Apple's Mac Sales Drop in Q4 2018 Amid Worldwide PC Shipment Decline

[31 Flavas]

What's the excuse this time?

Previously, it was because MacBook Air and Pro had not been updated. Now the updates have arrived.

DOOOOOOM! Apple is doomed! For sure this time! The jig is up.

 

[LordVic]

I mean, they cared about getting their product into peoples hand to be used as a creative tool.
It was never a cheap tool, but one that offered you good value for money.

When they switched to Intel processors and introduced the aluminium Macbooks, Apple actually grew faster than the rest of the market, because people saw and appreciated this added value in their computers.

yup. At the time of the conversion to Intel, Apple computers were sitting at roughly < 2% total sales share.

They're now at 6% internationally and 9% US. These were even higher for the years 2011-2013. Then it seems all hell broke loose at Apple, and they forgot about the computer lineups. They seemingly can only handle 1 mac revision at a time. Prices have skyrocketted and share and sales are going down. Reversing the trend of Apple becoming a larger computer player.
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The NVMe drive in the new macbooks are also soldered in, and they removed the recovery port from the logic board. I hope these NVMe drives are reliable.

These soldered in SSD's are going to tank resale of Mac's.

ALL SSD's, NVME or not have limited write cycles. While these for average users could be in years/Decades. For extremely heavy users, this could be a few short years. This means it's extremely plausible that any of the new Macs with soldered in CPU have a lifepsan of < 10 years. Something that previous Mac's could blow past (how many people here are still using 2009 mac pros or early 2010's laptops.

NOW with the soldered in SSD devices. Once those write cycle limits start getting hit. The entire logic board becomes garbage. Instead of a cheap $100 SSD swap in, it's a new computer.

Soldering storage into a device for no reason other than just to do it, is nothing more than planned obsolescence. And there is NO technical reason for it.

 

[pgwalsh]

Time for Apple to allow OS X to be installed on 3rd party machines, even home built one's. Not saying make OS X opensource (that would be courage, brave, different) but just open it up. The time is right their focus is clearly on services and gadgets, so why limit it. The PC market for Apple is more like a side project today. If Apple really intends to compete with Alexa, Neflix and Android this would help considerably. They'd bring a lot more people into their ecosystem. I'd install it on my computer in a heartbeat.

I know this is rather unpopular to many faithful but Apple is primarily focused on growing their services market. If this isn't completely obvious then not sure what to say. If Apple was serious about the PC market they would have launched a new MacPro a long time ago.

Oh I recall when I used to champion x86 when Apple was on PPC and people here crapped on me for it and well.... However unlikely it might be I will hold firmly that it's the right thing to do.

 

[guzhogi]

The iPad is already slipping to a 1.5 year refresh cycle. I won't be surprised if the Macs go longer, say 2-3 years, in between updates.

It would be interesting to see what the replacement cycle would be if/when Macs move to Apple's A CPUs
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Soldering storage into a device for no reason other than just to do it, is nothing more than planned obsolescence. And there is NO technical reason for it.

You're forgetting THINNER! /sarcasm

 

[Abazigal]

Time for Apple to allow OS X to be installed on 3rd party machines, even home built one's. Not saying make OS X opensource (that would be courage, brave, different) but just open it up. The time is right their focus is clearly on services and gadgets, so why limit it. The PC market for Apple is more like a side project today. If Apple really intends to compete with Alexa, Neflix and Android this would help considerably. They'd bring a lot more people into their ecosystem. I'd install it on my computer in a heartbeat.

I know this is rather unpopular to many faithful but Apple is primarily focused on growing their services market. If this isn't completely obvious then not sure what to say. If Apple was serious about the PC market they would have launched a new MacPro a long time ago.

Oh I recall when I used to champion x86 when Apple was on PPC and people here crapped on me for it and well.... However unlikely it might be I will hold firmly that it's the right thing to do.

Because it’s probably still more profitable to sell a smaller number of Macs at higher hardware margins, then license out the operating system and sacrifice all that. How many macOS licences would you have to sell in order to match one fully specced-out iMac Pro?

At the end of the day, market share is simply the means. Profit is still the end.

