“New data from research firms Gartner and IDC indicate that Apple Macs suffered significant declines in shipment volume in calendar Q2,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “No one is particularly surprised, given how long it is taking Apple to update many Mac models such as the MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro. While fans look expectantly to a Fall refresh, investors have to wonder why it’s taking so long.”
“The research results of IDC and Gartner only disagree about the magnitude of the global Mac shipment decline,” Hibben writes. “IDC says it fell 8.3% y/y to 4420 units, while Gartner says it fell 4.9% y/y to 4559. Both Gartner and IDC agree that the global PC market is still in decline, by about 4.5-5%.”
“Following WWDC in June, I definitely had the feeling that Mac OS had fallen even further down in Apple’s list of priorities. MacOS Sierra was mostly about incremental improvements. The biggest changes were Apple Pay in the Safari browser and the inclusion of Siri,” Hibben writes. “Meanwhile, the hardware has languished. The non-Retina Display MacBook Airs have become a redundant anachronism with the advent of the 12″ Retina Macbook. The MacBook Pros have been in desperate need of an upgrade.”
Then “there’s the poor old Mac Pro, which is essentially unchanged since its introduction in December 2013. It’s still running Intel Ivy Bridge EP processors which were launched in 2013 and use Intel’s obsolete 22 nm process,” Hibben writes. “This is absolutely shameful for a company claiming to be a leader in technology and for a product that was supposed to offer Mac professional users best in class hardware.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “This is absolutely shameful for a company claiming to be a leader in technology.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Exactly how rich and big does Apple have to be before the company runs like it has more than five guys working 18-hour days trying to do everything? The world’s most valuable company is incapable of updating the Mac Pro for two and a half fscking years? Seriously? “Mismanagement” is not too strong a word to apply to the ongoing Mac Pro fiasco.
Just like every other human, there are things Tim Cook does very well and there are other things about which he seems painfully inept.
Hint: Make new Macs and update them with regularity while advertising them strongly. Obviously, as you might have noted by perusing iPad unit sales reports, not everyone has fallen for your “iPad is the next PC” meme, yet, Tim.
We only say that as those who were already Mac users for over 13 years at the point Cook was still over at Compaq trying to get his Windows PC to work.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s Mac sales fall, economies shudder – July 12, 2016
IDC, Gartner: Apple’s Mac no longer bucking PC industry’s sales slide – July 12, 2016
No new Macs, some models for years, but Tim made plenty of time to weave custom rainbow watch bands for the Apple employees he implicitly pressured to march in yet another Gay Pride Parade.
WTF does that have to do with Macs?
I’ll rephrase it for you:
Tim made plenty of time to weave custom rainbow watch bands for the Apple employees he implicitly pressured to march in yet another Gay Pride Parade, yet there have been no new Macs, some models for years.
It’s about priorities. It’s about misplaced notions of social crusading that impinge upon the very reason anybody listens to your sanctimonious preaching anyway. Cook should worry about running Apple properly and leave the political bullshit to the politicians. Or quit and run for office instead.
Need more clarity? Just ask. I’ll be happy to oblige.
Bugger off and buy a Windows. This is a wrong site for you.
Just another closet gay man raging about his kinfolk. This shit happens all the time.
Preach it, brother! 🙂 I’ve been emailing Apple for years about creating a “Mac” that is expandable. Apple just doesn’t get it how many people want such a system like this. :/
Indeed, if you have time for any social activism regardless of what they may be, then you have time enough in your schedule to have a meeting with the designers and engineers to do something about the MP. Just imagine if the iPhone was left as is for 3 years! For a leading tech company this is beyond shameful. Yep, many are abandoning ship for windows PCs.
” Yep, many are abandoning ship for windows PCs.”
PC sales show that this is simply not true.
People may be holding onto the Macs they have, but they are not abandoning ship.
Please take your agenda elsewhere.
Don’t know what you are talking about, the latest sales surveys show that Apple had the biggest year over year declne. Also, HP and Lenovo each make 3 times as many units per year compared to Apple. Dell about 2x. All because Apple refuses to keep improving its hardware to keep up. Also, the pros I know are jumping ship. Cook had better turn the Mac around or it will sink further on his watch.
Perfectly stated. Thank you.
