“The latest PC marketshare figures from Gartner and IDC suggest Mac users are anxious for new MacBooks, as Mac sales fall and economic weakness impacts PC sales everywhere,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“IDC says Q2 2016 worldwide PC shipments fell 4.5%, totaling 62.4 million units, with Apple and Lenovo particularly impacted. Apple fell from a 7.4 percent share in Q2 2015 to a 7.1 percent share in Q2 2016, with an 8.3 percent drop in year-on-year shipments, they said,” Evans writes. “Gartner says Q2 2016 worldwide PC shipments fell 5.2%, totaling 64.3 million units. The analyst say Apple’s market share held, year-on-year, at 7.1 percent, though its year-on-year shipments fell 4.9 percent.”
“Looking at historical data it is noteworthy that PC sales are slumping at a significantly faster rate than during the 2008 recession,” Evans writes. “That Mac sales – which remained steady during the last recession — appear to being impacted this time around is a red flag warning of how severe these fresh challenges are. That Apple is impacted means something – the company has been estimated as accounting for 0.5 percent of US GDP and 0.15 percent of global GDP, so its weakness will have a material economic impact.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, you never know, new Macs just might turn things around! Dare we also suggest they be coupled with new Mac advertising campaigns? Hey, we can dream. Apple’s on a budget, you know. 😉
SEE ALSO:
IDC, Gartner: Apple’s Mac no longer bucking PC industry’s sales slide – July 12, 2016
Sometimes you have to wonder just what the F are all those people doing over there in Cupertino.
Yesterday’s technology at tomorrow’s prices. You can’t recommend the current macs in good conscience.
Sure you can recommend current Macs, just not “Pro.”
Not at the prices Cook & Co. are charging for Macs.
He thinks he’s selling fashion, you see.
So buy a PC and you won’t have to worry about “fashion.” (Don’t let the mental ward door hit you on the way out.)
Fashion was one reason I purchased the 2013 Mac Pro. If Paul likes, he can visualise my folly as contributing to a worthy charity, just as I do when I select a Louis Vuitton handbag to serve my needs for the next fifteen years instead of a Walmart shopping bag…besides, Walmart have started charging ten cents for them, the greedy bastards.
Paul’s much too busy with his skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge business model studies as taught by Professor Henry F. Potter to comment. Also you can well imagine that Paul has never let fashion be his concern or forte. I believe they many refer to folks like him as either “clodhoppers, draggletails or tatterdemalions.” Which is being kind.
In all likelihood, they are working their asses off to develop, integrate, and release the new hardware, software, and capabilities that people like you seem to take for granted.
You should learn to cultivate a healthy respect and admiration for the capable people at Apple that are doing great things while you sit around and criticize.
Sometimes I wonder how long this country and this world will survive when it is infested with people like L.
Yeah, without objective comparison and critique from people like L we would have the insulated Cupertino Groupthink ivory tower dictate when and how Apple updates anything, and we would all love it.
If Apple was working its asses off, it would have managed to update something about the Mac Pro in the last 3 years. But no, they couldn’t even bother to update the price as it falls further behind the competition.
Brainless cheerleading is the last thing Apple needs right now. A swift kick in Tim’s ass would be more appropriate.
Sigh …. And i hear You Paul..
So many things are neglected! Pro macs… Pro-iOS…..High end gaming.. …. Schools…….
They are losing the mind share of two of the most important demographic groups…….Kids/ teens and pros ….
Shooting themselves in their own foot.
Apple , Tim, Team …wake up !
Without showing off your prowess at the extreme ends .. You will lose your credibility as the best in no time. And as a result the ability to charge a premuim !
Real life example.. Most My friends kids all have iphones and ipads and macbooks.. ..all but iphone is collecting dust…. They are either on their iphones or when on bigger screens.. They are on their 1300$ pc-s. Why? Becouse they can play all the highend advanced games !
You ask them why not mac… Answer is: Ohhhh mac is too slow.! Can customize…..not all games are supported on mac … Etc.
At school they are given chrome books….
So Apple what do you believe this kids will grow up accustomed to?
Pros: Im have been heavily involved in 3d animation/ modeling.. Macs are such limited platforms for that…..On PC i felt i can be on the cutting edge without offering both arms and legs …. With Macs i feel WTF…
So Apple .. How long do you think your iphone monentum will cary you forward ? While you are losing so much in other areas.
Most important lose: Your image as the best computing platform regardless of task at hand !
(Watch is nice but wont save you imo… Apple Tv and tvOS are perpetual betas……)
Sigh!
Tim.. You have too many inept /unqualified prople calling shots in variouse areas of Apple… ..
