The days of Macs avoiding the fate of the rest of the ailing PC industry may be over.
Analysts who have filed their predictions for Apple’s quarterly earnings call, which is coming tomorrow, think Mac sales finally failed beat those of PC competitors. And they’re expecting to see Apple’s fourth consecutive year-over-year quarterly decline in Mac sales.
The analyst roundup comes from long-time Apple reporter Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Their estimates of quarterly Mac sales cluster around the 5 million mark, and average at 5.09 million units for the quarter. By comparison, this time last year saw Mac sales of 5.71 million — which would make this a quarterly decline 0.62 million, or 10.79 percent.
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As Elmer-DeWitt writes, “For the aging Mac line, which limped though its big back-to-school September quarter without a refresh, the results are not expected to be good … The Mac can usually be counted on to outgrow the rest of the PC industry, even in a bad quarter. Not this time. Not even close.”
Of course, the real test is going to be next quarter, when Apple gets a sense of how popular the new Macs it will unveil this Thursday prove to be. The new lineup is expected to include a refreshed MacBook Pro, and maybe new MacBook Airs and iMacs.
Macs haven’t represented anywhere close to the bulk of Apple revenue since the days of the iPod, but — as Elmer-DeWitt notes — they have always proven to be capable of defying the rest of the PC industry. The strength of Mac sales has traditionally hinged on the quality of Apple’s products as well as the “halo effect” of the company’s ecosystem.
Why do you think Mac demand is slowing? Leave your comments below.
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.
4 responses to “Mac sales no longer defy faltering PC industry”
Most of the mac line suffers with an age of 2012 to 2014 – once they resolve that issue, we should see some growth in sales. – it is very difficult to convince pro users that a 2013 computer is the correct choice.
For the last few months ALL macs were presented as ‘do not buy. Updates coming’ on every buyer guide. No wonder sales went down…
They are simply too expensive. They have been running on Intel hardware for quite a while now, it’s time Apple moved into the OS marketplace – MacOS has plenty of reasons to content with Microsoft on other hardware besides that which is manufactured by Apple. Some might argue that rigid control over the hardware is part of the OS strategy, but I’d contend that it is by far a better strategy to simply require third party manufacturers to adhere to rigid standards to bundle the OS, which I’d bet they would scramble to do.
The lack of a refresh is the most obvious explanation, and I’m sure accounts for most of it. But still, I have to say that I’m still holding on to my 2009/2010 era Macs – I much prefer Snow Leopard to more recent Mac OSs (especially since the travesty of the current flat interface since Yosemite – I will never upgrade beyond Mavericks until they fix this), and there simply haven’t been any great technological breakthroughs in computers in a long time. Although all my Macs are now obsolete, they still do everything I need to do. Once upon a time obsolete computers were pretty much unusable for anything remotely current, but not any more. This is why the whole PC industry has collapsed, and Apple is not immune to that.