F*ck off “Joe.” The brutal truth is you were born a loser and will die a loser.
Need more clarity? I’ll be extremely happy to oblige.
Exactly. He should be focused on Macs not political activism.
Who said Tim Cook was spending all his time on political activism? You have the logs proving it? Or just the hot logs coming out of your posterior?
Damn I did not get those. Limited Edition. They will be valuable. Apple has to make more of these Special and Limited Editions. There are more Gay Brides in the world so there is a market.
stop worrying about the gay pride parades
He feels left off and I also want these Limited Edition bands.
For all you whining kiddies going on about Tim Cook and taking dimwitted bigoted potshots at his sexual orientation how about taking a more constructive route (rather than sounding like Blithering Idiot School alumnus).
Try e-mailing him (tcook@apple.com) and other Apple executives (shiller@apple.com) and make your objections known. Or send in your feedback directly to the company:
https://www.apple.com/support/feedback/
Major hint: Don’t be like the loudmouthed pricks you usually are on this site, try to be cordial and to the point. It’ll get much more traction, credibility and ears that way.
the “loud-mouthed prick” resides in your mirror. Tim Cook, like John Sculley, is a mistake.
Really, you and others here make Foghorn Leghorn look shy and retiring.
You’re entitled to your opinion, even if wrong. Cook was responsible for much of Apple’s success when Jobs was around so it was natural he’d be a successor, even with missteps that even Jobs himself made. Doubtful many others could have filled in those shoes. It always had to evolve into a slightly different company. If Tim doesn’t learn from his mistakes then the Board should correct it.
Thanks BTW for not taking my advice to be more constructive but prefer instead to continue to wax assholic here and self-flaggellate too, for all the good it will do you, Apple or consumers.
“I fell into a Bernin’ Ring of Liars, I went down, down, down but the lies just got higher…
and it Berns, Berns, Berns, the ring of liars, the ring of liars.”
– Johnny “Fiat” Cash
Actually Mr. Botvinnik my site wide comments weren’t really aimed at you. Collateral damage. You’re a bit of a troublemaker, but amusing at times. 🙂
you like my song?
Sure, why not?
Poor, little peter. He’s offended, he’s flummoxed, his panties are in a bind. Heaven forbid, some rational and intelligent people share opinions that conflict with his narrow minded bigotries. If Tim Cook wants to broaden his mind and expand his horizons all he has to do is read MDN, right?
What was that kid? You prove my point about many petulant bratty children being present. You take umbrage to good advice? Just one of the many ways you and others here are abject losers.
If I wanted good advice from you I would have given it to you first.
You don’t have any on hand, doubtlessly you never have. Common sense and an intelligent course of action are not in your makeup. You prefer to stay neck deep in juvenile behavior. Good luck with that.
Poor, little peter. He tries so hard. Keep trying, peter, I have faith that one day you will develop a rational and cogent thought.
Little Frankie, give it up. Your childlike cries for help are truly pitiful. I feel sorry for someone like you who has yet to develop cognitive reason and intelligent methods & arguments to socially respond. Why don’t you have your little tantrums someplace else, hmmm?
I suspect that the lack of interest in keeping the Mac lines updated is not oversight but intentional. Namely, they have financial models they use related to what they release, and given that their customers only have so much to spend, they want that to be on watches, phones and other things that have substantial secondary income streams. This is, unfortunately, a consequence of wanting to please their investors versus wanting to maintain a first class technological landscape.
UPgrade the Macs Apple and keep them regular!
Tom Cook has a misunderstanding of Steve Jobs mantra regarding making insanely great products with regard to speed. The slowness to release almost put Next under. Fast technological progress always beats the sluggish. Perfection does not exist. Perfect reasonably but not at the expense of meeting deadlines or you risk losing your biggest fans. These subtle differences between Steve’s Apple and Tim’s can destroy Apple. Hit the gas pedal Tim and perfect along the way. Remember, you shouldn’t disprupt your customers’ work, making them wait and sometimes jump ship, while you surprise them years later. You can have speed and surprises.
You’d better have speed and surprises!
Stop whining. Apple will introduce the new Macs when the back to school promos close. This waiting for the new Macs is because of they had to wait Intel. So blame Intel and their problems if you need to blame somebody.
I got news for you. Intel is not the problem. The problem is Tim Cook.
