Lenovo Passes Apple in U.S. PC Shipments As Worldwide Market Flatlines

[skwash]

I wonder if servers are included in these numbers?

HP and Dell sell a lot of enterprise servers. A business that Apple has gotten out of.

Also, as the article mentioned (and other commenters), many businesses are forced to buy new hardware now that Windows XP is no longer supported.

 

[Fishrrman]

What's impacting Apple sales:
- lack of new products
and
- price.

It's not "Apple's fault" that the CPU chips aren't ready yet for a launch of revised models. But in lieu of that, they should drop prices on the "carry overs" (i.e., existing line) until new product becomes ready.

As other posters have mentioned above, there are some gaping holes in the Apple product line, as well.

To wit, they need:
- a "super-Mini" that offers iMac-equivalent power in a smallish box with enough connections to keep "prosumers" satisfied
- at least one laptop model with a matte screen

My opinion only...

 

[MarkusL]

What's impacting Apple sales:
- lack of new products
and
- price.

It's not "Apple's fault" that the CPU chips aren't ready yet for a launch of revised models. But in lieu of that, they should drop prices on the "carry overs" (i.e., existing line) until new product becomes ready.

As other posters have mentioned above, there are some gaping holes in the Apple product line, as well.

To wit, they need:
- a "super-Mini" that offers iMac-equivalent power in a smallish box with enough connections to keep "prosumers" satisfied
- at least one laptop model with a matte screen

My opinion only...

I agree about what is needed to fill the gaps, and would like to add a less dramatic product: A plain Haswell Mini without any redesign with respect to case and connections.

You can't blame Apple for new CPUs not being available, but you can blame Apple for choosing not to use new CPUs when they are available!

 

[pottmi]

Why we are not buying.....

I normally buy a new computer every 2.5 years so I can sell my old computer while it is under Apple Care. I did not do that this round because Apple discontinued the 17". I put in a SSD and more memory and just getting by until I just have to "upgrade" to a 15" or there is a viable Hackintosh 17" laptop.

Many in my peer group (developers) are in the same boat.

Another friend went to buy a new iMac and when he learned that Apple removed the DVD drive and requires an external drive he just took a pass.

Maybe some of this explains the drop in sales?

I would like to see Apple come out with a 17" "laptop" that uses desktop components. The target market would be people who want a lot of power and just cart their computer between work and home. The battery life could be minimal as the target market would normally have their computer plugged in.

 

[chrisbru]

I normally buy a new computer every 2.5 years so I can sell my old computer while it is under Apple Care. I did not do that this round because Apple discontinued the 17". I put in a SSD and more memory and just getting by until I just have to "upgrade" to a 15" or there is a viable Hackintosh 17" laptop.

Many in my peer group (developers) are in the same boat.

Another friend went to buy a new iMac and when he learned that Apple removed the DVD drive and requires an external drive he just took a pass.

Maybe some of this explains the drop in sales?

I would like to see Apple come out with a 17" "laptop" that uses desktop components. The target market would be people who want a lot of power and just cart their computer between work and home. The battery life could be minimal as the target market would normally have their computer plugged in.

The problem is that this market is so small, it isn't worth competing in.

 

[69650]

You give consumers too much credit. As if the people who buy a crappy £200 HP with an AMD CPU have any idea what the heck they're doing. They just see the pricetag and nothing else.

For what most people use them for a £200 laptop is perfectly fine. Many consumers are smarter than you think. You could equally argue that someone who spends 2 grand on a MBP only to use it for email and web surfing is an idiot.

Most people don't understand what they're buying. They either buy on price or brand name.

If Apple wants Mac sales to start going up again they need to inject a little excitement into their products. New models, new design, new colour options. Anything would be better than the quiet and very bland spec bumps we get year after year.

 

[keysofanxiety]

For what most people use them for a £200 laptop is perfectly fine. Many consumers are smarter than you think.

If I had a penny for every time I've seen a system wielding some cruddy APU, coupled with 8GB RAM and a 1TB HDD, I'd have about £1.42.

You can tell exactly the sort. They blindly waltz into PC World, and the greasy salesman licks his lips at the prospect of a new catch. He sees them gazing at an HP Envy, which happens to be in their favourite colour. "A 1TB hard-drive!" he'll boast. "That's x amount of pictures and music you can have on there! And 8GB RAM is loads!"

Of course, those two components are essentially the only user-upgradeable parts of a laptop, so buying a laptop on that basis is frankly stupid. They see the hard-drive, see the RAM, and have no consideration or comprehension about how much a rubbish CPU will cripple the system.

They. Have. No. Idea.

 

[darkgoob]

Your saying Apple doesn't make things people want?

Correct. They are alienating customers by making difficult to upgrade things like a Mac Pro without PCI slots... laptops without upgradeable RAM... etc.

