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Mac Sales Declined Nearly 10 Percent Last Year (9to5mac.com)
It's not surprising that Mac sales dropped for Apple in 2016 as they experienced their first year over year sales decline since 2001. What is interesting, however, is that as Mac sales dropped roughly 10% and personal computers overall dropped 5.7% for the year, the top four leaders in the market all saw growth as Apple was pushed to number five. From a report: Although Mac sales were up in Q4 2016 compared to Q4 2015, an analyst note today from Bloomberg's Anand Srinivasan and Wei Mok has revealed Apple has dropped to the fifth largest PC vendor, with ASUS overtaking fourth place. The top four vendors are now Lenovo, HP, Dell, and ASUS. The report adds, "Those four companies represent 65.2% of the overall market and each grew year -- over-year, while Apple ceded ground, declining 30 bps to 7.1%. The other 27.7% of the market is comprised of more than 200 vendors. In a market expected to consolidate, Samsung and Fujitsu are reported to be in discussions to sell their PC businesses to Lenovo."
Most everybody that wants a Mac already has one. If they want a new one, well, there isn't one. No new Mac Pro in three years. Same for Mac minis and the last "upgrade" was actually a downgrade. No new iMac in two. Tim Cook said last year he was expecting for people to upgrade their Macs every three years, but the sad truth is that three years is up for many people and the Mac on sale is the one they already have or so close to it that there's no reason to upgrade unless it's dead. Add in that the newer models may be less upgradable than the ones they already have and that's less incentive to get a newer Mac. I'm still on my 2008 Mac Pro because it still works and I'm certainly not going to shell out top dollar for a three year old machine. i thought I might even go down to an iMac, but they're almost as old.
Bravely making products that few want to buy?
It's pretty obvious that they aren't interested in the Mac anymore. And why should they be? They don't make much money off of it, comparatively, and it's a LOT of work to keep updating MacOS.
I say good riddance. There was a time when MacOS was pretty nice, but that was a LONG time ago. Now, it seems quaint and underpowered and pointless.
Let's see, they managed to renew two models of Mac last year. The MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Everything else was stagnant. There was almost no reason at all to purchase a Mac. While the MacBook update was actually superior to the previous version, overall the update was pretty bland. It's like Henry Ford took over and said, I have the perfect car, why should I change. Granted, Intel's missteps hasn't helped either. They haven't exactly put out a homerun in the processor market since the days of SandyBridge. In the realm of the Mac Mini, their desktop actually regressed from the previous version in only have a dual core processor.
Maybe if they actually do something this year, we can get behind them and buy their products again. If not, I am certain they will continue to slide down to the level of other vendors.
Place something witty here
except In the ghetto.
thats all.. ? i was hoping more.. 25% least... overpriced item..
But nothing inetersting has happened in a while. I actually downgraded to a 2011 late 13" because i could put in an ssd and upgrade the memory. All the new stuff is soldered to the motherboard.
So all I wanted was 32gb of ram, but it had to be especially built. I waited 6 weeks.
In reality, if I had looked it up, I would have found it was a simple process of opening a flap and inserting memory.
That put me off, so I looked at Microsoft, and yes Windows 10 is good, the Furface family works for me, and he Surface Studio looks amazing.
Nothing new or good from Apple in years. No reason to stick with Apple. They're done.
Thanks summary and article for quoting "30 bps" seemingly without knowing what it means.
Anyway, I looked it up. It is a financial term, not a bandwidth one.
A basis point (often denoted as bp, often pronounced as "bip" or "beep") is one hundredth of a percent.
I don't know how 30bps is easier to understand than 0.3% but there you have it.
Like some other MacBook Pro users, I'm really examining other options for the first time -- My next laptop will probably be a Dell XPS with Ubuntu, and this after decades (30+) of Mac use. If I was Canonical and Dell, I'd be marketing the shit out of Apple's... change of direction? I heard this morning that Apple wants to start making movies. It really does appear that Apple would prefer the more lucrative services markets then the poor return on hardware. I can't say I really blame them, but it really does feel to me like OS X has moved past its peak developers moment.