Bingo, just because it has “Intel Inside” does not mean the whole darn thing is Intel. There’s plenty they could have done in regards to upgrading.
Nope… They are not waiting for Intel. Intel has moved well past what Apple is using, and the rest of the world has too..
My $2000 hackintosh absolutely SMOKES the $4000 Mac Pro..
They are selling 3+ year old hardware for a ridiculous price. The Mac Pro’s hardware was already a year old when they introduced it, and they still haven’t updated it. The only people buying them are people with too much money that only care about looks.. Power users have moved on. It was an all Windows show at NAB this year, because mac doesn’t even have Thunderbolt 3 yet.
Yeah, I have decided to build a Hackintosh to run macOS 10.12 Sierra and Windows 10 Pro once the newer system support is available. I’m tired of waiting for Apple to give me the “Mac” I want that is expandable. :/ Plus, I want that super fast M.2 SSD drive-on-a-card from OCZ for boot drives. Then get 8 GB HDDs for data storage. 🙂
You’re trying to blame Intel for the Mac Pro going on 3 years with the same processors?
Apple has zero excuse waiting for back to school promos to close if they’re peddling 1+ year old hardware.
I think Apple knows better where to go than anyone here. Disruption of something is in the way. IMac and MacBook are so yesterday’s news, seriously. Who cares?
The need to be excited by Apple re-invented a RW-invention every 6 months isn’t very adult.
We need a fusion we didn’t know we needed. In fact, I think the Mac monitor may be going in favor of some new name like Apple Something. iAppliance is gone, MacOS is gone, Mac may very well be next.
Apple has ignored the Mac for a long while. Its Ok that we get incremental upgrades to OSX (MacOS) for free, and occasionally a processor upgrade for Laptops..
But the Mac Pro which has been mentioned more times than one can count, has had no upgrades for 3 years +. They really need to go back to the Tower from 2012 and install the latest processors and video cards that will make the Mac Pro scream, sure install a slew of Thunderbolt Ports USB/C ports, whatever on it,
Its not all about looks, sure its cool to have a Computer that looks as cool as it performs, but I would rather have a system that I can upgrade myself routinely and have Apple support third parties to provide those upgrades as time goes by.
Heh.
Steve also put Eric Schmidt on Apple’s Board of Directors.
Jobs corrected that mistake. Tim Cook keeps stepping in it.
Sorry… But its Erick Mole Schidth !
Cook has to wait to see what the competition is doing so he can steal their ideas.
What else did you expect from Cook? he ain’t no Steve Jobs, that’s for sure.
Here’s what Apple is good at: taking a creaky version of iTunes and flipping everything that used to be on the sidebar into drop-down menu and vice versa. And then forcing you to upgrade for no reason if you want to sync your new iPhone. Thank goodness for Google… I have to look something up almost every day when I come across weird behaviors in OS X
I’ll know apple is back on track when they update the wired numeric keyboard with USB 3 ports and an sd slot.
The role that most modern CEOs take (to the detriment of practically everything else) is to dance to Wall Street’s fiddle. That is literally what Cook was doing last week in Sun Valley.
Between social events, Cook has his people do Wall Street’s bidding with his extreme outsourcing, debt loading, stock buybacks, partnerships in IP-thief China, and so forth. So he gets an A grade from activist investors like Icahn who jumped in, rode the initial surge, and have now jumped out.
Most investors, however, see huge problem areas: much poor strategy, questionable acquisitions, underwhelming software, stale stores with unknowledgeable blue T-shirted staff, and disappointing new product development that shows complete lack of user focus, ….
So long as Apple relies on its walled iOS garden as a lever to push everyone to iCloud subscription computing, while ignoring the brilliant Mac personal computing hardware and software that made Apple great in years past, investors and customers will lose the passion they had for the company. They know that iOS is amateur grade, and it always will be. It won’t take too many spaceship campuses or Project Titans to bring Apple from the world’s most valuable company down to where most people see Apple: the world’s next Microsoft. If you look at the direction both companies have taken in the last 5 years, you can see they are operating out of the same playbook.
“investors and customers will lose the passion they had for the company”
I know that *I’ve* lost the passion for Apple stuff.
