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Apple Sold Fewest Macs in Any Quarter Since 2010 as Nearly Entire Lineup Was Outdated

Being a long time Mac user this comes as no surprise. Apple are no longer producing Macs suitable and sufficiently productive for the pro user. For the pro user a maxed out late 2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro is more suitable and productive than the latest offering providing a assortment of ports not USB-C only. It has a keyboard that makes sense and is reliable.

Moving on to the iPhone. Apples obsession with thinness as with the MacBook Pro compromises have been made. A major show stopper is no headphone jack. Apples assumption that all consumers are going to go out and purchase Bluetooth headphones is absurd. Oh and that prostrate and protruding camera.

All Apple decisions these days are made in the boardroom these days with the interest of the shareholder being of most importance whilst showing scant regard for the consumer.

Yes it is a cliche but since the passing of Steve Jobs Apple has utterly lost focus and direction.

Mac user since 2001.
 
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falainber said:
"We should be at 10nm"? Where did you get this?
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From Intel's product roadmaps...

...published three years ago...

That is how far behind they are.


Peperino said:
The reason Apple is selling less is because they are selling outdated overpriced hardware.
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It's been like that since the Macintosh was launched. I was around for the Mac IIfx, which was ten grand in 1990. And people are having a heart attack over the 2018 MacBook Pro 15 at $6700 when I remember the PowerBook 3400c was $7000 - in 1997.

And let's not talk about the 1990s when PowePC Macs were getting clubbed like harp seals by cheaper Intel Windows PCs, "megahertz myth" not withstanding.
 
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The Mac will be gone within the next 5 years. The traditional PC business just isn't a big profit driver anymore. There will still be Windows PC vendors, but high end consumer market for PCs is getting tough. Apple can make a lot more focused on mobile devices and services. Is there any loyal iPhone person here that would dump it if Apple dropped Macs? I doubt it.
 
WannaGoMac said:
Funny I find myself occasionally reaching up to move a document around nowadays which of course doesnt work.
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I considered a Surface desktop before I bought an iMac. I just wasn’t ready to jump ship, even though I found myself tempted. I love the way the Surface flips down into easel mode. If my job involved lots of contract review and markup, or I was an architect or interior designer, or an animator or artist who uses a tablet to draw freehand, I’d absolutely switch to Surface.

Having a big 27” screen that works like an adjustable easel, paired with a stylus, is game changing for a lot of professions and just really cool all the way around. I’d love to flip my iMac into easel mode and use my Apple Pencil for brainstorming, sketching out UI ideas, sketching out ERDs, etc. Instead I use my iPad Pro, but I sure wish I had a 27” screen as opposed to a 10” screen.

I think it’s crazy when people defend Apple’s dogma about touchscreens on the desktop. Microsoft has brought a whole new dimension to the desktop by making the Surface screen adjustable and adding touch.
 
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pl1984 said:
You must be looking at a different Intel than I am. Regardless I think we can all agree Intel has made significant improvements in their processors since the last update to the Mac Mini and Mac Pro. Furthermore it's not only about processors, other things have improved too.
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Not the "We're still on the 14nm process technology" nonsense again. Maybe Apple is so dependent on a process change because they continue to make their products unnecessarily thin. But that's on Apple, not Intel. The facts are the Mac Mini and Mac Pro are using technology which has long been replaced. That's on Apple, not Intel.
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Well sure, very specialized computers with a very small share of Apple's Mac lineup. I wouldn't expect regular updates to these machines. I am sure they are working on major changes to both of these products moving forward.
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falainber said:
Because if Apple starts using proprietary CPUs they won't be competing directly with PCs. Today at least they can be shamed by consumers for using CPU models that are a generation or two older than what their PC counterparts use. With their own CPU they might start using the marketing BS (like "retina display") to convince people why their CPUs are the best.
[doublepost=1533143282][/doublepost]
Maybe he never used a tablet or a smartphone?
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I am still not sure I follow. I don't see why Apple making their own chips means they won't be graded on performance. They are today with their A series chips. The same thing will happen with their laptop chips, they'll be compared to Intel performance.
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falainber said:
Like in PowerPC days? this did not work too well.
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Different times, computing is changing dramatically. High performance processors are becoming less and less critical, really only relevant to a small group of users. I manage a team of 60 people for a logistics company through nothing but my iPad Pro.
 
robbyx said:
I think it’s crazy when people defend Apple’s dogma about touchscreens on the desktop. Microsoft has brought a whole new dimension to the desktop by making the Surface screen adjustable and adding touch.
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People complain about Mac sales being low...take a look at how few units Surface shifts. :eek:
 
spherox said:
Outdated and overpriced.
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Outdated, overpriced and badly designed. Currently, Apple does not make a single computer, desktop or laptop, that I'd buy at half their inflated prices. Apple not only removes features that users want and adds ones we don't want, when we complain, an Apple executive will lecture us on how much smarter he is than we are.

We don't need USB ports, they say, over our protests, what we need is the "Touch Bar for working more productively." The latter is particularly backward. In the days of MS-DOS, you could buy the equivalent of that Touch Bar—an overlay for your keyboard. Since nothing on it changed and the lettering as easily read, it was actually better than this constantly changing, hard-to-read Touch Bar. Even then few bought those Touch Bars circa 1984. The idea is not only a loser, it should have been know as one in advance.

