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You may not have liked the hardware (for good reason) but the idea that Apple Silicon wasn’t very much in progress (therefore putting much effort into the Mac) at the time is a bit ludicrous. The A7 from 2013 signaled that the roadmap for the Mac was always being worked on.

Keyboard aside (truly terrible), the 2016 chassis was clearly designed for what Intel said it could deliver, but never did.
I'm very curious about the last point - could you say more?
 
Now we will see the (P)EU legislate to pass a directive forcing Apple to throttle down their AppleSilicon Macs because they are _anticompetitive".
 
How would Apple be able to tell if a customer was buying a Mac for the first time? I call BS. Enterprises probably bought a significant number of these.
 
New Macs need activation.
Activation needs an Apple ID.
If you need to create an Apple ID you are a new Apple user.

That would be my guess.

Also, when you place an order, either online or at a store, a customer usually provides a name/address/creditcard#/check/etc.

I'm probably going waaaaay out on a limb here, but I have a feeling a company the size and success of Apple can figure out if a purchaser of a phone/computer is a new or repeat customer.
 
How would Apple be able to tell if a customer was buying a Mac for the first time? I call BS. Enterprises probably bought a significant number of these.

And those enterprises would supply no documentation as to who they are when they make, say, a $100,000+ purchase?

Some enterprise dude who works in purchasing would walk into an Apple Store with a bag of cash and walk out with 50 MacBook Pros?
 
Bump up the base model Studio to 1TB and the adoption will be even greater. Come on Apple you are losing customers just to bean count a few bucks. So petty.
 
How do they know?
Surveys has already been mentioned.

Another way I imagine they could find this out quite easily is by simply looking server side how many users have synced their iCloud data with a Mac before and then referencing that with new Mac activations.
 
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I don't know if anyone has ever ventured into the Find My app, but it lists all the devices associated with your AppleID. No Macs associated to a Mac associated would be a pretty good indicator of first time mac purchase-- even my Mac from 2011 shows up in that app (and I assume older computers than that would, as well).
 
How do they know?

New Apple ID signins, as others pointed out.

How do you classify someone as new when a product has been commonly used in education for 30 years? It seems unlikely that someone would buy a Mac without ever having used one before.

Where I live there are no Macs used in classrooms at the k-12 level; iPads are used but only in certain cases, such as Special Ed.

“half of all Mac buyers during the quarter were new to the product.” How can they get away publishing numbers like these taken out of thin air… There is no way half of Mac buyers were new because then market share would shoot through the roof… which it doesn’t!

Not really. It's only for 1 quarter, so I would not expect a large bump in market share, since they essential replaced upgrade sales withe new users, not added new users to a consistent upgrader set of numbers.

Let's face it, the new 14/16" MBP's are functional engineering marvels, but the form of them is rather so-so.

I'll take functioning engineering marvels over form any day; since that means getting work done and not fighting some designers idea of great design.

Gosh. If that's a valid metric, I can just imagine the millions upon millions of "first time" Windows users Microsoft must be counting based on their "Sign in with Microsoft" schtick.

Apple has far better data than MS, given Apple IDs have been used to identify users and devices for quite some time.
In addition, unlike WIndows, MacOS only comes on Macs, so you don't get the "Had Dell, now HP" types in the data. A new AppleID is very likely a new user; since most existing ones want to have access to all their purchases, messages, etc. Sure, there may be cases where someone buys a Mac for a family member, who used to use tehirs, and now gets an AppleID, but is not a new user. They could parse out Family Sharing IDs if tehy wanted to cleanse the data.

Bottom line: It's accurate enough to draw valid conclusions.
You wrongly assume that people use a Apple ID.

I do not on my MacBook. I use nothing in the Apple cloud. Most of it is a joke and I easily use other vendors. I get no software from the Mac App Store.

I suspect the % that don't is so small as to have no impact on the numbers.

For any company that’s been selling to the same market for 45 years to still sells to 50% new customers is impressive. Im the tech industry, it’s unheard of.

If your market share is small enough it's not unrealistic, but I agree for the Mac it is pretty impressive, especially if many are switchers.

But there are fully functioning Windows VMs on Mac - even with ARM native Office. They run very well.
In addition there is X86 emulation (Quemu, UTM), so you can even run old software, that doesn‘t work on Win11/ARM.
Last but not least, some stuff can run via Wine/CrossOver as MacOS under Rosetta.

I've tried UTM.QEMU and it is a pain to get to run and keep working. I've had to reinstall multiple times and finally said F it, I'm out. Parallels with WinARM is perfectly fine for what I need, which id Office/Visio on occasion. Worst case I convert an old 2016 MBP to a dedicated Win device if Parallels stops functioning.

The only thing that is missing is an officially licensed Windows version, but with the MS/Qualcomm deal expired, there is no reason for this not to happen, as it seems to be in MS best interest.

There really is no upside to officially supporting it, something they have not done even in the Intel era. The support hassles would likely not be worth the small number of users they'd get. Better just to ignore it and not actively stop it; but if someone calls in simply say "sorry, not our problem."

And those enterprises would supply no documentation as to who they are when they make, say, a $100,000+ purchase?

Apple doesn't care what a new purchaser's business is for purposes of this statistic.

Some enterprise dude who works in purchasing would walk into an Apple Store with a bag of cash and walk out with 50 MacBook Pros?