I still like and will buy Apple gear *for myself* and anyone who still wants me to support their stuff, but I’ll not waste my time advocating Apple stuff and defending them against legitimate gripes people have.
Apple’s a multi-billion dollar company, they can afford their own evangelists. If they aren’t putting themselves out there, why should I?
Apple might eventually get out of the PC business and just focus on phones and watches. That is certainly what it looks like right now.
If Apple surrendered the whole Mac creative professional market to Microsoft/Windows after decades of touting that the MacOS X platform was created for creative pros would be a sad, sad day for us, and a monumental may to undermine the validity of any product they could offer. I can’t see Apple giving up on the creative professional market by discontinuing Macs. I can imagine that the current crop of executives are making strategic blunders, or that they are putting the finishing touches on a new, revolutionary Mac. Possibly, build-out of the new spaceship campus is distracting the leadership as they prepare for the relocation effort… No Mac? No Way!
MAC PRO — give us a box about the size of the old G4 with a fold down side.
Nothing real fancy, just something the geeks can get their hands into to mess around. That will keep them happy. A lot of I/O options. Create a set of trays for nano blades of your making allowing for the addition of more CPUs creating a cluster. Speed freaks will lover it.
If your design people are experiencing a bout of endless brain farts just have them reconfigure the internals to the old G4. The outside looks cool and the box is about the right size. Yes, it could be smaller but given all the crap people want to stuff inside the thing it won’t hurt if it’s a little big. Maybe offer the thing in two sizes. One would be the monster and the other, same look, but about 3x smaller. The small one goes on the desktop and looks cool. The monster resides under the desk, or wherever.
The box will plug into the new monitor you are going to be releasing this fall.
Give it a great price and you’ll have all of us geeks doing whatever it takes to buy one. They will be happy campers for years to come since, if you design it right, they will be able to upgrade the thing “forever.”
Easy peasy.
Shit rolls downhill.
What’s pathetic is they have more money than God and they should be producing incredible iMac’s, MPPro’s and MAC Mini’s….there is simply no excuse not to!!!!! And this should be done on a yearly basis…again….there is simply no excuse not to!!!!!
They still have less money than Santa Claus 🙁
What a load of whiners “new” Mac owners have turned out to be.
Things change. We’ve seen it before.
I believe that a great deal of the slow down is because people are waiting to see what happens this fall. That always happens around this time of year.
I tell people at this point, unless they need a new machine right this minute, wait until after fall. Let’s see what Apple does.
And then there’s the fact that Macs just last for freaking ever. People aren’t hurting to upgrade because their old machines just work.
I upgraded a MBP 13″ 2012 from a dead HD to a 500GB SSD and 4GB of RAM to 16GB of RAM over the weekend. $300. That little freaking almost 5 year old machine is a bloody fire breathing workhorse now. $300 vs. $1300 for a new MacBook at best. And the user, will probably squeeze another 2 years out of it, so that 7 year mark I keep running into shows up again.
The new MacBook is sure sexy and thin and pretty, but is it $1000 sexy?
Nothing about what this person does with her computer demands a new one. So there is that factor as well. She’s on the Internet, typing, and watching Netflix like everyone else.
Perhaps Apple is choosing not to blow their innovation wad until there is a reason to do so.
I bought into the Apple ecosystem about 10 years ago. How long I will remain a part of it is unknown.
Recently, I was in the market for a replacement for my aging iMac. After checking out the prices and the specs of the current machines, I decided that I simply was not going to pay that much for machines that did not provide a reasonably large SSD and could not be easily upgraded later on. (I have upgraded both my MacBook and current iMac about three years ago.).
Instead I bought a Thunderbolt external SSD and run most of my Mac from that. I get 80% of the benefits of a new machine for 1/10 the price.
Does Apple think if I drop the Mac I will stay within the Apple ecosystem for all my other stuff: phones, tablets, etc.??? If so they are sadly mistaken. Once the ecosystem dike is cracked the flood waters will flow and the crack will widen. Beware Apple.
Agree with you 100%. Been using OS X for 10+ years now and still love it, but Windows has actually become, um, good with 10 and I could switch with minimal pain. The only thing holding me is the ecosystem and iMovie. If Apple does to iMovie what the did to iPhoto there’d be nothing to keep me from looking elsewhere for new hardware. iPad remains the best tablet, but the iPhone is falling further and further behind the best Android phones in screen quality, camera quality, storage space, and price.
