Apple just announced record-breaking iPhone 6s sales, but according to a new report, the Mac may not be showing quite the same upward trajectory.
Research firms Gartner and IDC both claim Mac sales have slowed to their lowest rate since late 2013, although they disagree about the extent.
IDC suggests that Mac sales have fallen 3.4 percent year-over-year, while Gartner thinks Apple saw a marginal increase of 1.5 percent. Both of these figures would mean a slowing in sales for Apple’s non-iOS and Apple Watch devices.
But it’s not Apple’s fault.
According to researchers at both firms, Apple has been hurt by the strong U.S. dollar, which has made its computers more expensive to overseas customers, while the market has been weaker than usual in both Europe and Japan.
Even if Mac sales are slowing, it’s also a whole lot less than the rest of the PC industry, which has declined 11 percent to 71 million units sold this quarter, as per IDC’s figures. That means that, while the overall pie is shrinking, Apple is grabbing a bigger piece of it.
We’ll find out for certain later this month when Apple reports its Mac sales figures on October 27.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
9 responses to “Mac sales are slowing down, but don’t blame Apple”
Could be shrinking competitive edge. MS’s surface against mac book. There are many smaller thin form factor laptops these days , not just Apples. My biggest hate no mac has a touchscreen yet!!! my kids 3-11 are so use to tablets they instinctively touch the screen on my mac book. ipad pro is no surface 4 replacement. With an MS Surface you can install a printer, scanner and install a driver. Not sure how I would do that on an ipad pro. Mac mini shrunk to dual core only in the last refresh. iMac’s don’t have HDMI in which would be nice so you could use it as a monitor.
Did you ever heared about “Air-Print”? You don’t need to install anything. No cable! It just works.
Your kids are doing productive work on your MacBook? A touchscreen on a MacBook is not a “Must-Have-Feature”. It’s really unconvinient. In some tasks it’s cool, but in the most tasks, a mouse or a trackpad is better.
In the most tasks, people using just the touchscreen or just the keyboard with the mouse / trackpad. A programmer don’t need a touchscreen, give him a keyboard and a mouse and he is happy.
A designer will mostly draw / create things. Give him an ApplePencil and a touchscreen and he is happy.
I think a solution with a touchscreen makes sense, if the screen is detachable.
Sorry for my bad English. I hope you’ll understand it.
Problem is product longevity. In the early Y2Ks it seemed you HAD to upgrade at least every three years due to web pages requiring faster processor speeds. My last iMac lasted 4 years and I gave it away because the CD/DVD drive stopped working. My current iMac is on year 5 and is just humming away.
Meanwhile my cheap crap Dell desktop at work gets replaced every 2 years… and sucks compared to my “old” iMac.
it would even start to make sense to destroy the pockets and go for a 5K with the newest things inside.
$2300 that can last you for 6-7 years working well, if you are lucky.
$30 monthly dollars…
The problem is Intel’s release timeline.
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro, just installed El Capitan on a system which shipped with leopard and it hasn’t skipped a beat. Still using the same MagSafe that came in the box too. I guess the morale here is macs last a long time so I won’t buy one every 2 years but when the time comes to upgrade I’ll never look anywhere else than Apple and I imagine this is the same for a log of others.
Capitán on my mba 2011, faster than ever. After four years, the monthly prize of the computer is about $300 a year.
So the good news is that macs have YOY decline in sales but it’s better than PC? When is YOY decline in sales a glood news? And for record breaking iphone sales? Really? Where was China and Australia counted in last year’s iphone 6 launch? China is biggest market for iphone BTW, and would have easily accounted for 3 million iphone sales last year had it launched with rest of markets.
the newest 21 iMac are not the state of the art they claim to be…