“Mac shipments in the U.S. during the third quarter fell at a dramatically steeper rate than that of sales of other PCs, including those powered by Microsoft’s Windows, IDC said Wednesday,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld.
“According to the research firm, Apple’s personal computer shipments in the United States slumped 11.2% year-over-year to 1.9 million machines. The PC business as a whole contracted just 0.2% as sales picked up more momentum than had been expected, with all four of the remaining top 5 — HP, Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba — posting positive growth numbers for the quarter,” Keizer reports. “Apple’s decline was 56 times that of the industry average.”
“Why the plummet in growth? ‘Mac unit sales are correlated to product launches, so when Apple ships a new [Mac], sales zoom up,’ said Rajani Singh, an IDC analyst, in an interview Thursday,” Keizer reports. “And when Apple doesn’t, sales take a dive.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re all waiting for the elusive MacBook Air with Retina display, that’s why (and, some of us, for the Mac Pro). Also, this is the time of the year when we know we’ll be wanting to buy new iPhones and iPads, too.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “theloniousMac” for the heads up.]
Also to note that pc’s need to be replaced at 5 times the rate as a Mac. Quality lasts.
You are so right. Nothing beats quality products like Apple.
Here’s proof of your comment –
I gave a circa 2002 iMac G4 to my sister-in-law’s sister about 3 years ago, and she’s still using it, says it runs great.
My circa 2006 Intel iMac serves as my Media Center, and still runs fantastically!
I would love to update my 2010 iMac to the new thinner iMac, but it runs flawlessly. I keep trying to convince myself to move this iMac to the Media Center and get a new iMac, but I just can’t do it.
I don’t know of any PC users that have 11, 7 or 3 year old machines that they would say run as well as any of these iMacs.
Here at the office we have a 1999 G4 that still runs. We are not currently using it, but it was recently disconnected because it was to slow for any real work, and only half the web ran on it.
Exactly the same where I work, there’s a Bondi/white tower, made in 1999, that still works, but is too slow, but a slightly later, possibly 2001, Anthracite/white tower, that’s still in use as a mail server. My 2003 PowerBook is still in perfect condition, it just needs a new battery, but it’s really been superseded by my 2010 Mini and my iPad. Contrast those with the many, many PC’s that have been gutted for any usable spares, and dumped; I counted fourteen sitting in the warehouse ready to go for scrap, last year, and others this year.
If the Microsoft Surface was a big hit, the Windows PC sales would have tanked. But, The Surface sucked and tanked, so the PC box people had to replace the malware hacked virus infected Windows PC boxes with another. So, Microsoft’s incompetence saved the day!
I believe that’s one of the reasons why Wall Street doesn’t like Apple. The product turnover is much slower and that would definitely dampen sales every few years. Wall Street seems to like companies that make cheap, disposable-type, high-turnover products. That’s how I see it. Consumers are holding onto Apple product for too long a time. You could say that Apple is its own worst enemy when it comes to Wall Street’s valuation of the company.
My 24″ iMac 3.06 GHz is into its fourth year of running 24/7 and except that it practically slows to a crawl when I run Mountain Lion, so it will forever be stuck at Snow Leopard and it’s perfectly fine when running that. I’ll be getting another iMac but only because I want a newer one and not because I need to replace the one I have. I’ll just use my current iMac as a spare in another room.
I agree – here’s another example. My 5 1/2 year old Macbook Pro gave up the ghost with a logic board failure a few weeks ago (a legacy of one too many spills over the keyboard) but it was running Mountain Lion, if a little slowly. I use my Mac for film editing and i will wait for the mac pro. In the meantime i am using my other mac – an 8-9 yr old mac mini, running Lion. It works, and its fast enough for everyday mail, safari, office/iWork. I have an HD display and it feels like a modern machine. And it still looks amazing.
So very true. I’m running a Mac mini G4/1.42 as a home automation server. That’s an EIGHT year-old machine that runs 24/7, never needs to be rebooted, never gets a virus, never has an issue. It’s been sitting there running without issue for probably four years non-stop.
Macs can last forever; they’re just redeployed or handed down instead of recycling.
Failing to to release new models in a timely fashion will do that to you. Where’s the new MacBook Pro? The new Death Star Mac Pro? I’ve needed a new laptop for a year and I’ve been hobbling for what I hope will be released in two weeks.
A cosmetic overhaul of the iMacs would move a lot of machines too. The “big chin” is getting kind of long in the tooth …
Same here. I’m waiting for the new Haswell MBP and getting more and more frustrated as time goes on. It’s no wonder that sales fall when no new Macs are released. I’ve set aside the money, but it will be unspent until the new MBP arrives.