Every day i become more convinced of this.
I hope its on your A list of priorities to correct this situation. Its getting dengerously close to the edge of the cliff.
Now if we are all wrong and you are convinced that Apple has answers to all of the above…..Then i must say your PR and Marketing/advertizing departments are in a Coma!
Apple has 100 people assigned to watch band color selection.
Apple has 1 EE and 1 ME working on the next Mac Pro.
Do you really believe that bullshi- you’re trying to pass to us? If so, you’re a fool.
100% agree. There’s something wrong with management there
Seeing as how this year is apples 40th anniversary, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a complete revamp of the entire line up this fall. The notebooks usually keep the same design for around 4 years, so this would be time to change up the unibody retina MacBook Pro. The mini could be shrunk even more, and the iMac could be given a facelift. I don’t think the MacBook Air will be kept around much longer, it might even be killed this fall if the MacBook product line is expanded a little bit. And I think the reason for not updating the mac pro since introduction is due to getting the manufacturing process down, and also working with the gpu companies to get designs of the modern cards that will fit into the enclosure. And also updating the socket to accept the new broad well based Xeon e-5’s that just came out in May. And I also think that a 4K & 5k thunderbolt 3 display is on the way now that everything would have the graphics grunt to drive it with the exception of the MacBook, but that may change also.
I just think the long delay has been leading us up to a massive revamp for the 40th anniversary. I could be totally wrong, but it does make sense.
Although seeing how Apple turned 40 back on April 1st, if they were going to do an “Anniversary Lineup” … they’re already 3 months late.
The 40th year started on April 1st, so that would mean it goes to March 31st of 2017. And since the 20th anniversary mac was released in 1997, I think there’s plenty of time.
The rumor mill, or rather, the lack of rumor mongering suggests your opinion is a complete fail.
As is your life and analytical mental processes.
Was there a rumor mill even suggesting the new Mac Pro redesign? No…. Was there a rumor mill even suggesting that Swift was going to exist? No… Was there a rumor mill about unibody MacBook Pro’s? No…. Usually when apple comes out with a totally new design for macs, there is no advance warning. They just do it. And if you look historically at the notebooks and the pro line, the average refresh is 12-18 months since 2003 when the Power Mac G5 was released, and a chassis update about every 4 years for portables and iMacs, and 6 years for Mac Pro. From 2006-2013 the pro had the same exterior design, with minor tweaks to the interior to support each generation of processor from Intel. But…. That system NEVER upgraded the Sata buses in the drive bays past version 2.0 (3gb/s) , and the pcie bus went to 2.0 in 2009. But that’s it.
Say what you want about the pro, but there weren’t suitable processors until this year to replace what they have in there, that’s not apples fault, that’s on Intel. Just like the last refresh of the 15″ MacBook Pro, the sky lake processors weren’t ready for apple’s timetable so they didn’t put them in. With all the thermal and efficiency engineering they do for their portables it’s not just as simple as slapping in new silicon. Sure if you want 2-3 hour battery life and loud fans running constantly, then all the pc guys have you covered. Have at it. But, by taking their time and doing the products correctly, they can produce a much longer lasting and stable system that delivers great battery life, is quiet, and fast. And although the new MacBook may be limited, it is setting up the future of the design. Just like the original MacBook Air did. Everybody bitched about the same things with that one too, no ports, underpowered, etc… But that design language and unibody construction made its way into the entire notebook lineup, started the entire “ultra book” category of products, and arguably made the entire industry at least attempt to match its aesthetic and performance. And after it was on the market for about 2 years was completely redesigned to the current system we see today after they figured out a way to put all of those missing things back into the design.
Remember the first generation MacBook Pro that didn’t have FireWire 800? Everyone was pissed off about that too. But in rev B, with the Merom processors, all that missing stuff was put back in. If you’ve been an apple customer as long as some of us (I’m 37 and I’ve had macs and apple’s since I was 5) you get to know these patterns and not bitch about things because you know that eventually the product will address everything you need. And I can honestly say that the systems now are faster, more productive, and easier to maintain than they were 15 years ago. As much as I hate soldered ram, I understand the benefit from a manufacturing perspective. And as much as I’d like to put in any Sata ssd into my newer systems, the pcie storage they’re using is so much faster I don’t mind the capacity drop. Also, with Intel processors we’re not getting the 25%-40% performance improvement leaps like we were from 2006-2011. The i series chips don’t scale exponentially in performance, every year there is slight improvement, a few % points each successive generation. Especially in the mobile space, the performance gains haven’t really been there since the 3rd generation i7’s, sure the 6th gens are more efficient but from a raw compute perspective they’re not that much faster since haswell. And haswell wasn’t a massive jump over ivy-bridge in compute performance either. As evidenced by our 2012 MacBook pros that are still nearly as fast as the 2015’s we bought last year. Now their storage is sig8nifcantly faster, in most cases double the raid set up we have in each notebook, but in raw compute there is t much difference in performance.