It’s easy to blame Tim Cook for everything wrong at Apple, but, let’s be honest. The CEO isn’t the product design guy. He has lieutenants for specific areas. Just looking at Apple’s leadership page, it looks like new Mac hardware falls on the responsibility of Dan Riccio. The problem is, he’s also in charge of iPhone hardware, iPad hardware and even iPod hardware. The Mac is clearly not his focus. Follow the money, it’s not hard to see why iPhone is the focus, followed by iPad, etc.
It’s way cooler to pay $3 billion for a hipster headphone company, and burn $1 billion a month in R&D spend on a fuel cell car than improve the Mac. It’s time to face facts, they’re just not into us any more. In fact, it’s reasonable to begin the over/under wagering on the date when MacDailyNews changes to AppleDailyNews
I am in no rush to upgrade my iPad or iPhone. Every year? Not gonna happen. And I don’t need a watch- at least in its current form. My wife and I, however, both need to upgrade our Macs. Have been waiting for a few years. When I saw HPO’s “Spectre” I thought- oops. Not supposed to be shocked by a PC. Nice- then again, with (ugh) Windows. Ignore those who need and use the trucks, the Pros, you’ll find people searching for another ecosystem.
there is something wrong with how Apple is treating the Pro mac segment no matter how apologists try to spin it.
Look at GPU performance:
even with slower subsystem and processors by upgrading the GPU in SIX year old Cheese Grater Mac Pro it blows the doors off the new Cylinder and other macs:
Barefeats.com:
(GPU intensive Game Tomb Raider)
six years old 2010 MP with Titanium Card Upgrade: 96 fps
Cylinder MP D700 : 49 fps
Retina 5K iMac : 55 fps
retina MacBook Pro : 18 fps
http://barefeats.com/imac5k20.html
(since this article I think there are even faster PC video cards).
(Hackintosh or Windows machines with newer subsystems will have even wider differences than the above).
There is currently no mac with an upgradeable card.
Note some have argued fps is meaningless as games have a limit but that’s not the point, the games fps is just an indication of GPU power, GPU power is needed for other stuff like powering several high res monitors, certain types of 3D rendering etc which certain pros need. (e.g for myself I have a 27 inch Cintiq pen monitor and another second large high res monitor and I want to run several high end programs at the same time. I found significant difference in changing cards in my two Cheese Grater pros ).
Right now there is no easy solution for Mac users to get the GPU power they need in new macs.
at lot of users today don’t realize they are having issues like Photoshop brushes at large setting going slow as molasses or Games stuttering is due to lack of GPU power.
I can go on on other aspects of Mac issues but I think the above is enough to even make apologists question apple’s Pro mac attitude (i.e forcing Hackintosh or Windows switching) .
I want to use MacOS , I don’t want Windows but it’s frustrating how Apple is treating pro users.
Hackintosh Macs or dropping new processors (I got a 6 core Xeon for $110 new ), video cards, SSD into an old refurb Cheese Grater ($500 to $1000) will blow the doors off most macs today.
What year Cheese Grater did you upgrade with new processors? Usually it’s the 2010 & 2012 models. You raise salient & sad points about pro Macs.
GTX 1080 card is faster then Titan-X but only has 8Gb instead of 12Gb RAM which is still pretty good. And about $400 cheaper.
my second cheese grater is 2010 4 core which I will drop the six core xeon in (I already have the new processor). I got a reseller refurb machine a while back (they got a whole bunch from a graphics shop or something, all beautifully maintained with a service contract). as you probably know the Mac P’s come come with either one CPU or two CPU cards. Max upgrade for the single CPU card is a 6 core (I believe — I don’t upgrade Macs all the time so I’m not the most knowledgeable !)
I won’t be putting in a high end max GPU card as I have an older card, so I will put in a second mid range card : one for each monitor . (I think the Power supply can supply ONE high end power card or two mid range cards. the high end cards need both the GPU PCI internal power cords. again that’s from my limited knowledge. )
the one processor CGrater Mac Pros also I think have more limited RAM slots.
if I was buying today with the lower prices than when I got my refurb I will probably get the 8 or 12 core (two processor) 2010 model. (more than the cores you get extra RAM slots).
