Dude, are you living under a stone? I have multiple friends that have horrible problems with the new models that contain the membrane. It may not be as widespread as with the 2016 models, but the problem is definitely not fixed. I don't recommend a Mac laptop to anyone these days. Especially given that Apple Stores are not as common here in Europe as compared to US.
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Mac Shipments Down in Q1 2019 Amid Worldwide PC Decline
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I both buy stock in Apple (often), and hate on their products. They do not have to be mutually exclusive.
One is business/financial decisions, the other is personal preference in tech products and how one feels as a consumer.
I run a small PC support business and have set up a lot of Lenovo's for customers in the last few years.
Just set one up last week, lovely little machine 14" 240GB SSD, 8GB, i3 and only £400 which is a great price. Okay it will not last as long as my MacBook Pro 15 from 2012 but still a great all rounder running Windows 10.
This is literally what PostPC means.
The drop in new PC sales doesn't necessarily prove Jobs' Post PC claims.
It could be that people don't need to buy a new PC because their old PC works just fine.
Take me for instance. The last computers I bought were in 2015. They're still fast, powerful and do what I want them to do.
In other words... I haven't bought a new PC lately... but I'm still using a PC every day.
I still need PCs... and my current PCs work great. Thus... I haven't contributed to the new PC market in about 4 years. And I can't be the only person in this situation.
PCs have a long life nowadays. You don't have to keep buying PCs in order to keep using them. PCs aren't exactly a consumable.
However... if milk sales suddenly dropped... it would mean that people stopped drinking milk. You do have to keep buying milk if you want to drink it.
But PCs can last for years. Just because new PC sales have slumped doesn't necessarily mean people have stopped using PCs and switched to some other "Post PC" device. Their existing PCs can still work fine.
And even if someone buys an iPad... it doesn't mean they stop using their PC. The iPad could just be an additional device for reading on the couch while still using their PC for other tasks at their desk.
Have PC sales fallen from where they were years ago? Yes. But that could have happened without the iPad and Jobs' claims.
PC sales have somewhat stabilized now. I don't think we'll see a quarter where there are ZERO PC sales anytime soon.
Steve Jobs said people don't need PCs (trucks) and lite devices like iPads (cars) will be the future.
Well... PCs still outsell iPads 6 to 1 at the moment.
But again... old PCs will continue to work... so you don't have to keep buying new PCs all the time.
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I would disagree, I've set up lots of them in a last couple of years.
Okay the build quality isn't as good as the Mac's but you can pick up a nice Lenovo 14", 240GB SSD, 8GB, i3 for around £400 in the UK about a third of the price of a MacBook.
I don't think they are overpriced at all. I tried to make same configuration PC as 2019 27-inch 5K iMac with i9 CPU and I ended up only few hundred euros less (using LG 5K Ultrafine display) than iMac so it is not overpriced at all for what it is and what can it be used for. Granted, the LG 5K made around 1400 EUR of total price but if you need iMac for browsing the web only, then you are barking at the wrong tree
The laptops are overpriced...
Apple is not aggressively keeping their Mac's relevant.
- Macs are being updated much to infrequently.
- Macs are overpriced. Apple keeps trying to extort as much $ as possible from loyal users. Not trying to gain share but testing how high to price while losing few enough to gain revenue.
- Apple seems to have lost the sharpness of focus, coming up with machines that magically fit the the needs of their user base.
They're too afraid of walking in Microsoft's footsteps fearing they'll make the same mistakes. Apple needs a touchscreen Mac. Needs an ARM Mac. Ditch the Touch Bar. Needs lower priced model at least if not across the board. Steve used to say that Apple's would not leave a price umbrella for competitors to enter. Tim is creating a bigger umbrella daring competitors to enter the market.
They're surviving because the hardware still decent and generally better than anyone else's. But they're testing people's willingness to pay more for less.
- Macs are being updated much to infrequently.
- Macs are overpriced. Apple keeps trying to extort as much $ as possible from loyal users. Not trying to gain share but testing how high to price while losing few enough to gain revenue.
- Apple seems to have lost the sharpness of focus, coming up with machines that magically fit the the needs of their user base.
- Touch Bar is a stupid idea. Costly contraption in search for a problem to solve.
- The trackpad is too large on current 15" MBP.
- The 12" MB is aimless. Too underpowered, too small and too expensive.
- Overlapping product, messaging and pricing between top end MBA, bottom end MBP and MB.