Listen and you soon discover that Apple corporate believes that its more tech-savvy customers are always wrong. Look at where the money is going. The company considers its ideal customer to child-like and obsessed with getting the latest emoticons. We've had a green witch and a unicorn. Soon I expected to hear Apple announce, with great fanfare, an emoticon that's a green witch riding a unicorn. Yeah, look for it.

That pictures-over-words mindset explains why, although, Apple is constantly creating new emoticons, the spell checker in macOS remains unchanged since about 10.2. It is worse than the one that shipped with Microsoft Word in the late 1980s. I know because I was working for Microsoft on Word projects at that time. About half the time macOS doesn't have the slightest clue what the correct spelling of a word is. Enter that same misspelled word in a Google or DuckDuckGo search, and both will give the right spelling about 95% of the time. And macOS is so ignorant of English conventions, it will fail to flag "quickly-go" as misspelled despite the fact that -ly words are never hyphenated. That is stupid, really stupid.

 
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The question is what lesson Apple will take from this; will it be that the Macs are old or that no one really wants a computer anymore therefore they don't need to focus on them
 
CWallace said:
People complain about Mac sales being low...take a look at how few units Surface shifts. :eek:
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What’s your point? It took years for Apple to sell a million Macs. Microsoft has sold plenty more Surface products. And since when does sales = innovation? I’m not talking about sales. Whether they sell or not, the fact is, Microsoft has shown lazy Apple that touch not only works well on the desktop but can actually be quite a sublime experience. It completely changes the whole experience of interacting with a computer. It doesn’t appeal to me in a laptop, but on that big screen tilted in easel mode, it’s awsome.
 
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I wonder if the mac campaign videos, pro workflows and the new macbook pro issues being solved is a factor for apple trying to to get back to the mac pro user. i believe these earnings calls could have also been a catalyst?
 
lowendlinux said:
The question is what lesson Apple will take from this; will it be that the Macs are old or that no one really wants a computer anymore therefore they don't need to focus on them
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My guess is they'll want to upgrade them more frequently and drop prices a bit. There is rumored to be a new MacBook with a price drop in the fall. They understand that the number of traditional computer users are dwindling though, that's why more focus has been on the iPad Pro, also getting a major update in the fall. Apple will cover both your points.
 
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robbyx said:
What’s your point? It took years for Apple to sell a million Macs. Microsoft has sold plenty more Surface products. And since when does sales = innovation? I’m not talking about sales. Whether they sell or not, the fact is, Microsoft has shown lazy Apple that touch not only works well on the desktop but can actually be quite a sublime experience. It completely changes the whole experience of interacting with a computer. It doesn’t appeal to me in a laptop, but on that big screen tilted in easel mode, it’s awsome.
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I’d think real innovation would lead to people wanting to buy the product. The Surface is just another Windows laptop and a bad tablet combined. Innovation? Maybe to some degree, but no one is buying them.
 
DNichter said:
Different times, computing is changing dramatically. High performance processors are becoming less and less critical, really only relevant to a small group of users. I manage a team of 60 people for a logistics company through nothing but my iPad Pro.
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The fact is, Apple has a lot of “pro” users. Pro, as in professional. Yet for so many in the Mac pundit and forum universes, pro = creative content producing professional, which is actually just a small niche market for Apple.
 
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nvmls said:
“We are proud to tell you that so far our online store has had more orders for the new MacBook Pro than any other pro notebook before”

-Phil Schiller (2016)
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We are proud to tell you that all the latest hardware Apple has release has been crappy outdated- and way overpriced.
We are proud to tell you that Apple has been ignoring and neglecting Mac Hardware for so many years that we are not willing to put with the crappy stuff you are releasing.

The consumers. (2018)
 
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DNichter said:
Well sure, very specialized computers with a very small share of Apple's Mac lineup. I wouldn't expect regular updates to these machines. I am sure they are working on major changes to both of these products moving forward.
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I don't consider them to be specialized yet alone very specialized. As for regular updates we're well past regular updates.
 
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DNichter said:
I’d think real innovation would lead to people wanting to buy the product. The Surface is just another Windows laptop and a bad tablet combined. Innovation? Maybe to some degree, but no one is buying them.
Click to expand...

First, I’m talking about the desktop, not the laptop. If you haven’t tried the desktop in easel mode, pop into a Microsoft store and mess around with it. The Dial contraption is kind of silly in my mind, but the easel and stylus is awesome. It comes down to the screen size. I love drawing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad. But it would be way better if I had a 27” screen, if I could put two full size pages next to each other and mark them up, if I had 27” worth of screen space to sketch out an ERD instead of 10”. Etc.

As for sales, it’s never that simple. People have said the exact same thing about the Mac for years. It’s clearly better. So why do most people buy PCs? It took Apple years to sell a million Macs. Why didn’t everyone see the clear advantages over DOS and ditch PCs back in the 80s? Sorry, but sales has nothing to do with innovation.
 
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