Mac Sales are Down

People always tell me how affordable the Mac mini is when I complain about Apples' pricing. Huh?
719€ for a computer that has 8GB of memory? Shared between cpu and gpu? In 2023?

Excuse me?

That's also just a waste of good wafers for how capaple Apple silicon is.

I have used Macs for the last 15 years, so this is from someone who is deep into the ecosystem.

Apple can fuck right off with their pricing, Mac sales aren’t down because the market is challenging, Mac sales are down because they cost too much.

Give me an affordable Mac and I would have bought two or three in the past few years. Instead I keep holding out.

Well, they could decide to not gimp their base models and make storage and RAM upgrades cheaper, like you say. The new base M3 MacBook Pro only exists to upsell you to a M3 Pro MacBook Pro.

If they feel like they have to have a normal M3 MacBook Pro model, they at least shouldn't gimp it and give it 16 GB of RAM as default. Also, add another display controller to the base M3. We all know you don't do it just so you can upsell to an M3 Pro.

Like I said in another thread, Apple (like all companies) always try to upsell and that's fine as a concept, but these days some of the lower-end products sole reason of existence is to upsell the customer to a more expensive product. Make these lower-end products good products.

And yeah, storage and RAM upgrades should cost half as much at most. 16/512 should absolutely be the minimum default on $1,000+ computers as well.

Also, why would people upgrade from an M1 or M2 based Mac to an M3 based one? The vast majority of people won't.

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I mean it might help their value proposition to not attempt to sell monitor stands for a thousand dollars. I will never forget the audience's collective incredulous gasp at that reveal.

This just in: computer performance has mostly eclipsed the requirements of most non-gamer users, and the next gen is not only exorbitantly expensive but only some very edge case power users truly benefit from the improvements which are at times suspect in if they even exist.

I love Linux, but my work conferencing app is only Mac or Windows. But outside of work, I’m Linux mint on my desktop and steam deck for gaming.

I’m just really frustrated with Windows and it’s bugginess

Hope everything goes down in price a bit. Honestly Apple could afford it just to earn a bit of good will.

I think for the base price you get a really really good product despite 8gb memory. Most people just need it to perform and it does. But yea once you start upgrading it’s insanely ridiculous and it’s insulting to those who want more out of the best product they’ve made in a long time.

The base models are too gimped and anything reasonable is way too expensive. The machines are great, but they should be priced at least 20% lower.

AMD 7840U beats M2 in every single bench unless you really want macos.

Sales of most things are down, we’re returning to pre pandemic-boom normals.

Quite a lot of people have bought an M1 Mac and they are still powerful and efficient devices. I guess most Mac users don’t feel the need for a change yet. Because Apple sold a gigantic amount of those.

It's been long enough that most of the people who wanted an M processor as their next laptop now got one, so I don't think it's surprising that sales are down, after the initial blips.

Overall computers are on the down. More people do their computing on tablets or just phones most of the time. In richer countries, windows marketshare is decreasing, and Apple's is increasing. Not really sure what else apple could do that they actually want to do.

It'd be nice if they had a MacBook SE type thing, but I don't think they'd do that. Chromebooks captured the education market so it's probably too late to do anything there. Mac minis are never in a position to break into the business small-PC realm because they aren't cheap enough. Also it'd be nice if mac minis were cheaper/better-value and more expandable, but people have asked that for years and never got it.

Storage replaceabity is a serious problem for their desktop offerings, but that's been an issue forever and they don't care because they sell iCloud, and their monthly services businesses are doing well.

They really need to up the base model and re-become the premium brand. But they probably have stats that 90% of people get 16GB of ram and it would eat those sweet sweet profits.

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

But all of the company’s other hardware divisions were down, and as CNBC noted, overall sales were down for the fourth consecutive quarter.

CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that the iPhone 15 lineup is showing stronger early momentum than the 14 series.

So you can see the impetus for Apple holding its M3 event earlier this week, where the company introduced updated MacBook Pros and a refreshed iMac.