 

[LordVic]

You're forgetting THINNER! /sarcasm

The only device that's possibly small enough to have no room for an m2 based socket is the MacBook. Every other Apple product has room for an M2 if they want.

Heck, I'm currently on a Razer Blade Stealth. Nearly identical dimensions to the AIR (and 13" MBPro) and it managed to also fit in a M2 slot with a NVME PCI-E based SSD. So far, Apple hasn't shown a single technical reason WHY the storage must be soldered.

Even the T2 chip and security doesn't require storage to be soldered in to work. So the move to do so is clearly inspired not by technical limitations, but financially motivated.

 

[curtvaughan]

I wanted to replace my 2012 Mac Mini with the 2018 model. The price increase wasn't the problem as it was only $200 more, entry level vs entry level. But what got me was the way it was done. It was like product package shrinkage where the price goes slightly higher but you realize that there's a lot less inside the package.

I was even OK with the i3 CPU and Intel GPU. I was even OK with the 128GB baseline SSD storage. What I wasn't OK with is that the SSD storage was now soldered onto the motherboard. So if it fails and eventually it will you either suck up the high cost of a new motherboard or buying Applecare.

If you want to upgrade to 256GB SSD, that's another $200 bump in price for that model. They giveth and they taketh because they allowed for memory upgrades but shut the door on user SSD upgrades. They could have designed the new Mini chassis to use fast blade SSD storage that was user upgradeable but they chose to tweak the configuration where you have to spend more to upgrade the Mac.

Now some say, hey no problem just add an external TB3 SSD drive and you're good to go. But that also drives up the cost buying an external enclosure or a prepackaged TB3 SSD drive. So after careful consideration I decided not to play that game and i'm sticking with the 2012 Mini until it fails.

You can also buy various expansion dongles to connect USB sticks, SD cards, and wired headphones to the one or two USB-C ports on the laptop, but when you have to start carrying around external cables for interfacing to needed devices, or hooking up to external storage, it sort of obviates the advantage laptops have over desktops for portability.

 

[Heat_Fan89]

The only device that's possibly small enough to have no room for an m2 based socket is the MacBook. Every other Apple product has room for an M2 if they want.

Heck, I'm currently on a Razer Blade Stealth. Nearly identical dimensions to the AIR (and 13" MBPro) and it managed to also fit in a M2 slot with a NVME PCI-E based SSD. So far, Apple hasn't shown a single technical reason WHY the storage must be soldered.

Even the T2 chip and security doesn't require storage to be soldered in to work. So the move to do so is clearly inspired not by technical limitations, but financially motivated.

Of course it is. In fact trying to sell any Mac with soldered SSD could/might be a tough sell because of the limited write cycles of the soldered SSD. When it fails it will require a new motherboard. So Apple has basically created a new sale vs a used Mac changing hands and I would be leery about buying a refurbished Mac from Apple that has soldered onboard storage.

 

[Detektiv-Pinky]

Time for Apple to allow OS X to be installed on 3rd party machines, even home built one's. Not saying make OS X opensource (that would be courage, brave, different) but just open it up. The time is right their focus is clearly on services and gadgets, so why limit it. The PC market for Apple is more like a side project today. If Apple really intends to compete with Alexa, Neflix and Android this would help considerably. They'd bring a lot more people into their ecosystem. I'd install it on my computer in a heartbeat.

I know this is rather unpopular to many faithful but Apple is primarily focused on growing their services market. If this isn't completely obvious then not sure what to say. If Apple was serious about the PC market they would have launched a new MacPro a long time ago.

Oh I recall when I used to champion x86 when Apple was on PPC and people here crapped on me for it and well.... However unlikely it might be I will hold firmly that it's the right thing to do.

I am not sure opensourcing OSX is going to work out well. I think the unique user experience of the OS has something to do with the tight integration of HW & SW.
What is really missing is a diversity in HW these days. Every device seems to be targeted as a fashion acessory rather than a tool.

Apple should spin-of their computer business and give them some leeway in the way they build their products. Not every computer needs to be a fashion statement. Look how many people crave for a simple headless machine that has a multitude of ports and has interchangeable hardware parts such as HDD/SDDs, RAM and graphics cards.