With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to
- Reference: 1720721046
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/07/11/mac_upgrade_not_happening/
- Source link:
Number crunchers at Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) [1]said in a report that, as of March 2024, 68 percent of Mac owners had a device older than two years. Four years ago that number was just 59 percent.
"The trend toward holding devices for a longer time is slow and steady," CIRP's Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz wrote in the report.
[2]
The pair attributed the slowdown in Mac purchases to many of the same reasons the smartphone market has seen [3]a dip in new device purchases of late: Upgrades have become incremental and unexciting, hardware is lasting longer and compute power upgrades don't matter to most people.
[4]
[5]
"As computer users rely more on streaming and web-based apps and programs, the traditional motivation for computer upgrades has waned," Levin and Lowitz said. "For most personal computer owners, their current computer has adequate storage and fast enough processing speed."
And let's not forget that [6]ever-larger price tags haven't helped in the handset market, and probably aren't helping the PC and Mac sector, either.
[7]
AI Macbooks to the rescue?
The PC market has been on a decline for several years now – pretty much since the COVID-19 pandemic caused a one-time spike in sales due to so many people shifting to work from home.
That's not to say the market isn't recovering, with PC sales recently recording [8]three consecutive quarters of growth after that years-long slump. The reason for the recovery, aside from the fact that all the computers bought during the pandemic are more than four years old at this point, is being laid at the feet of the AI and its entrance into the PC market – at least [9]according to PC makers .
[10]
So, with the AI PC era beginning, will Apple users similarly upgrade their devices? CIRP isn't so sure that'll be the case.
When asked whether Mac owners who make heavy use of their machine's hardware - such as video editors or some developers - may buck the lengthening upgrade cycle trend, Levin told The Register that CIRP doesn't have granular enough data to determine if such users are upgrading earlier.
"Those intense users would be a small percentage of the Apple user base, so analyzing their upgrade pattern would be tricky," Levin told us in an emailed statement.
[11]Flexing financial muscles, Arm aims to elbow into Windows PC market
[12]PC 'price hike' coming as cost of memory soars – analysts
[13]IDC: AI is a solution for a PC industry with a sales problem
[14]Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI
As for whether Apple's own " [15]Apple Intelligence " AI integrations set to appear in the next few generations will similarly shrink the upgrade cycle for Apple in the ways PC manufacturers have predicted, that's not clear either.
"Although it's way too early for us to have consumer survey data, we can't see how it would shorten upgrade cycles any more or less than other software developments did," Levin predicted, reiterating "Mac users that need more powerful processors to handle AI would upgrade sooner, but these represent a relatively small percentage of overall Mac users."
Even those users might not buoy Mac sales, says Canalys analyst Kieren Jessop, because the newest Macs are already equipped with chips that'll support AI workloads.
"Canalys defines an AI PC as a laptop, desktop, or workstation that has what is generically called an NPU [Neural Processing Unit]," Jessop told us in an emailed statement. "This includes every Apple Silicon Mac as it has the Apple Neural Engine."
Apple [16]stopped selling Macs that don't have Apple Silicon in them in 2023, when it ended production of Intel-powered Mac Pros. So in other words, even those interested in making use of Apple's upcoming AI integrations probably won't need to upgrade, and Apple knows this, Jessop said.
"Apple is already adapting to longer upgrade cycles. The growth of their Services business in the last several years shows this as they capitalize on a large installed base, and is now over one-fifth of the company's total revenue," Jessop noted.
Mac sales as a percentage of Apple's revenue, on the other hand, have steadily declined since 2000, when the machines accounted for 86.2 percent of Apple's revenue.
