World's best-selling laptop?

[skaertus]

During the keynote yesterday, Apple referred to the MacBook Air as the "world's best-selling laptop". It also referred to the 13-inch MacBook Pro as being the "world's second best-selling laptop".

I wonder what are the metrics that Apple is using for this. Apple does not reveal the total number of MacBook Airs sold, so it is difficult to ascertain. Is Apple referring to all laptops sold last year only (when there was a shortage of semiconductors which may have affected the shipment of especially more affordable laptops)? Or is Apple referring to sales since the MacBook Air launched back in 2008 and considered all iterations as a single product just because it did not change its name? If that is the case, is Apple considering the ThinkPad line, for instance, as one product as well? (Probably not, as Lenovo claimed to have sold 100 million ThinkPads back in 2015). Or is Apple considering the ThinkPad T14, the ThinkPad T15, and the ThinkPad T470 as different products while reputing the MacBook Air as just one?

Hard to tell. Apple is now full of shady marketing techniques like this (such as comparing the M2 to the years-old ultra-low-power Core i5, used in past MacBook Airs, just to mention that it is 5x faster, without even mentioning which model it is comparing to). By doing this, Apple is making all its statements less credible.

 

[lamerica80]

Its the best selling laptop in the world (of macs).

 

[skaertus]

Its the best selling laptop in the world (of macs).

That for sure it is.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

imo it basically means the best selling macbook lol. so shady

 

[uczcret]

Hard to tell. Apple is now full of shady marketing techniques like this (such as comparing the M2 to the years-old ultra-low-power Core i5, used in past MacBook Airs, just to mention that it is 5x faster, without even mentioning which model it is comparing to). By doing this, Apple is making all its statements less credible.

It really is so off-putting. That's why I was so happy reviews and forums tore them a new one when they compared the M1 Max's GPU performance to RTX 3090.

I have no idea how they came up with "the world's best selling laptop", but your guess that they're referring to MBA's total sales since its debut in 2008 sounds quite likely. But...since Apple doesn't break down sales anymore we'll have to take their claim at face value and my instinct's telling me it's just a bogus marketing claim.

 

[JohnnyWalker]

I'd like to know the source, but bear in mind that Windows laptops are divided massively across manufacturers and models. Basically there isn't an equivalent Windows laptop to the MacBook Air. If MacBook Airs made up 2% of sales and all the other Windows laptops each had 1% of sales each (or less) then the claim would still be true. I hope that makes sense.

 

[jav6454]

Likely they meant the 1st and 2nd most sold Mac. But they threw shade in there.

 

[skaertus]

I'd like to know the source, but bear in mind that Windows laptops are divided massively across manufacturers and models. Basically there isn't an equivalent Windows laptop to the MacBook Air. If MacBook Airs made up 2% of sales and all the other Windows laptops each had 1% of sales each (or less) then the claim would still be true. I hope that makes sense.

Yes, of course.

And different iterations of the MacBook Air over the course of almost 15 years may have counted as one product to add up sales.

So there is no comparison to anything else indeed. Because even different lines of PC laptops use numbers to differentiate each generation, something Apple does not.

 

[ahurst]

I think it refers to the MacBook Air specifically over the past few years (since that’s the only metric that actually makes sense).

I think that’s totally believable, largely because even though Lenovo or Dell might sell more laptops total, there’s only one MacBook Air while a ton of different overlapping models and sub-models are competing for slightly different slices of the same market in the PC world across different brands and sub-brands. If you add up all the Lenovo 13” laptops over the past few years they might well outsell the Air, but any individual one? There’s definitely more Airs sold per year then X1 Carbons or Yoga 13s specifically.

EDIT: Is there a specific model range (e.g. Dell XPS 13, Lenovo 14” T-series) that you think has sold more units than the Air over the past few years? I can’t think of a single PC model range that I’ve seen with that kind of popularity out in the wild.

 

[schappim]

"World's best-selling laptop?" is totally believeable given that Apple sold 28,958,000 macs in 2021. The vast majority of these are going to be Macbook Airs. Total notebook shipments for the same period were 246.1 million.

 

[JPack]

Pretty simple, you'll notice there is no time component in the claim.

Apple includes all units of MacBook Air sold cumulatively since 2008. Lenovo for example, didn't start selling ThinkPad X1 until 2011. And they sell several different models like X1 Carbon, X1 Titanium, and X1 Yoga.

 

[ucfgrad93]

Typical sales/marketing rhetoric that one should take with a grain of salt.

 

[hans1972]

During the keynote yesterday, Apple referred to the MacBook Air as the "world's best-selling laptop". It also referred to the 13-inch MacBook Pro as being the "world's second best-selling laptop".

I wonder what are the metrics that Apple is using for this. Or is Apple considering the ThinkPad T14, the ThinkPad T15, and the ThinkPad T470 as different products while reputing the MacBook Air as just one?

It's models.

T14 and T15 are different computers. If they were the same, why would they have different names.

 

[JohnnyWalker]

If guns kill people, do pencils misspell words?

Pretty hard to shoot someone without a gun.

 

[schappim]

Pretty hard to shoot someone without a gun.

 

[Velin]

Well, I was in Best Buy yesterday. A whole lot of people looking at the M1 desktops and notebooks. PCs? Crickets, meaning not a single person looking, other than me.

Sure, there is some marketing jargon in their presentations, but you have to give them some slack. They are speaking to both a U.S. and a global audience, and of course they are going to use some jargon/marketspeak. These presentations need to have that information in them, it sets the advertising tone for the rest of the product cycle.

 

[solo_riser]

Just marketing speak really. I mean in fairness lots of other companies bend specific facts or interpretations thereof to suit whatever goal they are trying to achieve, I mean Ford has claimed for decades that the F-150 is the best selling vehicle in North America, but of course what they don't tell you is that a large percentage of those sales are fleet sales to corporations and not the general public. I am sure that Apple is probably dumping a very large percentage of its MBA to schools or other similar industries for mere chump change just so that they can take credit for a larger market share of the laptop market.

In the end though it's probably not that big of a stretch to believe, that since laptops outsell desktops globally (and that's all brands), that Apple's least expensive laptop would be their best seller.