Now that Intel has new Kaby lake processors due out in the fall, I can honestly see why Apple didn’t go with the sky lake quad cores if they were late and didn’t provide much benefit. Also the new xeons just came out in May, these are the first new generation of e-5’s since the Mac Pro redesign. So I don’t understand what they would’ve put into the Pro in the last year to begin with. Now, should the graphics options be updated? Yes. Graphics cards seem to get exponentially better every year, and like I said before I think apple knows this, and has been working with red & green to get the modern gpus designed for the system.
Keep in mind, every time there is a design change it takes a refresh or two to get the system to where the majority of people are happy with it. Let’s say Apple makes a new paradigm shifting design, puts everything possible in it, and then they have massive failures because the boards aren’t ready, and the tech they used to make it isn’t totally rock solid yet…. They’d be crucified. So, when they make a new design there are always things missing from the first generation that are eventually added back in, once they have a way that actually works correctly. The level of outrage here always surprises me, if you step back and think about for a couple seconds their decisions do make sense. Just like the 480p FaceTime camera on the MacBook… It’s not that they can’t put a 1.2 or 5 megapixel FaceTime camera in that computer, it’s that the new board they designed for the system isn’t ready for that level of stress and would probably fail, so they put it what it could handle. And if anyone says “the a series chips can all do it, why can’t the coreM” well, the simple answer is Applpe doesn’t make the coreM. They don’t control the chips production, and they can’t optimize for it like they do in iOS devices, so they have to work with Intel samples and go from there. And like I said before, if you want a standard board that could support that higher Rez camera, there are systems that are built like that. But the new board design will take probably 2 generations to get totally fleshed out, just like the original MacBook Air did.
I’m not trying to defend blindly here, I’m frustrated with quite a few things also, but if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it’s not that hard to see where things are going and how they’ll get there.
Yawn
Okay, I *will* say what I want about the Mac Pro.
First off, claims of ‘no’ CPU’s until the E5 V4 Broadwell-EP’s ignores that the Intel’s Xeon E5 V3 Haswell-EP CPU’s shipped back in 2014, but was skipped over. And on those Broadwell’s, they started shipping production quantities a full fiscal quarter ago (before Apple’s 4/1 anniversary): since major players can get preproduction samples, there’s no reason why a new Mac Pro hardware with the V4 CPU’s couldn’t have already been designed, tested & shipped if Apple really wanted to.
And sure, we can note how the classic (2012) Mac Pro still had SATA-2, etc … but this is actually just proving that the issue at Apple isn’t Engineering or Project Management (after all, even if we forgive Apple for not being proactive in getting SATA-3 in the March 2009 Mac Pro after SATA-3’s ratification in late 2008, Apple also skipped it on **both** of the subsequent Mac Pro updates (July 2010, June 2012). To claim Engineering or Project Management as the reason why carries zero credibility: it was management and cost-driven. Period.
And now … the suggestion is that we’re all waiting for _yet another_ Intel update, this time to Kaby Lake?
But given how Intel’s strategy has been Xeon’s after the i’s, with the first Kaby Lake CPUs are being promised in “Late 2016”, the *optimistic* schedule for any Xeon based Kaby Lake CPU for a Mac Pro would be ~mid 2017 (a full year from now).
Finally, on shades of “Rock Solid”, that is certainly what a Pro-esque practitioner wants, but that also means that they won’t risk transition on the next generation of OS … as such, their business plan would be that it needs to be supported under OS X 10.11
You’re wasting your breath with this crowd. Once there’s blood in the eye, reason is in the back seat, and will say anything to get the driver to calm down.
Clear indication that the overpriced, underperforming 2015 MacBook missed the target by a wide margin. The puzzle is why Cook can’t seem to authorize more new Mac products and advertising.
I do recall the critics of the 2013 Mac Pro and the 2015 MacBook were chastised along the lines of “it’s just not the product for you”. Well, apparently Apple’s misguided quest for thinness and port-free designs and fashion over function just isn’t appealing. But is Apple correcting the horrible course that Cook has taken for the Mac? The silence from Cupertino is not reassuring.
Tech specs do matter, Cook. Get a clue.
no point advertising 2/3 year old technology is there?
