“Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster this afternoon reiterates an Overweight rating on Apple (AAPL) shares, and a $640 price target, writing that data gathered by research firm NPD shows sales of Mac computers in the U.S. rising 29%, in unit terms, for October and November, combined,” Tiernan Ray reports for Barron’s. “That supports his estimate Apple may see actual Mac sales rise 13%, year-over-year, globally, for the entire December quarter.”
Ray reports, “Munster notes some of this is a rebound from the prior-year period [see: The Great iMac Drought of Christmas 2012], what’s known on Wall Street as ‘easy comps.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: With 700,000-800,000 iMacs delayed and not being sold when they should’ve been sold last Christmas quarter, it would only be shocking if Apple’s Mac sales didn’t rise YOY.
Related articles:
Tim Cook’s mea culpa: iMac launch should have been postponed – April 24, 2013
Obviously, Apple’s autumn iMac launch was badly botched – March 19, 2013
Apple still seeing strong Mac sales growth as iMac supply constraints ease – March 18, 2013
NPD: U.S. Mac sales up 31% YOY in January; Apple looks to be catching up to iMac demand – February 25, 2013
The curious case of Tim Cook, operations genius, and the missing iMacs – February 4, 2013
iMac ship times slip again in Europe on supply issues; U.S. retailers shipping all models – February 4, 2013
Within hours of availability, shipping times for 27-inch iMac slip to 3-4 weeks – November 30, 2012
In a 10 year shrinking PC market sector…
Get a Mac.
It would be even higher is Mac Pro’s had been released earlier. If they do come out on Dec. 30th as predicted I expect the Apple Store will be swamped for those who want to purchase before years end for tax purposes.
The Mac Pro will not be a huge sales bump. The numbers just aren’t there. It will be for Apple what the Hummer, or the Corvette is to GM. There are some very high powered alternatives to the very expensive Mac Pro. It is now truly a “Pro” machine, while the iMac and Mac Mini have morphed to fill the “Pro-sumer” niche.
This is not to downplay the importance of the Mac Pro though. GM sells every Corvette they make, and it is their flagship model, not suitable for everyone. I’m sure Apple considers the Mac Pro to be in that category.
I don’t know about that. Auto enthusiasts all seem to look forward to owning a new Corvette. From the opinions I’ve heard about the new Mac Pro it doesn’t seem like that many pros are looking forward to it like they would a new Corvette. It’s really hard to tell because there’s always this huge current of negativity about new Apple products, so we’d really have to wait to see how well they actually sell. I think they look great and should perform quite well but so many people are unhappy that the graphics cards are limited and there’s no internal hard drive storage. There’s just too many question marks about this new Mac Pro to predict sales at this point.
People have a hard time letting go of the past. Stop and think. Why were storage and graphics cards attached to the motherboard internally? It was to take advantage of the internal bus speed. No serial or parallel external device had enough speed due to the limitations of the external connections.
Now, with the latest external connection technology those speed limitations have largely disappeared. There’s no reason now to not have externally connected storage and graphics. Apple has effectively moved the internal bus to the outside world. Expansion can now be basically unlimited, at least where it was previously limited by internal bus connections and internal space within the case. It’s a new world….think different.
External connection technologies have not caused speed limitations to disappear, they have merely eclipsed prior external connection speeds. Internal direct connections WILL ALWAYS BE FASTER than external connections.
Thunderbolt is a fancy name for external PCI Express 3.0 with a proprietary connector. It is _slower_ than internal PCIe 3.0 connections are today.
http://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theoretical-vs-actual-bandwidth-pci-express-and-thunderbolt/
Worse for Apple, PCIe 4.0 is on the horizon with double the speed of 3.0 and full backwards compatibility. So those true pros who want the absolute fastest hardware will have to wait only about another year for Apple’s new Mac Pro and Thunderbolt to be obsolete.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/PCIe_4.0-PCIe_3.0-PCIe_OCuLinkSM-PCIe-PCI-SIG,16269.html
Apple thinks users won’t care, but the reality is Thunderbolt still represents a bottleneck compared to the state of the art internal card interfaces. Even if they do chase after PCIe internal specs, there is no way Thunderbolt can ever be truly faster.
