“According to NPD, Mac sales for the month of April in North America were flat year-over-year,” John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD.
“Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who reported the data, says that’s a ‘neutral to slight positive’ data point for Apple, relative to expectations for its Mac business,” Paczkowski reports. “Why neutral? Munster’s own forecast calls for worldwide Mac sales for the June quarter to decline about 5 percent year over year. And last quarter supply issues hampered sales of Apple’s newer Macs. So if NPD is seeing flat sales for April, that potentially bodes well for the current quarter.”
Paczkowski reports, “Level Mac sales aren’t great, but they’re obviously better than down Mac sales… As Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly said, the iPad is now the company’s growth engine, not the Mac.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Most people, the car drivers, only need iPads to do what they do with computing. As those remaining who actually need personal computers, the truck drivers, gravitate to Mac, especially as the Dells and their ilk shut down their production lines, the rest of the world is going to wake up one day and be very surprised at the market share Apple Mac takes in the new, more compact personal computing market.
Not mentioned is that with the double digit loss of Windows PC sales and Apple holding with a slight up side is that Apple’s market share is jumping higher. And that is without counting the iPad and other iOS devices as computers.
Long live Apple!
New Mac Pro’s and Retina Display portables should also spruce up market share and Mac sales numbers later this year too from pent-up demand.
iPad’s will not replace everything. I have many clients who have set their iPad’s aside and returned to laptops (MacBook Airs).
Apple has a huge and historic opportunity to win the individual and small business markets. Maintaing flat sales while waiting for Microsoft to fix Windows 8 is not a conquering strategy!
If Apple want to win the war, it needs to to the following:
Get the prices down on MacBook Pro’s and iMacs. The prices have been gradually creeping up over the last three years. They need to reduced by about $250.
Update and improve iLife and iWork.
– iMovie needs full 1080p 60 support.
– Pages needs professional document formatting.
Release a major update to iWeb. A easy to use yet powerful web publisher is a potent selling point for small businesses.
Include iWork and iWeb with every new Mac.
Either purchase Intuit or make a first rate Quicken / Quickbooks competitor for the Mac market. Build links between this product and iWeb and iWork. Doing this would allow Apple to help bring small business into the e-commerce era. (Small business in 70% of the business in the United States. Surveys who over 50% of small business in unhappy with Microsoft.)
iWeb? iWeb is dead. gee
And of course the stock will drop because the market can’t tell the difference.
iMac 27″i7 w/Fusion Drive, 11″ MacBook Air, iPad mini, iPhone. I’m living the iLife! Could not be any happier. I use them all every single day – they’re grrrrreat!!!
Now then, these Apple products are so good now, that I can’t really see a reason for upgrading in the near future. Back in the day of the MacPlus, you just had NO choice but to upgrade. We were so starved for power, memory, and just about everything else, that we just HAD to buy anything new coming down the pike. LOL! If I remember right, my Plus had 1MB of RAM and no hard disk, no slots, and no FPU. It did have a 9″ B&W screen though, LOL! But you know, I LOVED that little computer. It made me an Apple customer for life.
The thing is, Apple products are so mature now that I don’t see me spending much on Apple products in the near future. OK there is the new iPhone, and if new iPad can come in at not less than 40% the current weight, I might go for that too. And perhaps, they can put a retina display in a 27″ iMac. I’ll upgrade then. LOL!
I would think that growth in Mac sales will have to come from first time iPad or iPhone owners new to the Apple ecosystem. Once on the iPad, many of them may decide to upgrade their aging PCs to a new shiny Mac. Here’s hoping they may see the light at the end of the tunnel. There really isn’t anything better and enjoyable out there than the iLife.
I used a Macintosh in 1985 when the only alternative was an IBM PC running DOS. The entire Marketing Product Management dept was switching to Mac’s with Microsoft Office for word processing etc.
I was a Project/Program Manager in the technology sector, design & manufacturing of multiplexer and switching products. I used MacProject which was great and with the graphic capabilities of the Mac, was able to produce very nice grahical representations of project status for my reports.
Upgrading to a Mac SE a few years later, and at the same time my associate was upgrading his PC. The MIS person came to my office and we opened the box, plugged everything in and was all set within 5 minutes. My associate was working with the MIS person to prepare and set up various .exe programs to get him up and running and to print. What a great commercial of the two platforms with the Apple “it just works” slogan it would have made.
Apple’s increasing PC market sales don’t count for shareholder value because Wall Street isn’t interested in the PC industry anymore. It’s a dying market. Being a top company in a dying market is liking being a big frog in a small pond. Apple would need to somehow find a catalyst to revive the desktop PC industry. I still couldn’t enjoy my life without a decent Mac desktop computer because I’m always encoding video files, running PLEX server and bit-torrents.
Currently, Apple only needs to mainly concentrate on the smartphone market in which it’s rapidly losing market share. One problem for Apple shareholders is that I don’t think Apple wants to win any wars. Apple just wants to sell products to those consumers who are willing to pay more to own them. That doesn’t play very well on Wall Street. The only companies that are highly valued are the ones that dominate market share and they have to be winners. Most winners are those who offer their products for less and that will never be Apple.
I don’t think Apple can ever gain any ground selling Mac Pros. They’re just too powerful for 90% of the population to need. Also, they’re too expensive for consumers. At least the 12-core version I’d want is quite expensive. Intel charges an awful lot of money for those high-end Xeon server processors. It might be nice for Apple to build a 6-core iMac using a non-server processor. That would be sweet, but then again, demand probably wouldn’t be very high for a product like that, either. I’m surprised Apple doesn’t sell far more Mac Minis. They’re pretty good for certain tasks, but the graphic chips they use are rather weak.
I would love to sell my MacBook air but iOS needs to improve a LOT on iPad. I can develope apps from iPad. I can’t delete forever ‘iTunes Match’ songs from my iPad, only on OSX iTunes, this is ridiculous. PC free? Photos management still a pain on iPad. and so on. Jobs is a Genius… sayin about the ending of the post-PC era… the microsoft jerks bought this without have a tablet, phone, no hardware no OS… totally clueless. Apple rules. iOS is the future but needs to grow faster.
What I can’t get is people fighting for control of Dell!
I echo the sentiments of most of the above posters: iOS is and always will be a pale imitation of the Mac for productive work. That is by design and is not an arguable point.
Cook is dead wrong that the Mac isn’t a growth engine. The primary reason Mac sales are flat is because he’s not done nearly enough to continue growing the platform. Apple could be publicly aiming for 20% market share in a couple years, sending a clear message to the market that the Mac is the most reliable powerful versatile platform for personal and business computing, and making a strong push into huge markets in which it used to compete (education and enterprise, for example). Remember the eMac anyone?
Instead, Cook is putting all his eggs in the iOS basket — but slowly losing market share there because of insufficient product variety to meet the wide-ranging needs of the world markets.
MDN goes a step too far in prescribing that most people don’t “actually need” a Mac. Just because the Mac is mature product line with a lot of units already deployed in the field, as compared to the mobile iOS devices which represent a younger market in earlier stages of growth, with much more frequent replacement as people lose/break/update their phones, does NOT mean that people don’t also spend a lot of time every day on their “trucks”. For the vast majority of people on the planet, heavy duty computers ARE vital to their livelihood, whereas the particular phone they use, “smart” or otherwise, is one small step above fashion luxury.