this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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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.
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.