I’m with you I’ve been waiting for a MacBook Pro for 10 months hopefully a 17 inch and the new garbage can mac pro who knows there I have to see it to decide if it’s usable. In the meantime I’m out of cycle for a new phone so I have said before I have had no reason to even go to a Mac store in 10 months maybe even a year. There is such a difference between being a fan boy and being an investor I want to personally see Apple as a business crush all competition but Tim Cook is turning the company into a boutique computer maker When’s the last time you saw a commercial for any Apple computer?
the “56 X” is just stupid. It has no relevance when the comparison number is very small.
If industry fell 10% then a 50% decline would have been 5x.
An 11.2% decline is not good but 56 X is meaningless. What if average decline was 0% and Apple decline only 1% ? It still would be infinitely higher.
Dumb.
But 56x gets so many more hits than communicating with actual mathematically useful language.
i was kind of hoping that the others hadn’t shrunk at all; then we could say that mac shipments shrunk an infinite amount more. if we are going to have fun with math and make up silly headlines, then let’s make them seriously silly!
What I want to know is, what is the percentage in the last 20 minutes?
That would give me a real indication to predict the next 36 hours.
I was going to point that out but you best me to it.
Like, if the PC industry fell 0.02% rather than 0.2% (just 0.18% less), then Mac sales would have fallen 560 times as much! So the headline went for pure sensationalism and nothing else.
So if you like that – check this 🙂
http://50centflash.com/free-story-the-room/
I’m due for all new Apple hardware. It’s a matter of availability and releasing of the things.
* iPhone 5s — impossible to find.
* New (Haswell) MBP — doesn’t “exist” yet.
* New iPad — doesn’t “exist” yet.
The steep decline is purely Apple’s fault of lack of supply. I’m waiting. With real money…
How about this. sales are either going up at Apple or people are failing and should be fired. How’s that for a plan.
Bang on .I’m waiting for the Mac Pro and the retina display iPad mini
I think that there is a lot of pent up demand for Apple products
I love my 64GB Gold 5s which I got 10 days after the announcement while my friend who ordered 8 hours after me is still waiting!
I really don’t think Apple gives up much in terms of sales. People that buy Apple are typically willing to wait, and Apple gets the sales anyway. I don’t think anyone who wants a retina MBP is going to buy a Lenovo instead.
Good points about quality. I just can’t bring myself to upgrade my Quad Core i7 MacBook Pro even though it is approaching 3 years old. I would love a Retina machine, but mine operates flawlessly. Plus, I spend much more time on my iPad now, and will upgrade to the new one later this month.
Bingo. I have 4 macs in the house now and they are all working flawlessly. Newest is 3 years old (MacBook Pro) and I just updated the hard drive (bigger) and replaced the CD with an Solid State drive. I’m waiting for an ‘Air’ with a terabyte of Space.
apple has never been afraid to canabalize it’s own products. I suspect that many people are opting for iPads instead of full on macs. there is a large segment of users for which an ipad is all the computing power that’s needed.
Everyone is waiting. New OS X. New Mac Pro. Entire product line needs a refresh.
I’m going to hold on to my 17″ MBP as long as possible. As it is my main workstation, I can’t imagine going to a smaller screen.
I bought a new 17″ MBP recently from MacMall (you’re welcome MDN) because they had a few still in stock. Gave it a SSD drive and 16GB Ram. Sweet machine. I like a big screen and was sad to see the 17″ go.
Here at Trevor Philips Industries we are an entirely all Mac house. We love our Macs and look forward to upgrading our Macs to Mavericks when it is released. We always stick with MacBook Pros because our IT department can take it apart and upgrade any component we choose like RAM and SSD that makes them run like new again. We really appreciate the upgradability of the MacBook Pros.
Unfortunately due to the closed nature of the Mac Pro, we won’t be buying any of that closed off inaccessible to the user hardware. We like doing our own upgrades and Apple is going down the wrong path with the Mac Pro.
I’d like to put in a note that we’ve been disappointed with Apple’s iOS 7. Wade in human resources has been complaining to me that it makes his iPhone feel like a Seventies machine again. Ron in accounts says that he can’t get any work done on his iPhone since upgrading to iOS 7. I hope Apple takes note and tones down the fairy colors and Fisher-Price look of the icons.
Grand Theft Auto 5, a sick twist on the usual troll rant, sarcastic or not
Really? They can’t get any work done because of the color of the icons and UI… Maybe they’re so attracted to those “fairy” colors that all they can think about is sucking dick instead of working?
Sorry, but with addition of several features and touch gestures, iOS 7 flows smoother and is easier to use than all previous versions.
As boss, perhaps you could tell your staff to behave like grown-ups, and not like whiney little school-girls, MTFU, and get on with their work. Snivelling about the colours is so juvenile, what is he, ten? And can’t get any work done? Perhaps if he stopped looking for porn, and got to grips with the interface differences, and got on with his work, everyone would be better off. How many people use the native apps for business? Most people use third-party apps, who’s colours Apple has zero control over.
I don’t care about the colours, and I prefer the new, simpler icon styles, but then I’m a grown-up.
