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.