50% of Customers Purchasing a Mac in Q2 2022 Were New Mac Users

[xRem]

I am definitely one of those new maccers. Used Windows for over 20 years but seeing how powerful a Macbook can be despite using a friction of the power convinced me to get one. Haven't regretted it yet. With their own chips Apple is definitely onto a winner, especially as it seems that AMD/Intel won't be able to offer something comparable anytime soon.

 

[prospervic]

Not for nuthin', but that photo placing the two flagship Macs next to each other highlights just how drab the Mac Studio looks -- like something that belongs in a utility closet.

Apple should have at least made it Space Gray.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like a power amp, and would fit-in nicely on a rack with other high-end audio equipment.

 

[4jasontv]

Ours don't. YMMV.

In thirty years it never had a single Mac? Especially in the early 2000 when iMacs were so cheap and trendy?

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.

Sure, but if that's the case it would be expected that most customers would be new purchasers. The number of people who have never purchased a new computer, let alone a Mac, grow every year. I would also assume that most people who buy a BMW are new BMW drivers.

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

Using their Apple ID wouldn't be a good way to do it since Apple ID sharing is so common.

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.

Agreed. But we aren't most people.

 

[planteater]

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.

No problem, but I’d advise against any latent desires that you may have to go down the path of Data Analysis as a career choice. It may not be the correct one for you.

 

[TallManNY]

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?

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.

You wrongly assume that most people don't use an Apple ID on their Mac. Maybe you don't, but the vast majority of people who buy and use a Mac will make an Apple ID (or already have one from their iPhone).

 

[TallManNY]

I endure Windows at work all day, and the last thing I want is to come home and suffer it again. I imagine lots of people feel the same.

I'm in the US and in my social circle only two people that I can think of has bought, for their own use, a non-Mac. Myself, playing around with a Chromebook, and one friend who built a PC for gaming. That is it. It has been 100% Macs at home now for well over a decade. Almost all of us use PCs for work though. And that is rough because the PCs at work are inferior to the Macs at the same price point.

 

[jlc1978]

In thirty years it never had a single Mac? Especially in the early 2000 when iMacs were so cheap and trendy?

No. Library never had one for over 30 years; school district hasn't in the last 15 or so either. There was talk about it but it never happened.

Using their Apple ID wouldn't be a good way to do it since Apple ID sharing is so common.

Sure, but I suspect some of the sharing is the Family Plan, with its own ID, which Apple could use to ID new users. I suspect the number of people who share their own unique Apple ID isn't enough to impact the results, especially since many would already be Mac users and any new users are likely to setup their own Apple ID anyway, even if they share one.

As a said earlier, the data set is large enough that all the examples people use are simply noise in the signal and the 90% CI is likely to be small.

Agreed. But we aren't most people.

True. Apple could announce a "Free Macs for all MR Users" and we'd find ways to argue over whether it was good or bad; probably using car examples. 2 MR users, 3 opinions.

 

[kingtj1971]

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.

I'm pretty sure it only counts as a "user" if you buy one for yourself, vs just having worked with one owned by a school or somebody else....

That said? 50% of the sales were "new users to the Mac"? That honestly surprises me, just because I thought we had pretty much already gone through the era of a whole generation discovering the Mac with it becoming trendy for college students to carry one around, etc.

What I observed after that was a pulling away from the Mac. Many people I know who used to use one and rely on it as their primary machine said, "Next time, I'm getting a Windows machine." because Apple was really dropping the ball in so many ways. (The keyboard issues, lines through the display due to failing ribbon cables in the laptops, discontinuation of support for 32-bit apps when many of those had no updated versions to replace them with, overheating leading to thermal CPU throttling on Intel i9 Macbook Pros in 2019, etc.)

My guess was that most M1 series purchases were from former Mac users who either stuck with them this whole time OR who used Mac, got disgusted with it and went to a Windows machine, and now are giving it one more chance.

