“A little while back, research firm IDC reported that Apple had lost market share in the personal computer market last quarter. On the company’s July 26 earnings call, management gave figures that appear to corroborate that report,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “According to Apple CFO Luca Maestri, the Mac maker shipped just 4.3 million Macs during its fiscal third quarter, a decline of 10.42% from the year prior… it’s obvious that Apple lost unit share.”
“It would seem that the company’s introduction of the updated 12-inch MacBook back in April wasn’t enough to give overall Mac sales a boost,” Eassa writes. “It has been a long time since Apple put out meaningful refreshes of either its higher-end MacBook Pro or its more mainstream MacBook Air lineup.”
The good news for Apple, though, is that once it finally rolls out substantially improved Macs, it should be in a good position to both regain lost share and encourage its current installed base (which Maestri says grew to ‘a new all-time high at the end of the June quarter’) to ditch their old Macs for newer, better ones,” Eassa writes. “Maestri told investors that the company ended the prior quarter with Mac channel inventories below the company’s ‘four-week to five-week target range.’ The fact that the company managed channel inventory levels so lean (Apple probably could have shipped more Macs during the quarter while still maintaining healthy channel inventory levels) seems to suggest that new Macs will arrive fairly shortly.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote yesterday: “New Macs, please. There is significant pent-up Mac demand out here. Perhaps, that (some nice high-margin Mac outperformance) is what Apple’s banking on for the holiday quarter?”
SEE ALSO:
Apple prepping new MacBook Air with USB-C, reports claim – July 27, 2016
What’s happening with Apple’s Macintosh? – July 14, 2016
Sales suffer as Apple neglects the Mac – July 12, 2016
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
Yup, pent up demand as current users holding off until the new Mac come out. Please, quickly… Need more power than the MacBook and like a 13-14 inch Retina but not so powerful as a MacBook Pro!
Meet me there n the middle Apple!
Nope. I own every Mac in the line except the Mac Pro. I need to upgrade my MacBook Pro but with Apple’s loss of focus on quality on various products over the past couple of years, I chose to invest in a modern HP All-in-One and laptop in the Spectre series over putting more money into Apple’s coffers while my Apple TV is still not up to par and my Apple Watch has slowed to a total and complete crawl. When Apple gets its shot together on quality, I’ll be first in line to upgrade. Until then, the hungry learn fastest and best. Apple needs to get hungry again. Now y’all can call me a turncoat. I prefer independent thinker. Apple is not my spouse and must EARN its place in my life in every product and service I buy. I’ve replaced an iPhone 6S Plus twice now because the speaker and mic were both bad the first time and the speaker was bad the second. People notice when quality slips and we do not appreciate it.
Oh man, I thought I was the only one starting to look at other products outside “the garden”. C’mon Apple, get hungry, there should not be better looking smartwatches out there than the Apple Watch but IMHO almost ALL of them are. I could care less about a flashy band, btw. Their focus on watch bands is sad.
Apple is dragging its feet with the Mac. They should have seen this coming.
I am hoping they had good reason to wait. I do believe we shall soon see.
I plan to buy as soon as we get some decent updates.
Two words … Kaby Lake
Definitely the lake series for the iMac’s and mini’s.
For the Mac Pro the two words are…Knight’s Landing.
The current MacBook Pro is two generations behind in the Intel i7 series. What’s that about?
FOCUS Apple!
Even though I agree with what you say (for once) I have still one starred your post.
Of course you did! It’s all part of your personal protocol. I understand. Now take your meds and enjoy your nap.
If anything the MBA line should be expanded, not marched to extinction. Add a retina display to the existing 11 and 13 inch models and you have real winners. Roll out a 15 or 17 inch MBA and you will have a stunning trendsetting machine…the one more thing that apple used to do. Also, Id love to see the anodizing shop come out with a project red MBA.