I’m waiting for 2nd gen 13″ MBP with Retina display. I don’t buy the 1st gen anymore. Learned my lesson on that.
Nonsense article from ComputerWorld to try and make Apple look like it is failing and nobody is buying.
MDN needs a B.S. rating system for these kinds of things.
I love my iPhone, but Apple needs to remember that without Macs, the best and the most on line / web content goes away.
You need us, it sure seems at times that they are not interested any more..
Where will the kiddies who value entertainment almost as much as oxygen get the stuff they read and listen to on iOS?
Goes away? Why, would you convert to the Amish church and live the simple life if Apple stopped making Macs? Raise babies and make hogs, or was that the other way round?
BS. Plenty of us have a little Linux/BSD installation on the side “just to keep up with things”. Life goes on.
Seriously, Apple should have just announced the Mac Pro when they were ready to ship it the next day. What’s the use of pre-announcing something anymore without a definitive release date? Apple announcements were historically accompanied by actual release dates for products, not some elusive “when it’s done or ready this fall”. Ship end of October Apple or otherwise Hackintosh here I come.
Because if I spend $4k on a Mac Pro on a Monday, then Apple came out with a completely new model on Tuesday (with no forewarning) I would be… upset, to say the least. By announcing months in advance, nobody can complain they were shafted by Apple.
and Apple did, in a rare move, announce the new Mac Pro way in advance. That had to hurt sales.
But the real numbers are in laptops as people wait for the new models.
“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
Over course, the economic situation around the world and in the US never enters the equation now, does it?
Mac mini with OS X Server (Not a real server OS)
Specs
2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
4GB memory
Two 1TB hard drives1
Intel HD Graphics 4000
$1,000 gets you a mobile processor, vampire video, and 2 laptop slow HDs.
No display, keyboard or mouse.
Locked up tighter than a garter belt excepting memory.
Please explain how OS X Server is not a real server OS.
The kludge Apple calls a server is not even taken seriously by Apple. They abandoned the server market.
The point is that the dual drive Mac mini is a nice $500 computer being sold for a thousand. The iMac is also about $400-600 too high model by model.
Apple has also stuck up the middle finger to the pro markets with a HTPC- aka Mac Mini Pro or Mac Pro Black Trashcan Edition. No way I’m putting that thing on or under my desk.
Totally with you as well the garbage can Mac Pro problem is that there are barely any thunderbolt accessories and nobody actually makes them Daisy chainable. Meaning with the second out put thunderbolt to continue the chain. I have come into that problem with most thunderbolt accessory so far. Even something like the Belkin thunderbolt hub gives you no more actual thunderbolt ports it really doesn’t. Six thunderbolt port would be two displays one hug and three portable drives it’s a start
Well this just means that when the new products are released, Apple gets to say that sales increased 56 times more than the industry average. 🙂
Baloney.
When last Q, apple decided not to breakdown sales of Mac units by region, an opportunity popped up for the cretins to proclaim numbers that cannot be verified from apple’s reporting. Apple share of us market did not drop. The premise the shysters are trying to push is that iPad/iPhone sales do not translate into folks buying an apple computer. They are still working for the WINTEL folks.
This is baloney. I personally know 11 families that have replaced their windows PCs with Mac notebooks.
Apple also doesn’t push the Mac very much in TV and print ads like they do with cell phones and iPads. I think the last time I saw a Mac ad was on Apples own site.
If they made the connection for Mac – iPhone – iPad – iCloud better I think the Mac sales might go up.
The new iMacs are evolutionary updates, with a better processor, faster WiFi and an option for a fusion drive. Nothing revolutionary, however.
The new Mac Pro is so revolutionary that it is a huge disappointment to professional users with existing investment in PCI Express cards and NVIDIA CUDA code.
Apple is selling fewer Macs because there is nothing new to get excited about. Simple reasoning.
At least this article got the clue that Apple sales ALWAYS drop, for whatever, when a new update is pending. It’s called ‘being an intelligent shopper’.
Kind of a DUH article otherwise.
You would expect Apple buyers to be ahead of the curve in the move from desktop to mobile, so it should be no surprise that the Mac is being “cannibalised” by iPad to a greater degree than PCs. Apple users keep their machines longer also. Microsoft is canning support for Win95 and that is forcing upgrades in the commercial space, disguising the collapse in the personal PC market. Macbook Pro is due for an update so some people are waiting. After the appalling Vista, the ungainly Win7 and the unusable Win8, the latest version of Windows is finally palatable to the PC crowd, so many people with very old PCs are finally upgrading.
A single number in a single quarter conceals a multitude of long term trends of which the largest is the move to mobile, and Apple is doing very well indeed in this space.
Any decline in sales of Macs will be matched by the increases as soon as the new models ship out
I suspect Apple thinks the iPad is part of their computer line and therefore, Sales are Just Great, thank you.