 

[maxoakland]

That seems huge. Like, a huge deal that this many new people are purchasing Macs.

 

[maxoakland]

If this doesn’t teach Apple not to abandon the Mac like they did in 2016-2020, I don’t know what will. The Touch Bar model was a disaster.

I’m going to miss the Touch Bar. I still use my 2016 MBP with the Touch Bar and butterfly keyboard. It’s getting kinda old, but I will really miss the Touch Bar and I really like the keyboard and I’ll probably miss it too

 

[CarlJ]

What about both form and function are important.

The point being that you can't let form completely overrule function. Taking out useful things (or introducing a much less reliable keyboard) and then saying, "but we've made it 2mm thinner!" - well, nobody was asking for it to be 2mm thinner at the expense of functionality. Apple has a history of making products that are both functional and well designed / pretty - they should keep to that course. Jony Ive with no Steve Jobs to provide balance / counterpoint, led to products that heavily valued form over function.

 

[Ethosik]

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.

Yeah I think that is what happened. "Lets just put the bare minimum involved with the current systems so we can devote 90% of the attention to getting the Apple Silicon versions ready".

 

[randyhudson]

No problem, but I’d advise against any latent desires that you may have to go down the path of Data Analysis as a career choice. It may not be the correct one for you.

So you think when a company buys 5,000 MacBooks from CDW, that CDW is asking them how many are going to first-time Mac users, and then just turning over that information to Apple? The same applies to Amazon, BestBuy, ....

 

[hans1972]

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.

That's not a problem, they can safely assume someone buying a Mac in 2022 which doesn't use an Apple ID with their Macs are existing Mac users like yourself.

 

[jakey rolling]

The point being that you can't let form completely overrule function. Taking out useful things (or introducing a much less reliable keyboard) and then saying, "but we've made it 2mm thinner!" - well, nobody was asking for it to be 2mm thinner at the expense of functionality. Apple has a history of making products that are both functional and well designed / pretty - they should keep to that course. Jony Ive with no Steve Jobs to provide balance / counterpoint, led to products that heavily valued form over function.

Yeah, the "but it's thinner" crowd always puzzled me. When "thinner" meant going from a 5lb, 2.5" thick laptop to a 1.5lb, 1.25 thick laptop, that comparison made sense, because the weight for carrying it around and, in some cases, using it when a rigid desk is unavailable was noticeably smaller. The extra thinness actually improved workflow.

When it started becoming "reduce another 2mm and 10 grams of weight" on some models, and in return start chopping off some functionality (like ethernet, HDMI, USB ports), the "thinner" selling point didn't really make much sense. My Dell Precision laptop from 2013 might be a bit thicker and heavier than a Macbook Pro of the last ten years, but it would only be noticeable if you put them side-by-side or held one in each hand. Once it was in a laptop bag or on a desk (basically, the two places 99.99% of laptops spend 99.99% of their time) there would be no difference whatsoever. That Dell didn't have to sacrifice ports or upgradeable RAM or storage in order to be portable, and as a result, it has a less than 2-year old battery, upgraded RAM and a new 1TB SSD in it, and it is still in use 9 years later running a fully supported current OS.

Now we have the even more ridiculous trend of Apple trying to make desktops as thin as possible. Other than looking cool on a desk, I don't really see much point in making the iMac look like a slightly beefier iPad on a stand. But here we are.

 

[4jasontv]

No. Library never had one for over 30 years; school district hasn't in the last 15 or so either. There was talk about it but it never happened.



Sure, but I suspect some of the sharing is the Family Plan, with its own ID, which Apple could use to ID new users. I suspect the number of people who share their own unique Apple ID isn't enough to impact the results, especially since many would already be Mac users and any new users are likely to setup their own Apple ID anyway, even if they share one.

As a said earlier, the data set is large enough that all the examples people use are simply noise in the signal and the 90% CI is likely to be small.



True. Apple could announce a "Free Macs for all MR Users" and we'd find ways to argue over whether it was good or bad; probably using car examples. 2 MR users, 3 opinions.