According to the MacRumors Buyer's Guide, only the MacBook Pro is a recommended buy, and that's one of the most panned Macs to ever come out. With sales of Apple Watches, iPads & iPhones tanking, they better have a boatload of new offerings in 2017 to turn things around, or they'll really be in trouble.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I tried to procure Mac Minis for a small office in angel-finance reboot mode—it was a blank slate for changing the mix—and Apple had neutered the quad-core mini with the expansion RAM slot so badly, we bought refurbed Windows 7 boxes instead.
Worse machine, twice as much memory, half the price.
One key executive who has cold feet about making the jump, and you're not going to risk a castrated revamp. So it goes.
The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster
I had 100% buy-in for the Apple solution, had we still been able to get the 2012 spec. Mac mini.
My office mate had brought his own 2012-era Mini into the office and everyone loved it, which is how the option to jump ship from Microsoft entered the conversation in the first place.
Then *bam* the anvil behind the velvet curtain when we specked out the crippled revamp.
I can only imagine that Apple kind of wants to kill off the PC category altogether. Insufficient lock-in. Choice remains.
He called it the "Planned Obsolescence". He argued, "If the planned life of a car is five years, it is a waste to design its components to last 10 years". So he deliberately got the cars built using less durable components. But statistics is a bitch. If the car had 100 components each with a design life of five years and they had 95% confidence level, you are likely to have at least 5 failures before 5 years. (Roughly speaking, I did not ace my stats class either).
But US was on a roll so and all the car makers got on the bandwagon. But rest of the world wanted reliable and durable cars. Where cars were considered too valuable to be scrapped in three/five years, the market demanded better cars. The Japaneses served those markets using small econoboxes, something no American would even look at.
Then came the oil shock! Americans tried the tiny Japanese econoboxes, for fuel economy. But fell in love with their durability. The difference between the reliability of Japanese and American cars were stark, plainly visible, no amount of marketing gimmicks could fix that. GM went from 60% of the world auto market in 1959 to less than 30% of just US auto market in 1990.
So the lesson Apple might learn would be, "We should not be building our computers that last this long."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sean Spicer just said that Apple had "sold more Macs last year than ever before".
The Macintosh is dying. You can't even run a decent beowulf cluster on them anymore. No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
If Intel wasn't intentionally hobbling their hardware, they could be producing low power chips with QPI that would allow scaling out to 64 cores or more in the power profile of their current workstation boards, before including options like Xeon Phi compute modules on-board as well.
They would just need to use the lowest functional binned chips for a new SKU that they could price competitively for the high consumer/prosumer line and/or offer them exclusively through apple's hardware channels.
But instead they just keep rehashing the same chips for going on 8 years now, rather than offering customers either something NEW, or something featuring tech normally above their budget.
Instead we get crap like Skylake etc where the only new features are bad for the customer, and the performance difference isn't high enough to warrant it for any but those who have to own the latest and greatest regardless of cost or sensitbility.
Apple has made a lot of missteps in the past few years, ostensibly in the name of innovation, without really considering how their products are used and the role bits and pieces of their product line reinforce the brand. Particularly Mac fans have felt it, and now it's hitting home.
Regressions in software, elimination of Apple tools that add value to their platform, allowing hardware to go stale yet designing them to not be modifiable, going style over ergonomics, etc. Jobs had a knack for ignoring the user but delivering something he could make the user feel that they wanted. The current Apple doesn't have that. When they drop the ball on something, they take a ding.
They are also taking far too many cues from Google that are producing terrible (worse, anyway) UIs and UXs. Their products are slowing becoming more awkward and less consistent and coherent. These are minor things, but they add up.
Meanwhile, console gaming is also sliding a lot, and PC gaming seems to be on a bit of an uptick at least partially thanks to VR... So yeah.
This is attributable to the "courage" of making a computer that lacks ports that people actually use.