With no new recent models to speak of, iPad revenue fell by 10 percent.

Apple’s CEO seems optimistic about the company’s position heading into the holiday shopping season.

“We now have our strongest lineup of products ever heading into the holiday season, including the iPhone 15 lineup and our first carbon neutral Apple Watch models, a major milestone in our efforts to make all Apple products carbon neutral by 2030,” he said in a press release.

The original article contains 345 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Not particularly surprised.

By most accounts they're very capable pieces of hardware, but the prices are way too high for current conditions.

Think there's also a case of incremental performance improvements in the form factor becoming less perceptible, and also more people favouring phones and tablets over laptops for everyday use.

I'm not sure why people are surprised by this. In a lot of ways, Apple was a pandemic darling that didn't take as big a fall as the other pandemic darlings did when the pandemic ended. When the pandemic started, there was a big splurge in tech spending that benefitted Apple + the other pandemic darlings (Zoom, Fiverr) as the whole world was going remote.

But then the pandemic ended, and so tech sales went way down as everyone started to step outdoors again.

They released the first ARM Macs with the M1 chip during the pandemic, which were a big step up in performance and power efficiency over the Intel Macs they replaced. That further raised their sales as people upgraded their old laptops.

But the M2 and M3 had the majority of their work go into improving the GPU for apps used by hardcore gamers and creative pros; the non-graphics processing increases are not as substantial. The majority of their customers are not gamers or creative pros; they just use their computers for email, social media, and word processing or sometimes spreadsheet use.

So this is not surprising at all. Not when the pandemic ended, and the M1 was good enough for most of their users. I suspect their Mac sales will go up again in a few years when the M1 is obsoleted.

I don't like Apple. That'll probably show. But I like Microsoft and Google even less, so ultimately I do want them to continue to succeed for the time being.

They should sell cheaper x86 and arm laptops. If other manufacturers can sell decent midrange laptops for around $500 USD, so can Apple. They can even charge a bit extra for that Apple logo and still come in well under the $1000 minimum price tag now.

Though that in and of itself might be shooting themselves in the foot a bit. They have kind of a designer brand vibe, people might not trust reasonably priced hardware from them. So they'd probably want to adjust their marketing too.

I think they should do this, because declining sales tells us less people are willing to pay that premium. Though they should keep their current product line too. I like what they're doing with their Mx ARM chips.

Are macs still the status symbol they once were?

I have an M1 Pro 16 and love it, but its already huge $3750 AUD price tag has ballooned to $4250 for the M3 Pro 16 whose only difference is the chip. I love my MacBook but unless Apple returns to earth with their pricing and/or makes the machines worth that much by providing more than the barest essential specs at those prices, I will be buying something else when this MacBook is done.

if you can upgrade storage and ram. they're soldering shit onto boards now.

If been thinking about buying a Macbook but I don't wanna commit a 1000$+ for a Laptop with an OS I have never used and I'm not sure how much I will like using it.

I don't get why they can't make a M1 based Macbook SE for 600$. The 300$ iPad for example is what got me into checking out iOS.

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Good, they're horrible laptops anyways

I got a Mac Studio recently, but my huge hesitation is that the CPU's TOTALLY suck lol. I only switched because I was genuinely sick of windows. And windows must have had a bug, because it kept hijacking my Chrome session with Edge EVERY Reboot.

But, now that the M3's have raytracing, maybe they'll suck less. Unfortunately, some areas, mac has definitely fallen behind on (like Aero Snap, we need magnet on Mac OS)

Read about a modular, upgradable PC laptop yesterday, the Framework.

Buffed it from the base and came up with a price of $3920. https://frame.work/ca/en/products/laptop16-diy-amd-7040/configuration/new?variant_id=454

A 16” MBP, with similar specs (96Gb RAM, since 64Gb unavailable)?

A paltry $4699. For.a.laptop. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space-black-apple-m3-max-with-14-core-cpu-and-30-core-gpu-36gb-memory-1tb#

SMH