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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.
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
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.
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.
They might not directly make much money from Mac, but they indirectly make shitloads of money from Mac, because Mac is the development environment for the iOS App Store.
Keeping macOS a going affair is a big piece of their product portfolio, unless they do a shit ton of work to port Xcode somewhere else.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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
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.
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.
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?