Apple's U.S. Mac Shipments Fall 7.5% as Overall PC Market Plunges 14% Year-Over-Year [Updated]

[cirus]

Lenovo is making good quality very well priced notebooks and it shows.

Apple is doing worse than it seems. I'd say a good chunk of that drop is due to windows 8 (and therefore not applicable to macs).

 

[efktd]

1. People still own the MacBook Pro they purchased in 2011 (me)
2. Tablets

 

[HenryDJP]

From a business perspective I understand their behavior, and in my post I refer to it.
Regarding MS Office you are right, but I really wish I could have written my diploma thesis in iWork. For scientific work iWork isn't suitable. MS Office for Mac did a great job and I was able to do my work on a Mac by using MS software. This is not bad, don't get me wrong (Office 2011 is great), but I am a Mac addict and I am proud that I did my thesis on a Mac, but doing it on a Mac by using superior Apple software would have been perfect.

Concerning Mac Pro, I know it's a niche product, like all Macintoshs are niche compared to iOS devices. But three years is not fair, really.

Understandable. I'm with you that it's time for iWork to get a major upgrade and they are overdue. May I ask, what's it about MS Office that allowed you to write a thesis that iWork couldn't do? If you're writing a thesis you would just use Pages? Why would you need to use MS Word? Wouldn't you just write your thesis, convert to PDF and send it to your professor? Forgive my ignorance, I'm just trying to understand what did Office do for you that iWork couldn't in this instance?

 

[rei101]

There is too much horse power already, no need for more speed unless you are working in video production and 3D.

And the tablets do their job surfing the web. So... just a mater of time.

 

[Doctor Q]

How is Apple and Toshiba up? Lenovo is the only company that sold more computers YoY

Absolute unit counts are down, but percentages are up. Because HP sold 1,062,000 fewer units and Apple sold only 115,000 fewer units, Apple's marketshare went up from 9.4% to 10% of total shipments.

A slightly bigger piece of a smaller pie:

​

 

[HenryDJP]

Lenovo is making good quality very well priced notebooks and it shows.

Apple is doing worse than it seems. I'd say a good chunk of that drop is due to windows 8 (and therefore not applicable to macs).

A good chunk of Apple's hardware sales plummeting is due to Windows 8? OKAY!!!

 

[Krazy Bill]

Dear Apple: Take note of Lenovo. Enterprise users want something different than what you give to the kiddies. With iOSX You truly are a general consumer company now with 100% of your products fully entrenched in that market.

All that Apple talent. A shame.

 

[theart666]

Lenovo is making good quality very well priced notebooks and it shows.

Apple is doing worse than it seems. I'd say a good chunk of that drop is due to windows 8 (and therefore not applicable to macs).

Dude what? no it's because most muppets only ever used a computer for facebook and youtubing cat videos, they can do that on a phone/tablet.

Do you know how much desktop sales have dropped compared to laptops up until last year?! It's just now that those laptops are too being phased out, people aren't upgrading.

Personally those people suck, but this is an evolutionary phase in the tech market which has pretty much been single handedly manipulated by one man, Steve Jobs. This was his master plan.

 

[neutrino23]

We are in the post PC era. iDevices are the future of Apple. The Mac will receive less and less attention as time goes on. Right now the iDevices are responsible for over 80% of Apple's profits. The Mac will eventually just be a "hobby" for Apple as much as it hurts me to say that.

I do expect Mac shipments to drop eventually, but they won't become negligible. Steve's cars and trucks analogy works well. We can expect lots of iPad and iPhone like devices and a smaller number of very capable, very profitable iMacs and Mac Pros.

When companies have lots of unrelated product lines the shrinking product lines are pruned. Apple has a number of closely integrated product lines making the pruning decision more complicated. Linch pins are inexpensive but they are darn important.

 

[WilliamLondon]

But this article is about shipments dropping. That's not a "maturing market." That's a dying one.

Such is the cycle of life, why are people so surprised?

You find exponential growth in the iOS device market.
Macs had a linear growth. Growth of 20% - 25% was a healthy margin.

I don't think that these -7% can be ascribed to the iMac delay. The most part of Macs are portable devices.

Apologies, but I'm not understanding what it is you're saying - no offence intended, but I really don't understand.

 

[Carouser]

May I ask, what's it about MS Office that allowed you to write a thesis that iWork couldn't do?

1) Synchronization with bibliographic managers
2) Different headers and footers based on document sections
3) A master table of contents, as well as sub-tables of contents, based on headers, but which can exclude some headers
4) Footnotes and endnotes, both of which can have their position and formatting in the document altered, to handle things such as roman AND arabic pagination
5) A document map

Those are only a few things. Can Pages do them all? I genuinely don't know.

 

[KPOM]

The Jobs aura is wearing off. Tim Cook just hasn't got it.

How so? Apple outperformed the market, if these numbers are correct. Remember, a big reason Apple got into markets like the iPhone and iPad is that Jobs quite correctly predicted that the PC market had peaked. Do we worry about GE because incandescent light bulb sales have collapsed? Did the end of the typewriter spell the end of IBM? Not at all, because those companies moved on to other things.

 

[iGrip]

On the bright side, 7.5% of almost nothing is even less than that.

I don't think this will have hardly any affect on Apple's bottom line.