I actually thought about buying a non Mac machine this month. I returned the MacBook Pro within a week of purchase and am wondering if my Mac experience is coming to an end. That thing (MBP) was several years lagging in design and a couple years behind in specs. Not cool Apple. Also, I’m not buying the next iPhone if the camera is sticking out the back.
It’s the sad state of the Pro lineup. And if an updated design with current specs is released will it be abandoned again in a few years? http://joecodes.com/apple-vs-pro/
I did the same after buying a 13″ macbook pro as a backup in case Apple could not fix my 17″ (they ended up replacing the entire motherboard for free because the video card failed, obviously out of warranty period. Usual great Apple service).
I had intended on keeping the 13″ to use for travel, but could not justify the price. I also could not justify the lower price on the Air considering the crappy specs.
I don’t need a blazing fast processor, but I think Apple is shooting itself in the foot with what they charge for reasonable storage.
As for your comment on the camera, that is somewhat silly. You do realize that when it comes to optics, there are laws of physics that Apple can’t avoid if they want to optimize image quality, and that means a certain distance between the lens and sensor. The only way around that problem would be to make the whole phone thicker, which may not be the worst thing considering the larger battery that would be possible.
Well no professional that needs a workstation grade computer has a viable option with the current Mac lineup. The Mac Pro is 3 year old technology at a premium price. It does not use nvidia GPU so no CUDA support for a bunch of professional software that depends on it. The iMac is not a true alternative for this segment in it’s current incarnation. So in short, no Mac option for the professional at this point.
You’re partially correct. The lack of Cuda support is not a good thing for shops that use premiere for production, but auto desk , final cut, and avid all leverage OpenGL so the amd gpus do just fine. Although for our purposes the dual d700’s have been good, there are times when I wish we could slap a w9100 in there in all of its 32GB of glory. Also it would be good on the new pro to have both an nvidia & amd option for those who need it. As I said above, I think they’ve been working on this. For example if the default were crossfire cards and then you could get either a high performance Cuda card like a quadro, or a good single thread card like a gtx 1080, that would go a long way to allowing people to design the system for their workloads. And also have the option of w9100’s in crossfire (64GB of gddr5) those are 4,000.00 cards but it would still be nice to have that option. I’m not writing it off until we see what this fall brings. All of our older Mac pros are still running and every piece of apple hardware we have bought the last 8 years has improved our productivity, so I’m not a pessimistic as some seem to be. And there’s no way in hell you’ll ever get us to run Windows natively for any reason, and I think most of apples pro customers feel the same way. The stability and security and efficiency of OS X is with waiting to see what they come up with.
I will agree with the MacBook Pro 15″ lagging though. We have a bunch of 2012 systems that have had their optical drives replaced with ssd’ and are all in raid 0 so they are very fast. The 2015 retina systems on raw performance aren’t much better since they still use haswell/crystal well chips. But their storage solution is double the speed even what we’ve got in the raided 2012’s, and the AC wireless is nice. I would like to see Kaby lake processors, and very high end graphics in the next one… Like a gtx 970/980m. Those would be awesome portables.
Nice balanced analysis, VoR!
Yeah, extremely rare around here with the rabid Tim Hating doofus crowd making too much noise.
Would you buy a MacPro today? That is my point. I wouldn’t. I am hanging on to my old 2008 MacPro until Apple give me a viable solution. I don’t mind going to the iMac, if the external GPU option is enabled for nVida.
Your 2008 Mac Pro isn’t hyper threaded, and the current systems are significantly faster than what you have. We have quite a few 08’s hanging around and I can attest to this. Also, your 08 system will not run macOS Sierra. If you still want the internal expand ability, buy a 2012 Mac Pro. Otherwise the current system will be a huge upgrade.
Voice of Reason is mostly correct. I’d say any Mac Pro from 2010-2012 can be updated to be practically as good as the best 2016 trash can for _some_ people’s work. For continuous fastest number crunching (and with proper aid of additional external cooling), the newest Mac Pro obviously is a little better than the 4+ year old models.
When Apple updated the Mac Pro in 2010, it got a significant boost in power. The 2012 model didn’t move the needle too much, neither did the 2013 trash can. Cupertino’s Mac development teams have been working with interior decorators for their new offices ever since.
It all depends on specific chips in your model. A look at the Geekbench Mac benchmarks http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks shows that the fastest 2008 Mac Pro offers almost the same processing power as the base 4-core 2013 trash can — so much more bang for the buck on the old Mac Pro towers. Sadly, these days all Macs are absolutely BLOWN AWAY by real Linux and MS workstations.
