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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
That was true for windows machines until Win 11 started forcing the TPM requirement
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.
Gaming laptops are such a terrible way to game that I can’t think of a situation where I’d recommend one.
For budget reasons, get a console or build a couple gen old desktop for a cheaper price.
For portability? Get a Steam Deck.
If you’re gaming at the dining room table, it’d be better if it were a Steam deck. On the couch? Game on your console if you have one; if you instead have a PC, game on it hooked up here.
Doing non gaming stuff? Well, you probably don’t need a gaming laptop for that - a “productivity” laptop makes more sense.
And of course, that’s where MacBooks shine.
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.
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.
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 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.
I only replaced my original pro because of the battery life. Now I use it in my basement for my 3d printers
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’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
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