 

[aristotle]

Dear Apple: Take note of Lenovo. Enterprise users want something different than what you give to the kiddies. With iOSX You truly are a general consumer company now with 100% of your products fully entrenched in that market.

All that Apple talent. A shame.

Are you serious? You are complaining about what exactly? The Launcher screen? Nobody forces you to use it. Notifications? You can turn them off. Game Centre? Nobody forces you to use it.

Have you seen Windows 8? Do you not think the Metro start screen is more of a toy? Do you think enterprise users are lining up to upgrade to Windows 8? Think again.

Apple has some of the most powerful/hi resolution laptops around.

Full disclosure:
I was, until recently using a Lenovo T510 laptop at work. Now I use a Lenovo ThinkCentre workstation tower running windows 7 enterprise.

 

[KPOM]

Lenovo is making good quality very well priced notebooks and it shows.

Apple is doing worse than it seems. I'd say a good chunk of that drop is due to windows 8 (and therefore not applicable to macs).

Windows 8? Seriously? Vista had a better uptake rate than Windows 8 at this point in its lifecycle. Windows 7 is the next XP, unless "Blue" knocks it out of the park.

There are several things going on. First, we are 4 years into one of the slowest global economic recoveries on record. People just don't have as much spare cash. Second, tablets like the iPad have become suitable, and more affordable replacements for many people. Third, technology has matured. Given Apple's high price points, it's amazing they haven't fared worse than they have.

 

[thundersteele]

So, as usual, analysts are useless. One estimates 7% decrease, one estimates 7% increase for Apple shipments

 

[xVeinx]

The numbers for Gartner and IDC are reasonably close. I also wonder if one of them subtracted something rather than adding something. I'm going to go with Gartner on this one, as I don't think that Apple dropped it's volume/share this quarter.

 

[iGrip]

I am proud that I did my thesis on a Mac

I know how you feel.

I am proud that I tightened up a bolt using a pair of genuine ViceGrips.

 

[Eidorian]

Windows 8? Seriously? Vista had a better uptake rate than Windows 8 at this point in its lifecycle. Windows 7 is the next XP, unless "Blue" knocks it out of the park.

There are several things going on. First, we are 4 years into one of the slowest global economic recoveries on record. People just don't have as much spare cash. Second, tablets like the iPad have become suitable, and more affordable replacements for many people. Third, technology has matured. Given Apple's high price points, it's amazing they haven't fared worse than they have.

Blue is more of a feature update than anything else. It is Windows 8.1. The biggest thing being a File Manager in Metro.

 

[xVeinx]

From a business perspective I understand their behavior, and in my post I refer to it.
Regarding MS Office you are right, but I really wish I could have written my diploma thesis in iWork. For scientific work iWork isn't suitable. MS Office for Mac did a great job and I was able to do my work on a Mac by using MS software. This is not bad, don't get me wrong (Office 2011 is great), but I am a Mac addict and I am proud that I did my thesis on a Mac, but doing it on a Mac by using superior Apple software would have been perfect.

Concerning Mac Pro, I know it's a niche product, like all Macintoshs are niche compared to iOS devices. But three years is not fair, really.

Pages isn't bad. It is more of an issue if you need to add in mathematical equations, but there are ways around that. Frankly, you might be better off using LaTeX straight up. I know I would (if my advisor wasn't likely to strangle me for using anything other than Word).

 

[SanJacinto]

Understandable. I'm with you that it's time for iWork to get a major upgrade and they are overdue. May I ask, what's it about MS Office that allowed you to write a thesis that iWork couldn't do? If you're writing a thesis you would just use Pages? Why would you need to use MS Word? Wouldn't you just write your thesis, convert to PDF and send it to your professor? Forgive my ignorance, I'm just trying to understand what did Office do for you that iWork couldn't in this instance?

No problem. This is not ignorance, just discussion

I had some limitations with pages like:
- No manually hyphenation
- Had a lot of Excel spreadsheets (Numbers is not a substitute)
- The last "structure point" always ends with an "." - that's not acceptable for my Prof.
- No sufficient automatic Index
- No dynamically list of literature

----------

1) Synchronization with bibliographic managers
2) Different headers and footers based on document sections
3) A master table of contents, as well as sub-tables of contents, based on headers, but which can exclude some headers
4) Footnotes and endnotes, both of which can have their position and formatting in the document altered, to handle things such as roman AND arabic pagination
5) A document map

Those are only a few things. Can Pages do them all? I genuinely don't know.

This is what I wanted to say. Just in better english
Thanks.

 

[iGrip]

what defines a PC?

At the least, it does not run a cellphone-class OS.

 

[jmnikricket]

1. People still own the MacBook Pro they purchased in 2011 (me)
2. Tablets

1a. Blizzard has very lenient system requirements for their games

 

[Zerotolerance]

I think the new iMacs have been a huge disappointment. Removing the useful DVD slot to create the useless "illusion" of thinness wasn't worth it. And the ongoing unavailability of a matte screen has kept a significant chunk of the professional graphic design market looking elsewhere.

 

[aristotle]

I think the new iMacs have been a huge disappointment. Removing the useful DVD slot to create the useless "illusion" of thinness wasn't worth it. And the ongoing unavailability of a matte screen has kept a significant chunk of the professional graphic design market looking elsewhere.

You can get an external USB2 or USB3 Blu-ray "burner" for under 200 bucks before tax.