My macs are about 4 years old each. They work just fine and there is absolutely no need to upgrade them. Somebody who does heavy development or major graphic design work may disagree. But for a regular user, Mac can last a long time. It is a great product.
Apple has simplified their product parts bin so that everything is using laptop parts designed for their thinness at all costs product goals. This means even their desktop units are constrained by the same thermal throttling that kicks when put under load.
It's compounded by them taking forever to update their product line, some of which is outside their control. However, the RAM constraints put on them by their CPU constraints are a self-inflicted wound when it comes to their desktop products. In this sense, they're only offering one product -- old laptop parts -- just in different cases, including the Mini and the iMac.
I understand that simplifying their parts bin does make some things easier but please stop trying to sell me an economy car when I want an 18-Wheeler.
Where is my Mac Pro Tower with dual ethernet and room for six internal volumes? The Mac Pro was the Empire Strikes Back of cases. Will we ever see its like again? If people like us have noticed the lack of a full ecosystem of hardware from Apple, what do you expect us to recommend to our businesses, family and friends?
Oh, and as an aside, they really, really need to be taken to task on their irreparable computers. Want to extend the device's lifecycle by swapping the HD, adding ram or upgrading the internals? Screw you buy a new machine and throw out the old one! Apple should be given a medal by the landfill owner's association.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Intel should of put QPI in all cpu's / use if for the link to the chipset.
1 socket cpu's with QPI don't make use of it just the slow DMI link.
But apple can do better if they where to drop being supper thin.
I hate to say it, but Tim Cook is just destroying Apple. At the Apple store in our mall now, they have just two tables devoted to MacBooks. On the walls, they have a Mac Mini, a tower, and a couple of iMacs. It's obvious that it's simply not something they're pushing hard. The extra tables that had MacBooks on them last year now have phones and tablets. And Apple TVs - they're pushing those hard. They are showing less than half the Macs that they were showing a year ago. To put it into perspective, the Best Buy has nearly as many MacBooks on display as the Apple store.
Now, you could say they're responding to lowered demand, but they really need to get their shit together. The proper response is to figure out why the demand is lower (hint: no significant upgrades since Jobs died 5 years ago) and fix it. It's really not that difficult for them to maintain their market position, it's amazing that they could screw it up this badly.
Do you have ESP?
Should have.
ASUS is a load of bollocks. God forbid you EVER have to deal with their warranty/RMA procedure. Highly unprofessional & untimely. Had a P5N mobo few years back that arrived DOA, initiated the RMA procedure, I made a tiny tiny little scratchmark on the motherboard so I could identify whether board was repaired or replaced.
SIX WEEKS LATER they sent a "new" motherboard to me, but guess what? It was the exact same motherboard with the tiny little marking I had made. Obviously, it did not work. Second time round they took ANOTHER 6 WEEKS to get a replacement board to me. At this point I'd had enough and bought a GIGABYTE board instead.
So while technically ASUS may make enthusiast motherboards, just hope that you never ever have to deal with their RMA dept. Absolutely disgusting.
In comparison, in the past I've done an RMA with Intel aswell, turnaround time was 48 hours, extremely professional and excellent communication, clearly something ASUS needs to pick up on. Don't care what ASUS releases in the future, I'll never ever buy any of their products again, don't care even if 99% off.
Steve Jobs = Imagine what the user actually wants.
Tim Cook = Imagine what the user actually wants to look like.
Apple:
There is always a balance between form and function.
You cannot choose one over the other.
Anodizing an under-powered micro laptop in pretty colors is cool, but pointless.
Anodizing a bleeding edge micro laptop with features (think more than size) that no other has (in pretty colors) is cool and to the point.
The value I expect to receive for my dollar is much more than what I see, it's what's under the hood that lets me work more efficiently and make that dollar work for me.
Remember the old adage: Looks Fade.
-D
I have been waiting to upgrade, too, but Apple has continued their pursuit of thinness while abandoning the "Pro" market -- specifically professionals using Macs for computing rather than as a fashion accessory. The value and longevity of Macs has decreased significantly from Apple's neglect of both their laptop and desktop product lines.
