I care a lot about the Mac, and I'm not sure what to think about the fact that Mac unit sales are down again.
The Mac has been growing for a long time, and they seem to have reached a plateau. I assume that's the reason why Macs have became absurdly expensive in the last few years -- when they can't grow unit sales, they need to grow revenue per unit.
The result is that Apple doesn't build the computer most of their potential customers want -- a $1000 Macbook. I understand that they don't care about the $300 netbook market, but not offering a decent $1000 laptop is a bad idea. It means they are going to loose consumers and students – there are decent alternatives at that price point. Or, people like me, who just keep using their old Macbooks because the high price of the new machines isn't worth the marginally improved performance.
Where does this lead us? I don't see how the Mac should grow from here, and as a Mac software developer that worries me. I want to be in a growing market, not a stagnant one. I'm probably going to be okay for the next few years, but is the Mac still going to be a worthwhile platform for a small software company in 10-15 years? I don't know.
>Apple may be 10% worldwide, including Asian markets like India.
Well in 2000 there wasn't much computer in China or India.
Of course today that is a lot different. But if Apple's numbers were correct [] then MacBook Pro market share isn't growing, as a matter of fact MBP usage may be shrinking in the West.
[] For a number of years they claim nearly 50% of Mac buyers are new to the platform. That is nearly 10M per year.
Nearly all of the new Mac users are from China.
And yet their reported Active Mac User dont grow any where near as much.
2019 was also the first year in recent history Apple stopped reporting on Mac user satisfaction.
Buried a bit deeper is something more interesting:
Despite these advantages, US Mac retail sales slowed for about six months.
The Macolypse Hits Apple*
From about November 2008 to April 2009, Mac year-over-year US retail sales declined, even as Windows PCs dramatically gained. There was kind of a numbers reversal, following the late-September stock market crash. For example, in October 2008, following release of new aluminum, unibody laptops, US retail Mac revenue grew 25.5 percent, while Windows PC sales fell 4.2 percent, according to NPD. By January 2009, Mac retail revenue was down 10.4 percent from a year earlier and Windows PC revenue was flat.*
He goes on to say Mac Sales are up for June YOY, while attributing some of this success to price cuts, and noting that while Apple enjoys the high-margin territory firms which are pricing on value are holding onto market share.
I think the real losers here are not PCs in general or even manufacturers with a range of offerings like Dell and HP, but other luxury computer brands like Sony and boutique workstation suppliers.
As noted, the brick-and-mortar limitation is really distorting. Last time I was in Office Depot or Best Buy, they were strongly emphasizing value over performance with their space allocation.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Apple needs to sell off Macintosh. Their lack of focus on Mac hardware has cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, which for a normal company would be a big deal, but is rounding error for Apple.
I bet they could easily sell 1,000,000+ units of 2015 Macbook Pro laptops with 32GiG RAM and an updated processor/chipset/graphics.
I don't think it is a coincidence that 2015 was their peak unit sales for Mac [1]. 2017 was down from 2015 by 1.3 million units.
The Mac sales are not diminishing at all. They are INCREASING. The fact the iOS is also increasing, and increasing at a much higher rate, doesn't mean Mac sales are decreasing.
There's one thing that has me worried here. And it has nothing to do with EPS and profit margins and the like, let Wall Street worry about that, what I'm worried about has little effect on Apple's bottom line these days. It is that Apple sold just 4.1 million Macs, missing the estimates badly.
General-purpose computing is starting to look more and more like a profitable hobby for Apple. That it is in retreat over the whole industry only makes it worse. Maybe the day when most everybody has been herded into a walled garden isn't too far away.
It will be interesting to see Apple's Mac sales numbers this quarter. Last quarter they were down close to 20% year-over-year.
My personal theory for some of the loss in sales is that PCs are lasting much much longer than they used to. I just recently retired a laptop after using it for 6 years and am still rocking a quad core PC that is over 5 years old. My earlier computers were replaced earlier.
He's missing the big picture, in my mind. Pc sales may be in decline but aside from a few quarters, Apple has sold more macs by more than 6 times it did when it plateaued ten years ago. Sales have been on a steady incline because they were always selling miniscule amounts compared to the other cheap brands on the market. There was almost no where to go but up. It's not milking anything.
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