Who is unlikely to "walk into an Apple Store with a bag of cash" given any company making a 100,000K+ purchase likely has some purchasing rules to control spend and stop fraud. What is likely to register them under a common corporate AppleID and or use some sort of management software to support them. They have no reason to hide their purchase, more likely they want the support that comes with them. Not to mention any negotiated discounts, or more likely leasing them.

You could have an AppleID from your iPhone and never used a Mac before!

In which case your AppleID would recognize the Mac as a new device. Under devices, it shows what has used this Apple ID.

You could have used Macs before and decided to use your AppleID on a Mac for the first time.

They % of those is likely quite small.

I said it, I repeat it, whatever way they got that 50% number is flawed!

Not really. Is it 45%? 55%? Who cares, it's close enough for teh story they are telling, i.e. Apple gained a lot of new Mac users last quarter.

No data is perfect. Even sales numbers are not 100% accurate. The data does not have to be perfect to get a statistically valid result. With enough data you can draw valid conclusions, and I'm sure Apple has someone on staff that understand statistical analysis. The tiny percentage of cases that get miscounted is simply noise in a large data set.
 
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You wrongly assume that people use a Apple ID.

I do not on my MacBook. I use nothing in the Apple cloud. Most of it is a joke and I easily use other vendors. I get no software from the Mac App Store.

It is not a iPhone…..yet.

Congratulations
I don’t think your personal choices make a significant statistical difference to the larger picture
 
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Where I live there are no Macs used in classrooms at the k-12 level; iPads are used but only in certain cases, such as Special Ed.
Really? Even my public library has iMacs. My high school gave out PowerBook to every student to use for the year. How long does it need to be before you last used a Mac to be considered new to the Mac? I have friends that get a new mac every ten to 15 years, and others that swap back and forth between Mac and PC. I think the issue I have is saying someone is a "new" mac user when they are really returning to the Mac.
 
I have it on pretty good authority that Apple also considers Mac owners with Macs of a certain "vintage" to be "first-time Mac buyers" if the Mac they owned is, uh, "vintage" enough. I don't know what threshold they use, but I'd imagine they have a slider (can easily vary it to see how the numbers change); if you think of how many MacBook Pro 2012 and MacBook Air 2015/17 got sold into higher ed, how many 2012-2015 iMacs are out there, and how many folks got bitten by garbage keyboards in 2016-2019 and jumped to Windows, and that Apple could, at this point, be considering them "vintage/first-time Mac buyers", then the numbers make complete sense. Is it a "fudge", yeah, certainly. But… they are Apple's numbers, and PR narrative, to fudge.

What SHOULD be happening is that the tech press and shareholders should be calling Apple out on it, and ASKING the question: "how are you calculating that?" They aren't. Says a lot, IMHO. (I can understand why the shareholders don't ask, the numbers are better for their share price. But the journalists? That's pretty inexplicable. So, I suppose I should say "journalists"…)
 
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Really? Even my public library has iMacs. My high school gave out PowerBook to every student to use for the year.

Ours don't. YMMV.

How long does it need to be before you last used a Mac to be considered new to the Mac?

A would guess Apple meant new purchasers, not that they were not familar with the Mac. It would make sense that first time buyers knew what Mac was before buying them.

I have friends that get a new mac every ten to 15 years, and others that swap back and forth between Mac and PC. I think the issue I have is saying someone is a "new" mac user when they are really returning to the Mac.

Some may be returners, but the number is probably small enough to not make a difference. New AppleID for the new Mac? New buyer.

What SHOULD be happening is that the tech press and shareholders should be calling Apple out on it, and ASKING the question: "how are you calculating that?" They aren't. Says a lot, IMHO. (I can understand why the shareholders don't ask, the numbers are better for their share price. But the journalists? That's pretty inexplicable. So, I suppose I should say "journalists"…)

I suspect most people don't care, and many buyers will never even read the article or press release. They just want to buy a computer.
 
I love all of these people in here with their anecdotal evidence against the statistics. Guys: we're talking about sampling _millions_ of sales. That is more than a large enough sample size to take statistical data from multiple sources (surveys, accounts, registrations, etc.) and combine it together to get a fairly accurate accounting of how many new users they have. Apple most-likely has their own in-house statisticians for this, but if they don't there are TONS of "marker research" companies that specialize in this stuff.

With this large of a sample size you don't need a definitive answer from every single person - statistical models will give you a really good answer.
 
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With this large of a sample size you don't need a definitive answer from every single person - statistical models will give you a really good answer.

But but but, I know all of my friends who bought last quarter already owned one so Apple has to be lying....
 
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I suspect most people don't care, and many buyers will never even read the article or press release. They just want to buy a computer.
This is most likely true, but these numbers aren't meant for them. These numbers are meant for share price/shareholders, the wealth of the Exec team (who are "paid" mostly by share price), and are used to maintain the status quo of a powerful "elite". As long as the current exec team keeps the share price going up, and are able to keep the "tech press" from asking the questions, any mistakes they make that "hurt" the Apple community at large—like greedily increasingly ramping pricing or pushing crap/mediocre products like the MacBook keyboards, entry-level iMacs with hard drives, 8GB iPhones when iOS took 5GB, and Stupido Display—will get glossed over… and that, eventually, does impact all of us in the community, even the ones who "don't care" and "just want to buy a computer." We suffer. They get richer and further entrench their control over what we all get next (or don't get). And make no mistake… it is what we do not get that we should be lamenting most.
 
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