They're too afraid of walking in Microsoft's footsteps fearing they'll make the same mistakes. Apple needs a touchscreen Mac. Needs an ARM Mac. Ditch the Touch Bar. Needs lower priced model at least if not across the board. Steve used to say that Apple's would not leave a price umbrella for competitors to enter. Tim is creating a bigger umbrella daring competitors to enter the market.
They're surviving because the hardware still decent and generally better than anyone else's. But they're testing people's willingness to pay more for less.
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Despite the sample bias caused by the whinging in the forums, Apple laptops are far more reliable than the competition when you look at the data. Consumer reports (pay walled, but ZDNet from 2017), for example, gives Apple the only 10/10 reliability rating in their 2018 survey.
Apple Insider, when investigating the rise in butterfly keyboard failures, explicitly makes the point that while more keyboards began failing in 2016, relative to the years before, the overall service request rate on Macbook Pros has gone down. MBPs are more reliable than in the past, it's just that when they do fail it had been more likely to be a keyboard issue. The 2017 model brought the keyboard failure rate down below where it had been in 2014.
When you're surrounded by overly emotional opinions, it helps to seek dispassionate data... That said, most of the data I see is from the US, and a lot of the complaints I see are from Europe, so there may be a Europe specific issue that isn't captured in the data.
Nope...don’t agree at all. They don’t “make more money” than any other company because of the Mac, although they probably make more money per computer than everyone else. That has always likely been the case, but the reasons today are totally different to 5-6 years ago. Back then, they were genuinely offering the best there was in premium materials and people expected to pay top dollar. Today, you certainly pay top dollar but you are no longer getting anywhere near the best. Hiking prices and cutting corners only goes so far and is not sustainable. Albeit phones, once, Blackberry and Nokia made more money than anyone else from phones.
Asus and Acer will probably overtake Apple in the next couple of years
Apple market share according to Gartner:
2015: 7.2%
2016: 6.9%
2017: 7.6%
2018: 6.9%
There are no indication of a continues decline in market share.
Again the numbers according to Gartner indicate that Steve Jobs never managed to get Mac to such a large market share as Tim Cook did.
So from a market share point of view, Tim Cook has been better for Macs than Steve Jobs ever were.
The Europe specific issue is that they have to be sold with 3 year warranties a lot of the time (2 year minimum) so failures need to be dealt with....and recorded as such.
I think he did, and he certainly hoped so.
The iPad was Steve Jobs favourite Apple product. The Mac never was.
Was it the worse decline in market shipments than Apple that gave you evidence Acer and Asus will pass Apple?
Again, Apple isn't going for market share and their Mac business is bigger than most entire companies.
Apple is never going for market share when it hasn’t got any. Funny how Apple never stop telling us their share in tablets and wearables?
Lenove, HP and Dell do not follow the same strategy. esp. Lenovo is different from the two others.
The PC market is a low margin business. It has been increasingly difficult for small vendors to survive since you need scale to be profitable.
This is a trend which has happened for many years now. In 2011/2012 the three biggest vendors had about 40% market share. Now it is 60%.
In the same period Apple's market share have been pretty much stable.
What we are seeing are smaller vendors being bought or just giving up and their market share being taken over mostly by the big three. It is something which will continue no matter what Apple do.
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It's part of the story, but it's not THE story. Apple invented the tablet and wearables space. They just also sell computers, so it's apples and oranges, really.
Again, their Mac business is small for them, but larger than most entire companies. $18B in revenue for Macs is bigger than all revenue of Netflix, as an example.
Lenovo is arguably the most profitable PC company except Apple. They made less than $940 millions in profit in two quarters after a 42% increase in profit.
Let's say that Apple has 30% gross profit on their Macs, Apple would have made a profit of $3822 millions in the same period using financial 2018 has an example.
Lenove brags about having a 5% profit margin their PC business and says it is industry leading.
They sold less units than they did a year ago. That was a decline in sales regardless of what caused it.
I think you're stuck in the business mindset. This is a tech form, with techie people who are much pickier than the average consumer. I agree the average consumer loves apple products, which is why I think it's almost always good to buy apple stock, regardless of how much apple products have disappointed me recently.
Apple conceded the personal computer marketshare battle to Microsoft a long time ago...either 1992-1994, when Windows 3.1/3.11 for Workgroups came out or 1996 when Windows 95 started gaining traction after the shock wore off, while Apple teetered on bankruptcy. Either way, continuing to fight a battle you already lost is sheer idiocy from any perspective. Wouldn't you agree?
It is exactly why Apple is going to tell you about the Watch’s marketshare, or the iPhone or the iPad. We live in the Post PC era, these devices are what people are buying and Apple wants to dominates the smartphone, tablet and wearables market. That’s Economics and Marketing 101.