While most Mac owners won't need to upgrade RAM or disk, I have done so on every Mac I've owned. I don't care about thinness or weight as much as function, compute power, and storage. I have nearly no reason to buy a computer with a slow CPU, small screen, or small SSD, yet Apple relentlessly offers non-Pro computer specs lately.
Phone and tablet revenue have so eclipsed computer revenue that Apple is financially allowed to offer dismal upgrades without recourse. I can only hope their recent Mac sales declines will be analyzed as Apple's own fault, as there are tons of folks desiring to upgrade to a more powerful Mac product.
Timmy's hatred for computers and Steve Jobs are legendary. The decline of the Mac lines which have been preceded by the reductions in hardware capability and operating system capability are the plan to kill-off the Mac, iPod and iTunes. Back in the day, iPod and iTunes saved the Mac after their introduction.
Timmy's and Apple's next master-plan piece of innovation will be a the "Apple Tickle" a lesbian masturbation device tethered by blue-tooth and wifi to allow two or more lesbians to masturbate (the device is inserted into the vagina and controlled by iPhone) while playing masturbation games, in their home, on a bus, in a shopping mall or in their cars as such.
yes Windows 10 is good, the Furface family works for me
Has Microsoft been advertising its tablets to fans of fictional talking animals or something?
When you make a product that people don't want what do you expect? If Apple would listen to their professional customers and build products that they want then you would not be seeing this. The professionals are the group that drove adoption of the consumer products, don't forget that. As a IT specialist, people ask me all the time what to get and they usually get what I tell them to, so be cognizant of the consequence of pissing of your professional users because they are the group of people recommending your products to others. Word of mouth advertising is worth it's weight in gold.
When I brought my MBA 13" back in 2013 I was happy to have a quality device that was portable but ran Linux ok (except the camera). The screen was low res but there was nothing on the market that looked close and was known to run Linux ok. Fast forward a few years and the screen was getting really annoying and I came to realise that fancy aluminum case was probably the reason for poor WiFi performance.
Last year I notice the Dell XPS13 DE and it made my MBA look crap. There was no sign of a better Mac on the horizon. The Dell was physically smaller than the MBA but had a physically bigger display and higher res. Add full support for Linux out of the box and it was a no brainer. As much as I like my MBA the Dell is a far better machine.
Apple really need to take the laptop feature update cycles seriously of they want to retain market share, but it is going to be a few years before I look at them again.
Hopefully, followed by Rust.
Apple has simplified their product parts bin so that everything is using laptop parts designed for their thinness at all costs product goals. This means even their desktop units are constrained by the same thermal throttling that kicks when put under load.
That was REALLY true with the 2015 MacBook Pros; but isn't at ALL a problem with the 2016 MacBook Pros. That is one of the biggest reasons why the 2016 MBPs are actually MUCH faster than the 2015's, even though the CPU is slightly slower at max. speed.
Of the 2015 MBP:
"Once we had noticed some occasional GPU throttling, it is hardly surprising that the losses in the stress test are even more dramatic. After our one-hour stress test with Prime95 and FurMark (Windows), the CPU runs at only1.2 GHz, while the graphics card is also limited to just 400 MHz. Even though devices from Asus, Acer & Co. also throttle, none of the direct rivals loses that much performance. "
Vs. the 2016 MBP, the same publication said:
"The analysis of our initial benchmarks shows that the new MacBook Pro is on par with the replaced MBP with a Haswell i7-4870HQ CPU in the Cinebench R15 Single test, while it is 12% faster in the Multi-Core Rendering test. All in all, the results are within the expected range of all tested 6700HQ processors. Cinebench R15 Multi clearly shows the advantage over the current Apple MacBook 13: +115%.
The MacBook Pro 15 is a little bit slower than the previous model in the PCMark benchmark test (Bootcamp Windows). It is on par with other powerful multimedia notebooks like the Dell XPS 15 9550, Asus N552VX or the ZenBook UX510, for example.