Repeat after me the universal truth: “No external cable connection can ever be as fast as a direct interal connection.”
Apple has created another Cube that will look stale next to the forthcoming 2015 Linux and Wintel workstations with PCIe 4.0. Apple’s best move will be to drop the cylindrical Mac Pro into a clear prosumer role at an aggressive price point, and then release next year a true internally expandable professional-grade workstation. A/V professionals have been waiting.
“No external cable connection can ever be as fast as a direct interal connection.”
So, there is something magical about a cable being inside the metal box, rather than outside it. Sure. So, you’ve never noticed that there’s a cable connecting that hard drive that resides inside the metal box, just the same as there’s a cable connecting the one that resides outside the metal box.
And your article is from July 2012. That’s 18 months ago. Where is this magical interface? It should have been here by now. Can you say “vaporware”? I knew you could.
There is something magical about being directly connected to a motherboard. Distance matters.
I stand by everything written. The schedule for rolling out PCIe is not unlike new Intel chips: even the computer industry takes things one step at a time. …well, except when Apple decided to skip easy updates to its venerable Mac Pro for several years. While the Wintel box makers were offering PCIe 3.0, eSATA, and USB 3.0, as well as superior GPUs — Apple was still pushing PCI 2.0, FW800, USB 2.0, and a grand total of two GPU choices, neither of which could really pull off serious 4K resolution video.
Listen, I like Apple, but the truth needs to be spoken. Under Cook, Apple is hyper-focused on iOS. Apple’s long-time suffering professional users continue to get the short end of the stick, and a late, compromised, fashion-first new cylindrical Mac Pro isn’t really as cutting edge as the MDN echo chamber thinks it is. If this is the best Apple can do, count me as unconvinced. Apple is NOT listening to its pro, small business, education, and large enterprise Mac users.
The Cube was not a high performance model. The Mac Pro is. And TB2 speeds are far beyond the needs of the target user, which is not the same user that buys high speed Linux distribution network servers. The ability to to transfer 4K video to multiple monitors and still have more than 5Gbps left over for other “stuff” will be adequate for years. Yes, internal bus speeds will always be higher, but for the target buyer the Mac Pro design has substantial bus headroom for the future. And the design is capable (at very high bus speeds) of connecting to nearly an order of magnitude more devices than you could put into a PC case. For video, graphic, and music design and management the Mac Pro is a very capable tool. It’s capable of running some of the best software the industry has for this niche. It’s not targeted at those users who choose PCs running Linux. It would be the wrong choice for those users. But it is powerful enough to handle the networked design clusters of most small to medium sized companies. And even in large companies, the media design groups aren’t huge.
Zeke is correct, it was all about bus speed. There were associated costs, such as cooling a hotter interior, that are now nicely mitigated by Apple’s inside-out design strategy. The heat sinks were anvils and some of the fans were noisy to the point of distraction battling your souped-up processing units. You also needed lower room temperature at some plants and unless you worked in a clean room you had to worry about more dust getting in there.
“Piper Jaffray: Apple’s worldwide Mac sales on track for to rise 13% this quarter”
“… for to rise …?
Really? No editors available today?
Does MDN EVER proofread before they post?
They’re so quick to point out other people’s errors, but constantly make typos and grammatical errors all throughout everything they post.
Not to mention the reliably broken links…..
It helps that they’re shipping iMacs this year, unlike last year…
If there was a backlog last December it would be reasonable to think that over the past year the major portion of that backlog was sold. This would mean higher than normal sales in the early to mid part of 2013 and may be reflected by ‘normal’ sales in 2014 for the same period in comparison to 2013 and 2012. This is of course assuming there is not once again a backlog in sales.