Last year Macs accounted for just [17]7.7 percent of Apple's revenue, according to Statista. Whether Apple will continue devoting resources to improving that portion of its business, especially if AI-capable Macs are already in large circulation, is anyone's guess. We asked Apple, but haven't heard back. ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://cirpapple.substack.com/p/aging-apple-apparatus-macs
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZpBV-YTlyQ@Dkl@jj4WxIwAAAIQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/second_hand_device_market/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZpBV-YTlyQ@Dkl@jj4WxIwAAAIQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZpBV-YTlyQ@Dkl@jj4WxIwAAAIQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/10/idc_secondhand_phones_sales_bright_spot_in_crappy_phone_market/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZpBV-YTlyQ@Dkl@jj4WxIwAAAIQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/10/pc_market_grows_for_third/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/13/dell_exec_reckons_aipowered_laptops/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZpBV-YTlyQ@Dkl@jj4WxIwAAAIQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/arm_q4_2024/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/11/pc_price_hike_coming_as/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/10/idc_pc_shipments_sink_q3_2023_ai_to_rescue/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/28/windows_to_drive_pc_refresh/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/apple_ai_wwdc/
[16] https://support.apple.com/en-us/116943
[17] https://www.statista.com/chart/8817/mac-sales-as-a-percentage-of-apples-revenue/
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The no upgrade gamble
The return policy is very good. If you aim low and it doesn’t meet your needs, take it back.
Personally I’ve not regretted any upgrades… 6 years down the line the original upgrade often makes the difference between usable and unusable.
Re: The no upgrade gamble
Wouldn't it be nice if you could have done the upgrade after 6 years, rather than 6 years in advance?
Re: The no upgrade gamble
Do you have a laptop with an upgradable CPU and GPU?
I thought you couldn't keep a Mac for more than 4 years before an OS update throttled it and then it self-destructed?
You're thinking of Windows.
I just checked my iMac (on which I a typing this), it is "late 2015". And it still works, and has had updates recently.
The throttling thing is for iPhones, not, as far as I know, Macs, and even on iPhones it tends not to be a significant decrease in CPU speed. They generally get about seven years of software support, which while worse than Windows or Linux, is significantly higher than your number. For now, OpenCore Patcher does a pretty good job of letting users ignore the cut in support, but that may not work as well for ARM devices and almost certainly will not be able to do a thing when the latest Intel models run out of OS support. I have a Mac that Apple decided to cut off at Mac OS 11. It's running Mac OS 14 fine, though the battery has seen better days.
It is fair to say, however, that people who don't use OCLP to do what I've done see a significant degradation when their OS support lapses. It's not just not getting feature updates. It's not even the worsening record of security updates quantity or speed. Many applications drop support for Mac OS releases quickly, especially including anything that Apple wrote.
OCLP
If you rely solely on Apple, that's sort of true.
The people who maintain the OpenCore Legacy Patcher are great.
My mid-2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro is still running a current macOS release (Monterey), thanks to them. On an SSD, it's still usable. Forget using an old Mac with an HDD unless it's in a server role, where snappy interactive performance may not be needed/desired.
I have another one running Windows 10, via Bootcamp drivers, which is, sadly, better-performing than any macOS release. It's even still usable as a light gaming rig.
Once Windows 10 support goes away, I'll either let the old MBPs go or switch them to some Linux distro. Hopefully one of them gets the trackpad support right. So far I haven't found such a beast.
I actually have a 2006 MacBook stashed away somewhere that still works (battery is totally shot, so it needs to be permanently plugged in).
I buy a new one every six years on average. M1 pro w/ 8 performance cores at the moment, will be replaced with a refurbished M7 Max when the time comes.
No, a MacBook will last about 10 years with a couple of battery replacements.
Still using last gen Intel MacBook Pro
No upgrade path for my usage. VirtualBox running several (Intel) OSes. Apple Silicon has left me seeing the end of the Apple trail…
This isn't that surprising
There was a huge surge in purchases when Apple released the ARM Macs in late 2020 and through 2021, those first generation M1 Macs while over the two year mark are not that old.
The no upgrade gamble
The risks on the Apple gamble keep getting higher with the SoC architecture. You're at the "Buy" page and presented with different options for RAM and storage. Each increasing option adds $1000. If you select the correct option, you will have a highly performant computer for your work. If you select too high, it can be thousands of dollars wasted. If you select too low, all of the money is wasted.
Place your $4000 - $10000 bet or keep using your old computer?