[...]
We could not determine throttling of the GPU performance in the Unigine Valley benchmark. The GPU reaches a decent temperature of 70 C and even managed a slightly higher score once the system was warmed up.
[...]
The sensors show much higher values for the internal temperatures. The GPU reaches uncritical 70 C in Unigine Valley, but the CPU will level off at 91 C in Cinebench R15. The scores do not collapse in macOS though, so there should not be any problems with throttling."
So, it seems like the combination of the lower-power Skylake, and Apple's improved Thermal Management has created a laptop that is significantly faster OVERALL (and especially at long-term CPU and/or GPU-intensive tasks, like video editing) than its predecessor.
Please make it possible to order a premium Macbook Air 11 inch, same body and ports, just 16GB or 32GB of memory and 1TB or 2GB SSD.
It is the ideal workhorse for traveling and day to day work. I don't need a better screen or touchbar because I connect it to an external screen, ergonomic keyboard and mouse anyways if I am at home or at the office.
The only other nice to have is to update the DisplayPort to support dual 4K monitors. I am still using a maxed out Core i7 from early 2014 but often hit the memory limits. My next machine will be an Hackingtosh or running Linux if Apple does not provide an upgrade path.
Great. Fantastic. Now reply to the originating post.
The iMac and Mac Mini are laptops being sold as desktops instead of being engineered to be what they are —desktop products.
I went to buy a new Mac laptop last year. I needed a quad core machine in a 13 inch form factor. But Apple, in all of their post Steve Jobs buffoonery failed to make a product to meet my needs. So I got a Thinkpad and put Linux on it. I really wanted a new Mac, but now, I'm not likely to buy another Mac again.
I can't understand why people keep saying Mac sales are dead or dying.
Just in the last week, I bought a 64GB, 3GHz, triple one-terabyte drive, 12/24 core Mac Pro with a graphics card that will more than do what I need. Beautiful tall thing, truly awesome case design, lots of ports, three open card slots, expandable, physically secure, latest MacOS installed.
For ~$1500.00, with free shipping and 30 days return privileges to make sure it arrives safely and works as specified.
I bought it at what has become my absolute favorite Mac store, EBay.
Looks to me like Mac sales are doing awesome.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Unfortunately, no MacOS, and no Mac apps.
So it doesn't matter what hardware we can get.
I have no doubt at all Apple is so far behind in hardware design because they are really busy, you know, doing critically important work like removing earphone jacks and function keys and user-upgrade-capable features like RAM and drives and network ports and batteries and card slots and drive bays. That has got to be some challenging engineering!
But the fact remains, we buy your fabulous hardware -- and I'm totally giving you the benefit of the doubt there, certainly we could buy newer hardware just as you describe, likely less expensive just as you said, plus all manner of fabulous I/O and bays and slots -- and we still can't legally, or even reliably, run any of our software. Hackintoshes are not a good solution at all.
Which makes the fabulous new hardware exactly as useful as a boat anchor, minus the ability to really get a hook on the bottom.
What a lot of people who rant about price and performance just don't seem to get is that people buy computers primarily to run software on them and connect them to things that the computer can control and otherwise add value to, or vice-versa, inevitably using said software. If a particular computer won't run the software, you can describe how fabulous it is and the huge price advantage(s) until your vocal cords fail you, and it will do you not a bit of good.
Me, I just shop EBay. I paid $1500 for a 12/24 core, 3x 1-terabyte drive, ~3GHz Mac Pro just last week. It's not the latest thing, but on the other hand, it's still pretty quick, and in terms of resources and ports, it's great. The actual price/performance... outstanding.
Apple made nothing off that deal. But they deserve that in my view as they tried to foist that trashcan thing off on me. Could have had my money with just a proper tower design. Instead, they sent me to EBay. Clearly, I'm just not sophisticated enough to understand their marketing plan, that's all. [waves in California's general direction]
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Honestly, as a MacOS user, I would welcome that day.
