
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.
Exactly. The price keeps inching upward and the last generation of MacBooks was awful. After getting burned by one of those things I’m not about to buy another one even if the new processor is awesome.
Not to mention, the OS has become junk over the years. It used to be great for developers. They still ship crusty old versions of programming languages, window management sucks, and it’s just a pain in the ass to work with. These days, I would rather be on a Linux machine. Plus, most games work on Linux now, which is something Apple still hasn’t figured out.
I use Linux for home and Mac for work. My Mac is older Intel based with software bar for F keys. If in the past 10 years ago I was into Mac and owned one… I no longer see the reason for Mac.
Hardware choices are not a selling point
Context bar makes it harder to use for programming. It is not a sell for me.
Mouse pad frequently jumps cursor.
Keyboard feedback is cheap.
Software is not impressive either
Usability wise Gnome is better than OS X for me. No ctrl key on right side is terrible.
Due to Windows subsystem for Linux v2 I am starting to think Windows is better for Linux development than Mac.
MAC M1, M2 laptops have good battery life going for them.
The keyboard’s on macs have always been crap. They’re even crap on desktop, they’ve taken their awful, but I suppose understandable, laptop keyboard and stuck it on a desktop keyboard base. Why?
Why are Apple allergic to the concept of keys having three dimensions to them, why are they all flat with zero travel.
They’ve been a form over function company since the iMac days with the round mouse with a single button completed with PC mice thatwere commonly two button with scroll wheel and in a shape that fit the hand and let you know which way it was oriented.
Apple was known for the one-button mouse in 1983, 15 years before the iMac
Yeah but the iMac was when they introduced the completely symmetrical mouse that you couldn’t tell which was it was pointing without looking for where the cord was. The previous one-button mice were just lacking functionality but looked as bad as most mice did in those days. The round one-button mice looked nicer but functioned worse, hence form over function.
That said, I should have probably added an “at least” to my original statement.
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By lately, do you mean the M2 chip compared to M1?
My M2 laptop with 8GB of ram?
i mean i want the m2 Chip but like the reasonable person i am, i wait for the competition to catch up and then buy it at a fair price, and install an actual OS on it. like holy hell… they make decent hardware and then on top of that totally ignore that vulkan is the best thing that happened to graphics apis in 20 years
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.
It’s between Apple and framework for me for my next laptop. The question is do I want a laptop that I can infinitely repair and upgrade, or do I want a laptop that actually has battery life when I pull it out of my bag because it has a functioning sleep mode. Thanks Intel. Maybe make sure your processors are actually power efficient before axing S3 sleep.
People give apple a lot of crap and I get it. But they are still by far the best user experience laptop. There’s a reason with all that walled garden stuff. It’s good hardware and software when used by anyone with the purpose of just using it and not needing to tinker with it.
I’m at a point where I don’t mind the idea of diversifying my time with Linux more. I have an older pc I have mint for fun and a steam deck. Just worried one of these days apple will mess macOS up to the point of no return and Linux will be my lifeline.
As someone who uses macos every day my worthless internet opinion is that the Gnome 4 desktop experience is far better for productivity. I mainly use a web browser, email, and ssh, so I tend to value windowing and multidesktop fluidity highly. This is also coming from a linux certified tech though.
There’s a reason with all that walled garden stuff.
Yeah, their wallets.
AFAIK sleep issues were fixed. Anyway, since AMD framework motherboards exist, you can buy them.
All pc sales are down. Other PC companies profits are terrible. Everyone stocked up for work from home and now are good.
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
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.
I don’t know if they’ve increased the price so much that people are no longer buying it or that they made the M1 models so good that people don’t need to upgrade.
I have an M1 Mac Mini and I really don’t see myself needing to upgrade for at least another 3 years.
…another 3 years.
So, a pretty standard update cycle.
No, it got 2 years shorter. It was 5 years before.
I’ve already had it for one and half years. But yeah, still fairly standard.
Which is why Apple should have followed a 2 year refresh cycle for Macs. But they started moving to M3 within a year of launching M2.
Well the M3 isn’t released yet. So we aren’t on a yearly cycle. The M2 was released in June 22.
Besides this, I don’t think the intention of the “yearly” updates isn’t to push everyone to also update yearly. People are on different “update cycles”. If this one isn’t for you, it might be for someone els.
short apple
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.
For the same reason you can’t run Windows 11 Pro on your phone. The chip architecture.
If the Mac were half as repairable as a Framework and could run Windows VMs without crashing when they run my default tools, I might be interested in one again.
I’ve never had any issues running windows VMs on any of my macs. And our office is full of developers running windows VMs on Macs.
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.
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.
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.