Yet millions do, all the time. Your needs are not everyone else's needs.

When you stop listening to some of your customers because others of your customers are still happy, you're doing it wrong. You can't tell one group of customers they're wrong, "because look these other customers don't want what you want, so obviously, you're wrong for wanting it."

Then don't. That's a normal part of consumerism. I am sure there are people who don't recommend HP, LG, Samsung, Dell, Android...etc.

Aaaand this ridiculously bad attitude is why Apple is losing sales. Instead of asking "How can we meet all our customers' needs" they are saying "go fly a kite."

Plenty of people still love Apple, though.

Irrelevant.

I can find negative reviews of any product you name in the history of man.

The wheel. GO!

What'd they eliminate?



What'd they eliminate?



What'd they eliminate?

Upgradeable memory, upgradeable storage device, matte screen, built-in optical drive.

Sales are growing, actually.

So is that why they lost market share?

What'd they eliminate?

Just go read the recent Macworld article, and all the comments on it, here:
http://www.macworld.com/article/2090767/iwork-updates-for-mac-ios-return-missing-features.html

People are buying Apple now more than ever in their company's 30+ year history.



Who is this imaginary person?

This imaginary executive represents the collective anti-feature ethos of Apple. That ideology that eliminating useful features is OK in an "upgrade" and that doesn't care about backwards compatibility.

Look I already suffered through the transition from OS 9 to OS X... from PPC to Intel... and from 32-bit to 64-bit. I just want a stable platform that just works now for the next 10 years. Computers need to reach a point where we can agree they don't need to be revolutionarily reinvented yet again in five years. I like that OS X has not been trying to reinvent the wheel lately. I just want upgradeable, modular hardware, not giant iPads.

Their stock has been going up for well over a year now.



You gotta be honest with yourself. Why are you lying on a forum?

Not lying. Concerned.

 

[deviant]

I assume you're talking about a PC minus the 5-6 drives. I've been looking at a similar setup to replace my NAS/Media Server and the 5-6 drives alone come out to more than $400 (of course 5-6 drives inside ANY mac is pretty much impossible).

Well, of course! I already had my HDDs. I just needed 1 little box with LOTS of storage, and there's NO mac that can do that. And even if there was one, it'd cost like 3 pcs like the one i built. I have a 2009 mini but having that with 5 USB hard drives attached to it is just madness. If you're interested, the build is Node 304 case with a miniITX mobo (Asus h87i-plus) that has 6 sata3 ports and a pcie3 port (if you plan on gaming, it's rock solid) I posted it on pcpartpicker, if you need, i'll find the link.

 

[donnaw]

(snip) Also, as the article mentioned (and other commenters), many businesses are forced to buy new hardware now that Windows XP is no longer supported.

I'm curious about this statement. The company I worked for (I recently retired) upgraded our hardware every 3 years (one third every year on a rotating basis). But when we moved to a new OS (yes, we were a Windows shop) everyone got the new OS at the same time. If a new OS was out and new hardware was purchased it was re-imaged to the older OS.

There is no reason that hardware that ran XP (or Vista) can't run Windows 7 or 8. I have a Samsung netbook that I bought for $300 over 8 years ago. I've put both Windows 7 and now 8 on it and it runs like a champ (no, no driver issues at all,with either upgrade).

No, enterprise does not purchase new hardware just because they move to a newer version of Windows. At least not since Vista.

 

[deviant]

Yet, a lot of people install bootcamp to use Windows and some just plainly installs Windows.

I don't know anybody who buys a mac, formats and installs windows on it. But i guess there are people like that.. May be they love the design AND have A LOT of money to spend, but hey, i mean, do what you want, right? I doubt there are many people that do that.

 

[jdiamond]

What about focusing on the other gap?

I'll probably get slammed for this, but wouldn't it be in Apple's best interest to lessen the price gap of their products compared to competitors? I suspect there's a large market of buyers who would move over to Apple if prices were more reasonable. I know, I know, they've made billions with their pricing model, but wouldn't they REALLY dominate the market with lower prices?

Honestly, I'd prefer if Apple went the other way - increasing the features on their laptops to justify much higher prices, since that's sort of the point of the Apple market - higher end stuff for people that care.

Maybe it's because of Apple focusing so much on PostPC, but it really seems like all they've done since 2011 is dramatically reduce the features on their laptops, once again telling us about all the things we don't really need. Focusing on just a few products can be an advantage, but then those few products need to be REALLY high end.

Now that compute power has flattened, where Apple should be on the forefront is modern connection standards, but they seems to lag here as well. If this year's Macbook Pros have HDMI 2.0 and a more modern DisplayPort standard, that'll definitely be a plus.