I note here that new macs like the high end iMac have good SINGLE processor speeds beating the cheese grater but relatively weak GPU for powering a second high end monitor . Costs a lot too.
——
btw : mabye more knowledgeable Mac users can answer this:
I use Free Memory etc to clear RAM as sometimes the buffer isn’t clear when you exit a program. (RAM monitors will show this).
BUT I seem to find the same issue with GPU memory: when you use some graphics programs the brushes etc GET SLOWER over time or even games start to stutter after hours of play , I dunno but is it the GPU memory gets locked like the CPU RAM ? freeing CPU Ram with Free Memory doesn’t cure it, I have to quit the program or even reboot so I think it’s the GPU memory. That’s why I find GPU cards with lots of memory seem way better than the old low memory cards.
Thanks Davewrite! Friends of mine have gone with a 2012 Mac Pro with 3.46Ghz dual 12 processor cards. Supposed to be as fast or faster than 2013 MP and it does PCIe, though only PCIe 2.
Reintroduce a slick, light, 17-inch MacBook Pro and you’ll see sales go back up. The entire creative professional market has been waiting for it.
not only is tim cook in way over his head, so is jony, angela et al. classic scenario of poor transition when powerful founder/leader passes on. they have too much money not enough managerial intelligence, so they default to royal fantasies and risk aversion (violining while rome burns). i lost total confidence since 2014 based on his misleadments, parsings and ambiguous manner of communicating apple’s plans and performance, he’s riding the back of the past.
“Exactly how rich and big does Apple have to be before the company runs like it has more than five guys working 18-hour days trying to do everything?”
Spot on, I’ve been thinking this for more than 5 years already. What the company is so small it can’t support 17″ Macbooks, xserve servers and a decent high end Mac pros? What, is this still run out of a garage in Palo Alto?
Not to mention poor Music apps, Mail apps, etc etc. The software is becoming more of the quality of a mid to low tier software house than supposedly the biggest company on earth.
I have been wondering about that myself.
Last quarter Apple made 10 billion plus in profits it’s really bizarre they let some stuff lag.
friends note:
— Macs made more money than iPads last quarter
so they are not money losers.
— comparing Mac sales with iPhone sales is no win situation because iPhone is the most profitable product in the world. Comparing against iPhone makes every product in the world, every car, plane, radio etc a loser. IPhone makes more money than Google or Microsoft or Ford.
— a few years back a study showed Macs taking 40% of world PC profits. if Mac was a separate business therefore it would probably be larger in profits than Dell or Lenovo or Acer etc.
yet Apple takes forever to update Macs, the Mac Pro is 2013 model!
AND
Apple does NO Mac marketing now.
I don’t even see cheap web ads, when i read Mdn I get Dell and Acer and Amazon ads… (the search engine is tracking my Mac searches but Apple doesn’t capitalize on it… )
Jobs had one NEW Mac Ad every MONTH for 4 years (Mac/PC guy 66 different ads in 4 years) dwindle to today .. nothing.
(note they sell more macs today so it’s not as if they have no money or sales but they don’t advertise. They could sell MORE if they advertised. without ads to educate too many people — including apparently those sales guys in Walmart and Bestbuy — think Windows is the same or better than MacOS).
no marketing, no updates makes lower Mac sales A SELF INFLICTED PROPHECY.
My guess is that Apple’s lack of computers relates to Intel’s chip cycle. Skylake has been a real problem for intel and for PC makers. My hope is that Apple was waiting for a particular chipset it needed for its planned hardware and it got delayed as a result. It’s not a great excuse for things like the Mac Pro, however which should iterate all the time and should be engineered to be a top of the line product in the industry because there are plenty of people who need that level of machine. I do think the Watch has been a distraction, albeit a profitable one. Still, it does make me wonder why they can’t get enough engineers to do more things at once.
And to the bigots, his sexuality has nothing to do with it. Neither is he distracted by activism. Those are ridiculous statements from bigots. The truth is we don’t know why Apple is doing what it’s doing because we never know why Apple does what it does. You can fault him for not executing updates in a timely fashion or other management issues. But his sexuality is not an issue to anyone but you.
Good points
Some hardware components are 6+ years old (not counting regular hard drives) and simply dont cut it anymore … wake up Apple!