They sure as hell haven't shown they are able to make cutting edge products. Just (cough) "courageous" ones.
It'd be killer to be able to set up a legit MacOS system with the latest innards.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I mean, jellomizer might be absolutely correct in his estimation that his "over 5 year old" laptop is still good enough for him to keep using it.
But in the overall sense, I don't think you can explain this drop in computer sales (especially the fact that Apple is now seeing 2x the decline of the rest of the industry) on the general fact that an older machine is still usable for a lot of folks.
There has ALWAYS been a subset of computer users who have no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Their only true motivation for a new computer is when the old one just quits working. That should already be reflected in the sales figures, year over year, and be pretty predictable.
I think it's been a pretty good rule of thumb for as long as I can remember working with computers that 3 years is a good length of time to hang onto a machine before upgrading, if you want to stay current, still get some resale value out of what you have, and still maximize how much use you got out of what you purchased. If you think about it? You can do a whole heck of a lot with a computer in 3 years' time. Certainly, you can do enough with it by then to justify every penny you paid for it. I mean, even if you only used an inexpensive PC to do your Federal taxes for 3 years in a row - that alone could cost-justify it vs. paying a tax prep. service instead.
Whenever I've tried to hold onto an older machine for as long as 5 years, I found it had diminishing returns. I'd reach the point where it was limiting me in some way or another -- even if it was just compromising by using lower graphics settings in the newer games I wanted to play on it, or adding on external hard drive storage to compensate for it not having enough inside it. When you stretch things out that long, technology has typically advanced by several iterations on practically everything in the computer. Processors have evolved, as have video chipsets -- but also, the whole bus architecture has likely changed. Computers that are 5 years old now are going to have much older versions of Bluetooth (if they have it at all), older wi-fi standards, and no USB 3.0 support (only 2.0 or 1.1). Quite likely, they only have 100mbit wired ethernet on-board instead of gigabit. If it uses a spinning disk instead of an SSD for at least the boot drive, you're taking a HUGE performance hit over more modern systems too.
The *one* remaining hope I have for Apple is that huge new "spaceship" campus they're building. I mean, if you look at all the office space that gives them? That could represent an opportunity for Apple to finally employ enough engineers, developers and designers to really plow forward with some innovation.
I find it interesting that so far, I've heard that Apple intends to keep all of its existing office buildings after the new one goes online, too.
They don't do any manufacturing in any of these buildings ... so ALL of this would appear to be for the purposing of coding software, designing things, or providing user support.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's possible Apple has kind of put things on the back burner while it ramps all of this up and reorganizes staff internally?
You can install software from anywhere on a Mac.
People in the Apple ecosystem are perfectly aware of products from outside the ecosystem--we don't like them. If you like them, then go buy them.
The iMac and Mac Mini are laptops being sold as desktops instead of being engineered to be what they are —desktop products.
I don't see the problem with that, since the iMac + Mac Mini are severely space-constrained, just like a laptop. My AOpen MiniPC from 2009 uses what are, effectively, laptop parts.
If you want to go after Apple, look at their soldering of memory and (especially) SSD parts to the chassis.
Have you seen the market prices for used Mac Pros? The last of the "cheese grater" Mac Pros - especially the 12 core models - are trading for serious bucks, almost their original sale price. When Apple released the inferior "new" Mac Pro, the demand for the older systems went up.
Man am I glad I abandoned the Windows world and bought my 12-core Mac Pro back in 2012.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
You have the imagination of an clueless a$$hole.
Each release is becoming more and more difficult to do it.
El Capitan requires a right click to force it to open and Sierra added a switch to disable it entirely.
Yes, I realize none of that is particularly difficult, but in Sierra's case you have to know the switch exists in the first place in order to use it. It's not even like they hid it, but the warning could at least give you a hint that the setting exists if you want to change it rather than just telling you that you can't install the software. That's just being lazy or a jerk.
I guess that'll make Trump's border wall a lot easier to build.