But all this chatter because of the market results? Hey, Apple hasn't released a new Macbook Pro yet. That comes in the Fall. So of course their market share isn't growing this past quarter. Although it'd be nice if Apple could benefit from some of those XP switchers still out there.

 

[zoetmb]

How the hell is HP number one? I understand Lenovo doing well and can even see why dell is but HP is a horribly messy company flailing around trying to get back on track and their products are not great at all.

Because HPs are purchased by corporations and that's where the vast majority of the sales still are. In the places I consult for, they use Lenovo and HP and for most users in an office, they really can't tell the difference between them. If one has better performance or reliability over the other, the average office worker isn't going to know.

The machines consumers already have are considered by them to be "good enough". While my personal experience is certainly not necessarily reflective of the market as a whole, I'm still using a late 2008 MacBook Pro and it works absolutely fine. And since I can still swap out the hard disk and battery myself, it has advantages over buying a new Mac laptop.

I think consumers are keeping their older computers and spending their money on Pads and smartphones. If Apple wants their computer sales to improve, I think there has to be a quantum change in the computer - they (and everyone else) have been making only iterative improvements for years now. Just making it slightly faster and slightly thinner each year, IMO, isn't enough to stimulate large sales. Consumers are only buying when their current machines either run out of storage space and they don't know how to clean it up or move the data to other storage, when they don't have enough memory to operate modern apps or when the machine simply fails.

 

[TheHateMachine]

I'm curious about this statement. The company I worked for (I recently retired) upgraded our hardware every 3 years (one third every year on a rotating basis). But when we moved to a new OS (yes, we were a Windows shop) everyone got the new OS at the same time. If a new OS was out and new hardware was purchased it was re-imaged to the older OS.

There is no reason that hardware that ran XP (or Vista) can't run Windows 7 or 8. I have a Samsung netbook that I bought for $300 over 8 years ago. I've put both Windows 7 and now 8 on it and it runs like a champ (no, no driver issues at all,with either upgrade).

No, enterprise does not purchase new hardware just because they move to a newer version of Windows. At least not since Vista.

Yea, all of our hospitals did a XP to 7 transition earlier this year we just remotely pushed the image to the PCs after doing a backup. Even our old Dells that were scheduled to be refresh a few months ago took the upgrade and ran just fine. Pretty much everything built 5 years ago is going to run Win 7 and we didn't have anything older than that. I can't see a lot of businesses running with older equipment unless they are struggling or they are a public school (who are all starting to use chromebooks these days). It's just an attempt on damage control to say the XP expiration caused this.

 

[Tanegashima]

Clueless...

I build a top of the line windows gaming system. 1.5 years later I bought the exact same gfx card for next to nothing and SLI'ed it. Insta 80% frame rate increase. Games are rarely CPU limited these days.

I've bought a playstation

Plays games, after newly a decade later another one comes out, plays more games.

Same cost as a single GPU

 

[sportsfan]

How the hell is HP number one? I understand Lenovo doing well and can even see why dell is but HP is a horribly messy company flailing around trying to get back on track and their products are not great at all.

Lenovo and HP supply corproations

 

[dxmac99]

I will say this however, for all the talk about how "expensive" Macbooks are, try pricing a competitive PC, they are all as expensive or *more* expensive. I just don't understand the constant "common knowledge" that Macs are more expensive. Try buying a Lenovo or Samsung Ultrabook - and tell me what it costs compared to a Macbook.

Though, I will say that the Macbooks (Air at least) are falling way behind in display quality / tech.

totally agreed! My gf's company was buying her a laptop. I spent time and did research and found out all those so called i7/i5 cheap laptops (dell/hp/lenovo) are based on much lower performance chips. I recommended her a previous model rmbp. However, her company didn't want to buy the mac, instead, bought a dell -- 15' touch screen, i7 quad (a good cpu), 8gb mb, 750gb hybrid (with only 8gb ssd) and a good graphic card. Dell priced it $2500 and then with $700 something discount. what a horrible machine compare to the mac. heavy, and you cannot open the lid with one hand (yes you have to use both hand to pull it open). and now just after a few weeks, the touch pad stopped working.

and don't even get me started on that horrible touch screen experience under windows 7. I really don't understand why they would spend all these money on this crap.

 

[PocketSand11]

In Apple's defense, Mavericks (and Yosemite) support Macs going back to 2009, and some even going back to 2007.

In fact, iOS 8 works on the iPhone 4S - released in 2011 - which is hardly '1 year ago'.

I said OS, not hardware. I don't want to install Mavericks on my computer (since it's mega slow), nor would I want to install iOS 8 on a 4S without some caution. Apple keeps trying to make us update the OS every year. It's nothing but hassle. My computer is part of my workflow, and I don't want to take risks updating things when it already works fine.

----------

I've bought a playstation

Plays games, after newly a decade later another one comes out, plays more games.