If they make a Retina MacBook Air, then they could make the Retina MacBook Pro thick enough to have a hard drive so you can have the Apple Solid State Drive and a 2 TB hard drive so you can have plenty of onboard storage and you won’t have to plug in an external hard drive. They could call it the MacBook Pro SE (Storage Edition).
I simply do not understand why something like this should have happened at all. All it takes is releasing regular hardware improvements to the Mac product line on a bi-yearly basis at least. No one really expects great innovation on the desktop computer front these days, but people will continue to buy with simple hardware improvements. Why the world’s most wealthiest technology company on the planet can’t manage to do that is beyond me.
Tim Cook is responsible for this fiasco. Tim Cook should be FIRED, immediately.
Put someone in charge who knows what Mac development is.
Fire Tim Cook!
Even better if Apple inc. has been running a skunkworks project for years to deliver their own A20 powered chips (a big leap forward from the A7..A10 chips for iOS devices) to replace Intel chips.
Reason for saying this is that it has been very quiet on the Mac hardware front in 2016, which indicates to me that something is happening…. We shall see!!
P.s. I await the verbal onslaught that says “it’s impossible”, just as it was impossible for Apple inc. to be first to market with 64bit mobile chips in the A series!!
It’s not ‘impossible’. It’s just entirely impractical. I’ll leave you to figure out why as I’m dead sick of teaching computer science 101 to people such as yourself. But here are the usual clues: CISC vs RISC.
Please don’t reply to me as I gave you all the clues you need.
The new Macbook Pros will have USB-C connectors with Thunderbolt 3. Much of the delay in new Macbook Pros has been due to Intel, as Apple has waited for Skylake and Thunderbolt 3. We likely will see these new computers in the next 60 days — I’ve been waiting.
I just upgraded a late 2007 model iMac with more RAM and it’s still a viable machine.
Reality is Mac’s last longer and work better so there is less need to replace as often. Yes, we will replace this older Mac when needed but I have newer laptop, iPhones, iPads, that get used 10X more often. For what this machine is used for it’s still a very viable machine. Unlike the PC market where you have no choice but to upgrade every 3-5 years.
Bottom line is who cares and which company is raking in the most money?
If I was going to college as a freshman this fall, I wouldn’t be buying a Mac. No one in their right mind pays premium prices for yesterdays technology. Some folks need a swift kick in the pants in Cupertino and to better focus on today’s products vs pipeline stuff.
Everything that’s released is old technology. Intel’s working on chips they won’t release for years. Apple doesn’t throw each new variation of a chip into its machines because each one doesn’t always offer a step forward. That’s why Dell and HP have product names like Dell Latitude 13 7000 Series.
Admittedly, how long a computer is viable depends greatly on what you’re using it for. My problem with Apple is that they’re soldering in RAM on the MacBooks and the Mac Minis, and they don’t make a Mac that has an upgradeable graphics card. If you want to play games on a Mac, you need to be able to upgrade the graphics card every 5 years or so, and you need a 16-lane PCIe slot for that. Apple’s proprietary NVMe interface wouldn’t be as bad if the current MacBook Pros had room for a 2 TB hard drive – that way, you could have plenty of storage without having to use an external hard drive.
like I said before:
—-
for certain uses Macs today are falling behind.
Look at GPU speeds.
Barefeats.com shows a 6 year old Mac Pro with slower subsystem and processors but with Upgraded Video card running a GPU intensive game Diablo 3 beating current macs by a wide margin .
2010 Mac Pro with Upgraded Card : 181 fps
iMac 5k : 75 fps
current cylinder Mac Pro D700 : 73 fps
(lowest price with d700 is over $4500 !)
Macbook Pro retina : 27 fps
A hackintosh (with faster subsystem than that 6 year old MP) or high end windows machine will have even bigger differences than the above.
People have argued that fps is not important as games have a limit for fps playability but that’s not the point, the test shows GPU power. Besides games GPU power is needed for CERTAIN tasks like running multiple high res monitors or doing certain types of 3D etc. I have a 27 Cintiq pen monitor and another big monitor for example and would like to open several high end programs and lots of files at the same time.