64 bit multicore results, Geekbench says:
Most powerful PC to date: HP Superdome2: 172099 (a supercomputer that no small company will ever be able to justify)
…..
Most powerful configured Dell: PowerEdge R930: 141129
…..
Most powerful off-the-shelf Dell 12-core (for comparison to Apple’s best) = PowerEdge R630 with E5-2643 chips: 39330
…..
Most powerful Mac to date: Mac Pro late 2013, 12 core Xeon E5-2697 chips: 32222
Mac Pro mid 2012, 12 core X5675 chips: 27781
Mac Pro mid 2010, 12 core X5670 chips: 26909
Mac Pro late 2013, 4 core E5-1620 chips: 14322
Mac Pro early 2008, 8 core X5482 chips: 12834
…..
The fastest version of Apple’s latest expression of their computing prowess, designed expressly for the Facebook & Twitter ultramobile crowd:
2016 MacBook with blazing (but throttled) Core m7-6Y75 2 core 1.3GHz processor: 6994
It is all very sad.
If you’re looking for a Kaby Lake processor in a rMBP, you’ll probably have to wait until November or December at the earliest. Even mobile versions of that variant won’t ship in quantity until at least then. (Yes, there are rumors of KL sampling in extremely limited quantities of prototypes right now. Yes, there are rumors that final versions will sample in August or September. But, shipping in quantity won’t happen until November/December at the earliest. Some rumors are suggesting that it will be shipping in quantity in January or February 2017.)
Mac Pro? How’s this for a system
Broadwell-E CPUs (up to 10 cores in a single CPU) (Useful Broadwell Xeons are just too damn expensive)
RAM (up to 128 GB, DDR4-2400)
PCIe 3.1 (available slots: 2×16, 1×8, 1×4 — yes, 4 slots minimum)
Nvidia Graphics (Up to two each GTX 1070, GTX 1080, or P100 with HBM)
PCIe 3.1 based SSD (Up to 2 TB)
SATA 3.2 HDDs, 2x (supports up to 15 kRPM drives) (Up to 10 TB each)
Thunderbolt 3.0 (4 or more, USB-C connector)
USB 3.1 (3x Type A connector (up to 5 Gbps), 2x Type C connector (up to 10 Gbps))
Ehthernet (2x 10 Gbit)
Apple really *could* build this and ship it by September/October, but I have little confidence they will. It would take a bit of innovative thinking (especially on the number of PCIe lanes), but they *could* do it. Sure a maxed out variant would cost $10,000 or more, but the maxed out version of the current machine costs that much for a fraction of the capability. They could have a half dozen build to order variations that are lesser capabilities.
Now you’re talking my language! If Apple delivered it in a tower configuration with easy user configurability and at least some decent internal expansion, the pent up demand would overwhelm them.
Who could have seen this coming?
A: Pretty much everybody except Tim Cook.
The future for Apple is not in PCs. It is in phones and watches. Think about it, how many people have a smartphone, compared to both a smartphone and a Apple computer? Heck, even 3 year olds have iPhones…Cook isn’t as stupid as some think, and remember, all the talk about the experience is just talk. The bottom line is $$$ for the company and its shareholders. This isn’t some charity, it is called Business.
Hard to argue with that, but I would add that the computer as part of the whole ecosystem is still an important piece.
Apple has to develop code for integrated systems, so the Mac is not going away.
We are also not living in the future, we are living now, and some of us still need functional PCs and laptops. I have not been able to do my work on a tablet. I also travel a lot internationally, so I cannot rely on cloud storage and need a sizable SSD.
But come on. Apple can really afford to take care of all of its products if it wanted to. And it’s not as if the iPhone and the AppleWatch are helping the share price rise any significant amount. The critics even say that part of Apple’s business is failing. I think Apple can afford to do much better with all the money it has squirreled away.
I for one have never placed much faith in the critics. They are a messy consensus of convenional thinkers, not some oracle that can unfailingly point you to an alpha stock or a blockbuster movie. Think for your goddamn self and stop bitching about short-term consequences of offhand utterances by half-witted shills and whores.
None sense. If what you are saying is true, all car makers should stop refreshing their car models that are running on petrol/gas/diesel and solely focus on producing electric cars.
Eventually, this will probably happen. Look ahead 30 years or so.
What a f***ing surprise. You go to buyers guide and 6 out of 7 mac products are in the ‘don’t buy’ category. Find me another Tech company that has this kind of line up. Apple you are a shamble.
I am glad your mac sales are falling, and it would be a lot worse for Q3, and you bloody deserve it.
Get your act together, and do your users some justice!