Same cost as a single GPU

Yep, except I'd go with an Xbox instead of a Playstation. "Gaming PCs" are so overpriced.

----------

Why do we need to alter human genetics? You're not supposed to be working on the touch screen all time, you still use your keyboard and your mouse, but when you need to highlight something, you can drag your finger over it. When you need to zoom in, you can pinch in, rather than go to the Zoom scroll bar, things like that.

When I need to do those things, I can just use my mouse, which is faster. Either scroll to zoom in or use a Magic Mouse/Trackpad gesture. We all know how difficult and frustrating it is to highlight things even on an iPad.

----------

You massively misinterpreted my post. Why are you so sensitive. It has zero to do with Macs, but pointing out a lot of Windows enterprise and edu organizations were using older machines built for XP. Now that XP is officially unsupported they are "forced" to upgrade their computers or they will be vulnerable to attack. We already saw this with the ATM hacking in early spring. That equals a lot of PC sales in one fell swoop.

The PC makers must hate Microsoft. They support 2001 software for 13 years, allowing people to keep their old PCs.

 

[Eweie]

I wish Apple would make plastic laptops again, maybe in the color flavors of the iphone 5c with the same type of mentality and aimed market.
make them thin, make them cheap, no "apple premium" to pay, they're just hardware.
make a damn 500 dollar plastic macbook, but make it fairly spec'd and they'll sale like bread. (maybe AMD cpu for those)

I dont care about the brand, I care about the OS. and getting a pc laptop to run OS X is a pain in the ass, it basically has to be the same hardware that a macbook has to run perfectly, most of the time the the processor and gfx are the same but then there's the wifi, IO, sound to worry about, they're almost always different unsupported chips, but we have manage to get some to work.

but whatever apple does, I hope they dont switch to their own processors, I think that'd be suicide.

 

[Eweie]

I said OS, not hardware. I don't want to install Mavericks on my computer (since it's mega slow), nor would I want to install iOS 8 on a 4S without some caution. Apple keeps trying to make us update the OS every year. It's nothing but hassle. My computer is part of my workflow, and I don't want to take risks updating things when it already works fine.

Mavericks is "mega slow"? this is news to me. why not just install it in another harddrive and boot from there to test. almost certain that Mavericks is no way slower than ML. Maybe in the initial release.

I have 6 harddrives in my 2009 mac pro, 2 of them ssds. (ssds are made by god himself...) I have OSX installed in every single hardrive and all have backup copies of my work and my work programs. if one fails I just boot to another drive.
I usually upgrade one of my backup drives to the new OS to see how it works, and if there's no issue I push the update to all my other hardrives.
I'm yet to find an OS X update that has kept me in the last version... plus that'd be stupid because some of my work programs (Like Marmoset Toolbag 2) are Mavericks only, and things I love to use like Microsoft Onenote PLUS a ton of games are Mavericks only.
still I have no issue with speed in Mavericks or any issue at all.

We'll see how Yosemite turns out but I personally like the aesthetics although I wish apple gave us the option of a 2d or 3d dock in the bottom.

 

[thekeyring]

I said OS, not hardware. I don't want to install Mavericks on my computer (since it's mega slow), nor would I want to install iOS 8 on a 4S without some caution. Apple keeps trying to make us update the OS every year. It's nothing but hassle. My computer is part of my workflow, and I don't want to take risks updating things when it already works fine.

Well, on the desktop side of things, you don't have to update. But I agree, on the mobile side they do everything they can to ensure you do.

Also, why the hell did I get 4 quote notifications for this one reply?

 

[D.T.]

Also, why the hell did I get 4 quote notifications for this one reply?

There’ was 4 quotes and edits in the post ... it’s kind of a bug, basically when a post is saved, the system parses content for quoted users and dispatches (if you’re configured to receive) an email alert, but it appears it does that for each edit where an additional user is quoted, including any existing users.

So you were quoted first, then 3 subsequent users were quoted in 3 edits ... 4 notifications

Side note: seems like from a design standpoint it would be simple to implement it where the system could notate the thread/post ID and log the email notification, and not re-send dupes - even if the content changes, you just want to be alerted to being quoted...

 

[tongxinshe]

Come on, worldwide market share is everything, where is that?!

 

[winston1236]

Price is the biggest thing. I know plenty of people who just aren't willing and/or able to spend the money on a Mac.

True, wages have been flat for some time now but prices haven't decreased to match.

 

[BSben]

I think they should update the Mac Mini, I never bought an iMac because it seems a massive waste of resources, if you have to buy a completely new computer, just because the display dies. And even though I love the Pro, it is just that, it is for professional users, and not me. Not only are there other people like me, who keep waiting for an update, but also I think it is an entry into the Mac eco system.