The is not a single Mac today that you can upgrade the GPU. Since that Barefeats tests I believe there are even faster video cards.
Lots of mac uses today don’t realize that their photoshop brushes at large setting are going slow or games stuttering due to lack of GPU power (go look at the test results again. A Macbook PRO — I have one — is like 7 times slower than a upgraded 6 year old mac in GPU performance ! )
GPU performance is just one issue. RAM (PCs can go up to 512 GB), faster subsystems etc are others of concern.
I love the Mac and the MacOS but there’s something wrong with Apple’s behaviour towards certain types of PRO users. (I emphasize CERTAIN as lots of people are happy with their current macs)
also where the Mac marketing?
no serious Mac advertising since Mac PC guy (one new ad a month for 4 years) ages ago
(note Macs near match iPad revenues, beat iPad in the April quarter. Imagine if they actually marketed them… ).
not upgrading their macs regularly, a misfit of a Mac Pro (non upgradable GPUs etc), no mid tower between the mini and the Pro which many users have been clamouring for and no marketing (practically none to cash in on the Win 8 fiasco years which is bizarre) makes dropping Mac sales a self inflicted prophecy.
Yep, the Trashcan is a POS design by a fashion designer.
I wouldn’t pay good money for a MacBook Pro or Mac Pro at this time.
Agreed. They went for cool, not function. My God, I hope they get their heads out of you know where and give people what they have been asking for for years. Nothing fancy, nor pretty but easily upgradable and with a lot of muscle. A box! DOH!
If it will make the in-house design people happy because they find it so objectionable, name it “The Dullard.”
An upgraded 2012 Mac Pro with Titan-X and 12 proc 3.47Ghz processors is as fast or faster then current 2013 Mac Pro, uses Nvidia cards and is about half the price (but no USB 3 ports without a PCIe card nor Thunderbolt). Please surprise us pro’s Apple with an upgradeable PCIe slotted machine that recognizes pro’s very different needs and the fact not everyone wants or uses AMD cards.
I’d really like to know who approved the current trash-can Mac Pro. Did Apple simply pay lip service to Jony Ive? Is Apple more interested in “green” computers than powerful computers? What’s the point of using GPU’s that can’t be upgraded to the latest GPUs at a reasonable price-point? I honestly don’t understand why Apple moved from the upgradeable cheese-grater Mac Pro to this non-standard coffee-table model. What practical purpose does it serve? Apart from how it looks the current Mac Pro just seems like a step backwards from all previous Mac Pros.
Well I agree. It looks to be a failed experiment, at least for many. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t a bit gobsmacked and surprised by it’s eventual negative reception, and the reasons for that.) For sound mixers and the like it’s fine but it still negates easy upgrading for everybody.
I would welcome back a Cheese Grater II, in fact, make it bigger with more drive slots, hardware RAID 5,6, etc.!
I was just at Siggraph and looking at BOXX and Puget boxes drooling a little for what could and should be. Puget told me they considered making Hackintoshes but for all the legal problems doing so with Apple decided against it. Apple might consider licensing out just the Pro boxes for those who want more, but that’ll never happen thanks to the ghost of the Power Computing debacle.
I gave you 5 stars, not much to add except to note the last few times I saw Jony Ive on TV etc, he was going on and on about how much care and effort his guys took to get the perfect shade of colour for a watch band or something which is great but I wish he would get a few guys to work on the Mac. A fast mac tower shouldn’t be hard as hackintosh people seem to be able to build faster macs in their basements. Practically no cost in R&D. (Note reports show apple has hired hundreds of engineers etc for the car, and hundreds of advertising staff for schiller so it’s not as if they can’t afford people… )
is it because in Apple today you don’t get bonuses or kudos for working on something ‘old’ like the Mac while all the praise and $$$ goes to new (supposedly innovative) stuff even if it’s just a more flexible watch band or whatever (which to me seem less crucial to Apple’s business ) ?
