What percentage of that is possibly due to folks buying Macs just to run Safari? Pure speculation on my part but I don't believe it can be more than a percentage of a percentage.
Was there a sudden increase when the Windows version of Safari was discontinued in 2010? It's hard to say exactly, because there are an awful lot of factors involves in sales numbers, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that's the case.
Also: think about your average dev or dev shop that buys a Mac just to make sure their stuff works on Safari. Are they buying a shiny new high-margin Mac? Oh heck no. They're buying the cheapest possible new Mac or, more likely, they're getting some cheapo preowned Mac. Or perhaps even more likely, they're using a service like Browserstack.
They wouldn't shoot their entire web strategy in the foot just to sell some negligible additional amount of Macs per year.
Looks like they've been selling around 18 million macs a year (https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...). If you ignore individuals having multiple computers, and assume the average lifetime of a machine is 5 years, you get 90 million people with a Mac. I don't know how many developers there are, but saw 20-25 million in some estimates.
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.
There are around 20 million developers globally and Apple has been selling 4.5 million Macs per year on average since 2013 (most of them MacBooks).
If 27% of all developers are using Macs (as the stackoverflow survey indicates) and the machines are replaced after 4.5 years then developers would be buying ~1.2 million Macs per year, 27% of all Macs sold.
In terms of revenue developers are probably an even larger share, perhaps a third? That's still not the majority, but it's certainly very significant even assuming that Mac users are overrepresented in the stackoverflow survey.
There has never, ever, ever been a time where most developers bought Macs. Ever.
The vast majority of software developers have always been on Windows. This is true worldwide and in the US. Only in certain fields and places like Silicon Valley do developers on Macs outnumber those on Windows.
I can link some numbers for you but they are findable. The stackoverflow developer survey shows it year after year.
Sad fact is that Mac sales are now 10% of Apples revenue. I think the only reason Macs receive any attention at all within Apple is because you need Macs to build iphone/ipad apps. Another way of framing this is - how much effort do you put on the bottom 10 percent of your TODO list.
Apple sold about 30 million Mac notebooks in the US in the last 4 years. Even if only half of those units were bought by unique individuals, that makes for 5 percent of the US population, a far cry from 0.1 percent.
(Background data: Apple has sold 100 million Macs in the last 4 years. 40% of those were sold in the US. Over 70% of the computers Apple sells are notebooks.)
Macs used to be popular with developers but, this has basically changed IMHO. Perhaps they are popular with web designers still but, developers seem to be using Macs no more than the rest of the population to me now. It is Apple's complete lack of support for them that has brought this about IMHO and, I think it will be the end of Apple in the (very) long run (it will be the end of them as anything other than a phone manufacturer sooner and eventually completely I think).
Uh, Apple has less than 8% of the market[1]. Why do you think it has the "vast majority" of sales? I'm assuming there's confirmation bias here but the vast majority of laptop sales are definitely not Apple, and not even at the high end—even if we exclude corporate sales.
I wonder if a lot of people are leaving the Mac ecosystem.
Apple has been selling roughly ~19M Mac per year since 2012, and its new user to Mac has also been steady at ~50%. Apple has had 60M Mac user in 2012 announced in WWDC, and they has been nearing 100M since early 2017. I assume that actual number is larger than 90M at the time, so after nearly 20 Months, ~20M New Mac Users on board, it manage to add a total ~10M Active Install Base.
That is surprising for me, as I was expecting ~110M+ Mac User already, others analysts like Benedict Evans and Asymco put those number past ~120M. So for every 2 new Mac Users, there is one leaving.
I hardly call that good news by Apple Standard. And this high churn rate happens after early 2017. From 2012 to 2016-17, there is 4 / 5 New users for every 1 leaving the Mac Ecosystem.
The timing actually align with their sudden Interviews with Apple journalist on Mac, Mac Pro, and the release of iMac Pro.
And judging from these numbers, I would bet the release of MacBook Pro, iMac Pro and MacBook didn't restore the faith of its Mac users.
Apple didn't care about its Mac lineup, this new MacBook Air as well as Mac mini were likely reaction to this churn, much like the iMac Pro.
Or may be, the timing has something to do with their New Keyboard Design, which they introduce to MacBook in 2015 and Pro in 2016, and they managed to fit that in this New MacBook Air.
What percentage of that is possibly due to folks buying Macs just to run Safari? Pure speculation on my part but I don't believe it can be more than a percentage of a percentage.
Was there a sudden increase when the Windows version of Safari was discontinued in 2010? It's hard to say exactly, because there are an awful lot of factors involves in sales numbers, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that's the case.
Also: think about your average dev or dev shop that buys a Mac just to make sure their stuff works on Safari. Are they buying a shiny new high-margin Mac? Oh heck no. They're buying the cheapest possible new Mac or, more likely, they're getting some cheapo preowned Mac. Or perhaps even more likely, they're using a service like Browserstack.
They wouldn't shoot their entire web strategy in the foot just to sell some negligible additional amount of Macs per year.
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