2y ago

Top Apple analyst says MacBook demand has fallen 'significantly'

www.cnbc.com 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.

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.

195 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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?
  
  You mean in 5-7 years when those devices are completely outdated?
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  My surface pro 4 is still awesome and does everything I expect it to be able to do.
  
  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'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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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! 😂

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.
  
  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.
  
  At max usage, an m1 has a hard time overheating. The hardware is really good this time, and the previous overheating was due to insufficient cooling hardware.
  Even if apple adds features that run the cpu/gpu/neural cores as hard as possible, overheating is not really on the table the same way it was on x86 macbooks.
  
  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 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.
  
  AFAIK sleep issues were fixed. Anyway, since AMD framework motherboards exist, you can buy them.

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.
  
  Hmm. What ide do you use? I develop mostly C#, and I use rider on an m1 MBP (not my main pc of course, but nice for not sitting at my desk my whole life) and I’ve got access to the latest .Net framework (which is still old as MS has stopped releasing framework versions) as well as .Net 7 and the .Net 8 RC.
  Again I pretty much only develop with C# .Net and JS/TS, but I’ve not had issues with support for current development.
- By lately, do you mean the M2 chip compared to M1?
  
  My M2 laptop with 8GB of ram?
- 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.
- 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 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

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 this case, they are probably suffering from success. Shitty manufacturing and unrepairability aside, the M macbooks are the first competent macbooks in quite a while, so most people probably bought the first versions and now they have no desire to upgrade, because why would they? I have an M1 Pro and aside from gaming performance there is absolutely no reason for me to upgrade.
- Istn that the case for every notebook these days?
- But if they're that good,why don't people buy 2 or 3 of them? Don't they like apple anymore?
  
  They are expensive for the general public. But the M1 chip is actually very performant.
- I have the same model, use it for music production and it's the sound of my piano via Pianoteq and my synth via Arturia Pigments. It's going great.

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.
- Weird take.
  Even the lowest end MacBook Air is 2560x1600. The touch bar got dropped years ago when they transitioned away from Intel. Pricing for the specs you listed starts at $999.
  There plenty to criticise. No need to make shit up.
  
  Weird take indeed, but I personally don't understand why macs don't have touch screens yet. I'm using laptops with touchscreens for over 8 years now and can't imagine using one without it.
- 1400x900 what? I though they all have those Retina displays something?
  But in general yeah. A time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones.
  First they've been building reputation and product image, then those became so strong that their actions, useful or harmful, had no apparent effect, and then it turns out they no longer know how to build reputation, product image and the product itself.
  It's funny how many things can be explained just in control theory terms, with feedback loops, response times, sensitivity etc.
  
  1440x900 is the native resolution of a brand new MacBook. I don't follow gibberish terms used in Macintosh hardware. Retina is eye tissue.

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’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.

Meanwhile prices only seem to go up and wages stagnate.

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.

I always hated the UI/UX of Mac. I find it annoying and ineffective to work on without heavy modification and third party tools.
- I stopped using Macs years ago because with every update I lost more control over the computer, making even basic configurations difficult. It felt like walls closing in.
  If all specialized software would work there, I'd be 100% in Linux now because it's just the superior OS - stable, easy to use, flexible and accessible (aside from Wine).
  
  I was the same way.. It's been about 20 years since I last owned a mac. I skipped the intel years entirely. I was given an M1 mbp for my current job though and its honestly fantastic.. One of the best machines I've used in years. The chip is a huge part of it.
  Since there are so many developers on mac these days, there is a ton of tooling around there to customize the UI enough to be flexible. I'm quite happy on it.

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.
- You can run virtual machines on Apple Silicon. I have done it myself. Also Razer are known for bad reliability.
  
  We've had no problems with them so far and the fact that they can be easily dusted and cleaned has made them more reliable than the MBPs we were using. In a dirty environment they fill with dust and don't live long.
  
  You can run virtual machines on Apple Silicon
  You can, but with emulationb for anything needing x86 (like Windows). Which means it's slow and unusable

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.

Tech companies aren't hiring. They're firing.

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.

Oh no, does Tim Apple know???

Hah. I'm still running my MacBook Air from 2013.
- Ha Lenovo T430 here! But I've probably needed to upgrade mine way more than the MacBook over the years 🤔
- Similar. MacBook pro from mid 2014 for personal stuff

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.

Maybe if they weren’t so expensive…
- Honestly the base price of Macbooks has stayed right around $1000 for the past TWENTY YEARS. So the price has kind of gone down if you take inflation into account.....
  The cost of the higher end models, however, has gone up.
  
  The base models are practically useless though. 8gb ram and a low storage (both of which unupgradable) means they become irrelevant quickly. To upgrade to something more usable like 16gb ram and 1tb storage you'd have to pay 600 dollars extra.
  
  What keeps me away from them is more the inability to upgrade even the storage. 256 is just too small and what smartphones come with these days, and stepping up starts increasing the price real quick.
- They aren't. They're premium, for sure, but you'll struggle to find a similarly specced Windows machine beating it by much, if at all (and when I say similarly specced, I don't just mean a shitbox with a big, slow SSD and a ton of budget ram, I mean something with a decent display, good build quality, fast storage and ram, a powerful and efficient CPU, and silent/fanless if comparing to the Air).
  I will grant you that Apple has lost their fuckin' minds with ram and storage upgrade pricing, but the machines as a whole are not that expensive relative to the competition.
  
  When they were still on Intel you could literally build one with the same hardware, and the cost was substantially cheaper. Is the OS really worth >1K? Nah.

Macbook SE - M1 Chip for 599. Problem solved.

Did they ever redesign those awful keyboards from a few years back? Is the power cord still a motherfucking USB C plug?
- What's wrong with usb c power? It's the greatest thing about the MacBook. I plug my s22 with it, and then i plug my MacBook with it. No extra effort, no extra plug.
  Also yes their keyboards are good now
  
  They're just delicate. Unless they make the back ones super high quality and durable. But I love the old magnet ones that just fall right out with no bending. I suppose the best of both worlds would be include a mag plug and also allow the USB ports to charge.
- no to both, they are actually one of the best computers you can buy now. they brought the magnetic connector back, there are plenty of ports and the keyboard is good again.
  
  Wanted to add that the touchbar is also gone, for anyone who wasn't aware.

I'm honeslty just wating till they bring out a new lineup without the ugly ass rounded corners they introduced with the M2 models. Also it would be nice if there was a clean version without all the legacy ports they added back on.

I ain't paying for Apple R&D. I'll consider them when they are cheap.
- The M1 Air is the best deal in computing.

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