—-
oh yeah, I have to note I really LOVE my big iPad Pro 12.9 and pencil ….
Let’s hope it ’twas not the Apple corporate culture beauty that killed the pro-approved Mac Pro beast!
Looking forward to an iPad Pro upgrade this year too from iPad 3. Not sure what size yet. If I fall asleep while reading a larger iPad is going to hurt falling on my face a lot more. 🙂
Hi homophobic JoeMacFrank. Still haven’t grown up yet I see. Obsessed with male appendages much? Probably because of your own shortcomings? This space is for adults only, so obviously you will never qualify.
My Mac Pro can do many things simultaneously without a hiccup that would drag any current Mac to it’s knees doing half as much.
Tower Mac Pro- not the HTPC Trashcan
I have to admit, the 27” iMac actually has an upgradeable CPU. Aside from that, I agree with you completely. Apple really needs to make a midrange upgradeable Mac tower with 2-4 RAM slots, at least 2 hard drive bays and at least 2 PCIe x16 slots. Otherwise, Mac users who want a lot of performance will just make Hackintoshes.
Macs are sorely lacking in speed and basic specs. Throw in that they solder on the parts to force you to bring it back to apple to get “fixed”, can’t add memory or change a bad hard drive, just isn’t appealing. I’m still hanging onto my 2009 iMac because of that and I’m a loyal Mac user. I would have upgraded long ago, until Tim Cook decided on this no upgrade/ no repair policy. Do I really want to hand over my old hard drive with all my info to some unknown recycling company? Just remember Apple doesn’t fix your computer you get a refurb and your data goes god knows where.
I’m really concerned about what to do if my iMac starts to fail. I have a 9.1, 3.06 Core2Duo and it’s getting long in the tooth. I do keep an updated clone of my current drive. I might have to buy a new iMac and then get a kit to pull out the hard drive of the old iMac before sending it in for repairs. It’s troubling not being able to easily replace a hard drive without some complicated kit. I really like the iMac apart from not being able to easily replace the hard drive.
It becomes a paperweight!
It is in fact getting late.
Apple is up to something and is actually waiting for all the green lights to be on…
The laptop reinvented?
A complete redesign of the unibody?
Continuity to an all new level?
The symbiosis at its first mature itteration?
Your phone in your laptop?
Your cycle shared upon all iDevices?
PIPs all over?
A display breakthrough?
The retina display to completion?
There has been no better time to hold and take a step back to see all the fresh technologies and possibilities combine with the Apple’s way of doing things.
Then, everybody will flock back to Apple
Or, Apple designers could just have their heads up their arrogant asses and are doing nothing, assuming customers will buy anyway. Equally as plausible.
What Apple is up to is thinking that they are ‘disruptors’ who are going to force everyone to use an iPad or iPhone for everything – so now the people who do stuff other than send snapchats or send messages are forced back to buying WinTel boxes. Fail.
The realspike:
Under Jobs, all of the above and more.
With Cook? None of the above.
It’s wonderful to dream, but dreams are all they are.
I myself wasted my time compiling a wish list for Aperture X which I was certain was just around the corner.
Sent many a suggestion off to Apple I did – fool that I was.
Now I know better.
Cook is busy fighting his leftist social wars and selling iPhones to communists.
This Autumn expect more lazy ‘updates’ and a mildly improved iPhone with a lovely camera.
Now that Intel is shipping their new CPUs, maybe Apple will ship some new MBPs.
Not an excuse, Intel has shipped 2 or 3 generations of CPU MB Updates since the Latest (2013) Mac Pro. that Apple has skipped over, if they keep waiting for the latest update we will never get anything. There does seem to be issues with the 2013 Mac Pro I have 2 of them in my Office and quite often my MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013 out preforms them when working in InDesign doing variable with XMPie.