It used to be one computer and maybe half a dozen pieces of software. Now it's a Mac -- or maybe two, the desktop and the laptop -- and a device -- or maybe two, or three, or eight, if the whole family has phones and iPads. It's an expensive habit to support, and I think part of the drop off may be due to the devices siphoning off money.
A new computer usually means an OS update, which means getting all the software updated -- and paying for the commercial, mission critical stuff -- and getting all the devices talking to the updated Mac, and logging back into everything, and restoring all the preferences and automation, and getting the backups going again, and frankly, I'd rather put beans up my nose.
And the hardware lasts forever. The oldest working laptop I have is a 1995 PowerBook 520, and the youngest is a 2011 17" MacBook Pro, bought refurbished as the world rushed to retina displays. It does everything I want it to do, and more.
- was calling a rubber chiclet keyboard an "Island" keyboard, and watching Apple hipsters buy it in droves.
Firestone Ford and Standard oil engaged in nearly illegal actions, buying bus lines and tram lines and closing them down etc.
The streetcar token cost 5 cents. The Model T Ford about a penny a mile for a family of four plus dog and cargo. "You could afford a Ford." The automobile was convenient, comfortable, and private. The tram lines went under because riders were looking elsewhere.
is keep parts flowing from a few US cpu and gpu brands.
Bump that iMac, mini, pro every year. The OS spans a few hardware cycles. Slowly remove OS support from the past hardware.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
PC sales overall may be stagnating but sales of gaming focused machines are on the upswing. If Apple were to make an Apple TV with support for AAA console gaming and gaming SKUs of the Macbook that supported AAA titles they could make some serious coin. Seems like they need to get on the cross-platform low level graphics API bandwagon rather than rolling their own if they ever want that to happen.
I was waiting to upgrade my macbook pro but these new ones are underpowered, overpriced and removed ports. Fuck you Apple. I made a hackintosh instead.
No new macs? No problem. I'm building a hackintosh tomorrow that will annihilate the Mac Pro for about a quarter of the cost. Problem solved.
This was the first full year they've lost ground in unit sales. But...
Apple's average selling price is around $1200 a unit, while PC Venders average around $500 a unit. This means Apple is still probably the most successful PC maker in the world by revenues. Macs have to account for over 15% of the PC market spending.
Also, Apple's Mac profit margins are in the 15-20% range, while PC venders subsist on 2-4% profit margins. That means Apple is certainly the most profitable PC vendor in the world, and it's Mac sales are roughly as profitable as the rest of all of the PC vendors in the world combined.
Mac sales are over $20B a year. on the Fortune 500 list the Mac would be around 150th. it's a huge business and not going away any time soon. But Apple needs to do a better job of keeping it's lineup fresh.
This drives me crazy. What the hell does the CPU generation have to do with the amount of RAM in a device? Little or nothing, is the real answer.
What the hell does the company making the device, have to do with telling me how much RAM I want or need? Little or nothing, is the real answer.
Except for Apple and their products. And yes, I have the same answer for any other company attempting the same.
Because Apple is TRASH today.
Remove features + don't add new ones = TRASH PRODUCT
Don't get me wrong, I want Apple to innovate and improve and there is room to do that. Just don't lose sight of the fact that the hardware isn't tripling in performance every 18 months, like it used to.
The recent new Intel chips aren't impressing a lot of people right now (https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-kaby-lake-7th-gen-7700-7600-7350/) and the AMD FX chips today are almost the same speed AND PRICE they were two years ago.
Lack of competition in the high end graphics cards means high prices for top of the line GPUs too. A recent quote from Toms Hardware: "Further up the hierarchy, prices haven’t changed much. There’s just nothing new from AMD to make Nvidia flinch." (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gpus,4380.html)
Can Apple do better? Absolutely!
After three years, are components that much better? Yeah, somewhat.
When good VR capable GPUs become affordable, then we may see a major refresh. Until then, an i5 and a 2GB GPU is more than enough to do most everything I need or want to do. Even an i3 is good enough for many (most?) games.