I never understood why a household would have more than one Apple ID. Different iCloud, sure, but it's better to have all devices use the same Apple ID.

 

[4jasontv]

I'm pretty sure it only counts as a "user" if you buy one for yourself, vs just having worked with one owned by a school or somebody else....

That said? 50% of the sales were "new users to the Mac"? That honestly surprises me, just because I thought we had pretty much already gone through the era of a whole generation discovering the Mac with it becoming trendy for college students to carry one around, etc.

What I observed after that was a pulling away from the Mac. Many people I know who used to use one and rely on it as their primary machine said, "Next time, I'm getting a Windows machine." because Apple was really dropping the ball in so many ways. (The keyboard issues, lines through the display due to failing ribbon cables in the laptops, discontinuation of support for 32-bit apps when many of those had no updated versions to replace them with, overheating leading to thermal CPU throttling on Intel i9 Macbook Pros in 2019, etc.)

My guess was that most M1 series purchases were from former Mac users who either stuck with them this whole time OR who used Mac, got disgusted with it and went to a Windows machine, and now are giving it one more chance.

Sure. But going to windows and coming back doesn't make them a new user. Measuring new users as they purchased it would. But that's just because someone who buys their first Mac after moving out of their Mac only home would likely count as a new user.

 

[cbaca51]

I’ve been a PC person all my life but I’m actually going to be making the move to a MacBook Pro this year. So I’ll be one of those people soon enough. But I’m waiting to see if those M2 MacBook Pro rumors are true so I’m waiting it out until the fall

 

[tubular]

Not for nuthin', but that photo placing the two flagship Macs next to each other highlights just how drab the Mac Studio looks -- like something that belongs in a utility closet.

Apple should have at least made it Space Gray.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like a power amp, and would fit-in nicely on a rack with other high-end audio equipment.

But the shape gives you plenty of room to paint flames on the side.

 

[Abazigal]

And make no mistake… it is what we do not get that we should be lamenting most.

I find life is too short to be moaning about how the iPad should have 256 gb default storage instead of 64. Just pay for the model and specs that you want, enjoy your product, and life goes on.

 

[rp2011]

I loved my iPad Pro. The best computer I ever owned, but with a Mac finally getting an iPad chip it seemed we were finally getting a modern machine. No need for an old-timey, bulky liquid cooled power hog with silly blinking LED lights for a machine with decent performance anymore.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

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.

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.

So are you telling me that all MS software now works fully slick on AS Macs?

From my perspective as a dev, I sometimes develop in C#. I haven't for a while, so I'm a bit out of the loop, but from a quick google around, there is a Visual Studio 2022 for Mac RC out, but without running the RC, there is no way to develop .NET 6 on AS Macs?

I feel like there are other niche areas that are still in development, but it sounds like MS is fully on board with getting all its software working slick on ARM. AFAIK, they are in full on serious development of their own ARM processors to get their ARM Windows running fast, as opposed to their current lacklustre offerings.

Anything else I missed?

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

Outside techie circles, pretty sure most regular consumers don't know or care about that stuff. They just want to "set it and forget it" and by the time the machine is 3, 4 years old and out of warranty they plop down another $1000-1500 for a new one and move on.

Well if that were actually the case, and most customers were simply buying the base models, then why do Apple even need to rip off the customers that do need to upgrade? If that were so, then it's just kicking the bees nest, with very little extra profits involved.

 

[tmoerel]

I never understood why a household would have more than one Apple ID. Different iCloud, sure, but it's better to have all devices use the same Apple ID.

Because an Apple ID is personal. It stores your personal data and sharing it in a family would be a privacy disaster. There is a reason you create create a family group with each their own account!

 

[4jasontv]

Because an Apple ID is personal. It stores your personal data and sharing it in a family would be a privacy disaster. There is a reason you create create a family group with each their own account!

Huh? What are you talking about?