The thing with Apple is that they just don’t release with every CPUs update. They normally wait until there is a significant cpu update. Also Intel has been working on getting the heat (temperature) down on the current CPUs releases. Heat is a major issue with the MBP’s and Air’s.
Refresh the entire Mac line! From Macbooks to iMacs to Macbook Pros to the Pro! Then count the money!
It would be very difficult to choose a Mac laptop right now. This one’s a little lighter, that ones a little faster, the other one comes in rose gold, this one is heavier but has an optical drive and you can actually upgrade your own RAM, the one over there has only one port, so plan on buying (and possibly misplacing) a bunch of new adapters.
Where is the value and simplicity? My current MBP won’t be supported in the next OS, but they’re still making the same basic design, non-retina, a bit heavy with newer processors and radios. It’s the only one that makes any sense and the next upgrade cycle might just drop it from the line-up.
Way to keep me motivated, Apple.
It is actually too simple. There are no models with optical drives or ones where you can upgrade RAM.
The only choices you have left is how big do you want it, how many ports you want, and how much do you want to overpay Apple for a reasonable amount of factory installed RAM.
Not quite true. The MacBook Pro (13 inch, Mid-2012) is still in production. It’s just very difficult to locate on Apples web-site (http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MD101LL/A&step=config#)
Waiting, waiting, waiting myself. I’m ready to pull the trigger on a 27″ iMac upgrade, but I refuse to purchase an expensive computer with old processors and legacy connections. To be fair, the iMac is more up-to-date than most of the product line. However, I want USB-Type C and Thunderbolt 3 before I’ll make the purchase.
Katy Lake processors, Nvidia or AMD GPUs, and standard Fusion drives would be icing on the cake.
As a video producer and editor, that’s exactly what I’m waiting for. When you’re using 5-6 streams of 1080 60p video for a multi-cam production, you need power. You don’t want constant hiccups because the computer can’t keep up. Let’s go Apple and Intel. You’re making my job harder.
If Apple want to get their sales up they need to:
1. Stop charging rediculous prices for the installed RAM
2. Provide sufficient ports that don’t need useless adapters to make them flexible enough to work and charge themselves and output to speakers and a wired mouse and link to a monitor – ie. function before making it 1/10th of a mm thinner.
Tim Cook sucks. That’s what they get for ignoring their flagship product. Macs. It’ll get worse.
Apple, it’s clear from your customers here, your Macs are far behind, and their performance is shit in comparison to what we have today. Coupled with the fact that older Mac Pro towers prior to the cylindrical design can be upgraded to have far better performance than what we spend dearly on today tells us that you’re not really caring about your customers’ needs.
That’s BAD business.
And I’m SELLING YOUR PRODUCTS FOR A LIVING.
My Apple sales for the Mac are in the toilet right now, and I’m almost convinced to jump ship just so I can get better specs. I haven’t upgraded my Mac since 2011.
Schiller, you had better eat your words of it being sad that people own computers older than 5 years, because those 5-year old computers are BEATING YOUR CURRENT PRODUCTS.
Sorry to rant like this, but something needs to be done.
I’m already seeing PCs under $1,000 that have 16GB 2166MHz DDR4 RAM and 4GB of VRAM on a dedicated graphics chipset. You cannot tell me that you won’t design your Macs to have better specs.
There’s no excuse for this. None.
Something is wrong with this articles title and content.
The title implies Apples market share has declined. The content, however, relates to a 10% drop YoY for Q3.
Gartner is reporting global PC decline of more than 13% with some dropping more than 20%.
Given that Apples sales decline is lower than the average, doesn’t that mean they have actually gained market share, not lost?
Gartner also shows Apple with a respectable 13.4% market share. This is not far off of the leaders with just over 20%
Why would I or anyone buy a Mac that can’t be upgraded? Seems simple.
Apple’s newest mantra:
Style over substance. Good for tweener boppers.
Terrible for working people. Keep the flash, give us updated machines already..