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Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

9to5mac.com

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Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#211

Post by endemic »

wodenokoto wrote: post #25
jclardy wrote: post #10

Makes sense with Apple's current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13" Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13" Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen. The 12" MacBook is there...but it is a super…

When I bought my current MacBook Pro (2009), it was the cheapest available amongst the updated pro's and it cost me $1.000 Apple simply don't offer that price point anymore. What used to be their low-price line of laptops - the MacBook, now starts at $1.300

Yeah, the value prop for the older (expandable) models was higher, as you could buy a reasonably-priced configuration then upgrade the RAM/HDD later. Now I'd need to spend $2k to price out a MBP with the same RAM/HDD as my 6 year old Mac.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#212

Post by endemic »

iSnow wrote: post #112
edblarney wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a new Macbook, and I can say that it's a great product. Probably the best on the market. The problem I had was cost - they are over-priced. Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive. My Mac has 200-ish G hard-drive which is f-ing retardedly small. They should all have 1T…

I would really love to love Apple. But at this point, my eco conscience kicks in. Buying a laptop that cannot be upgraded in any way, be it RAM, SSD, or WIFI card... that's just too much. I have no idea how big the ecological footprint of a laptop is, but it has to be huge. Once my 2012 Macbook Air kicks the dust, I'll look at Lenovo laptops.

I'm seriously considering an x260... most of the components are replaceable/upgradable. Of course it's not as svelte as a MacBook, but you don't have to throw it away when you start hitting swap all the time...

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#213

Post by mrmondo »

This seems odd to me as now more than ever I see more and more people with MacBooks / iMacs and AppleTVs which have become 'the standard' where as in the past you'd see people with windows laptops or whatever and that'd be the norm it's now appearing to be quite rare (at least from what I've seen in Australia), I don't really know anyone that still uses a windows machine bar one friend who has a gaming rig but he only has it for the GPU and uses a MacBook for everything else other than that it's just a few of the older aged managers / project managers at work and everyone else really uses macOS or Linux of some form.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#214

Post by noway421 »

freehunter wrote: post #77
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #5

Back when I worked at Apple the dirty secret was that the cheapest models, despite all the marketing of the MacBook Pro, made up the majority of sales. Back then it was the white plastic MacBook but now it's the 11" MacBook Air that occupies that slot. That model and its crappy TN screen is vastly inferior and more expensive than similarly-sized ultrabooks. The only redeeming feature it has is MacOS. Instead of repla…

Quite a few years ago I saw someone at college using a white plastic laptop and man I thought that looked sharp. I glanced at the top of it and saw it was a Mac. At the time I didn't own a Mac and I didn't follow their product lines, but that was a hell of a good looking laptop, I thought. That was actually the first time I'd ever seen a Macbook, I don't come from a very well-off or tech-forward area. Everyone at the…

The latest chassis with touch pad is their latest iteration and will be used for at least couple of future models. They are quite locked to the existing look currently.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#215

Post by icebraining »

swozey wrote: post #209
icebraining wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run Gitlab (Rails + Unicorn + Sidekiq + Nginx + Postgres + Redis) on a 3GB single-core VPS and it runs fine, without needing the swap. Is the stack really the problem?

How many users on your Gitlab? I've had to add 2GB of ram every 3-6 months to my Gitlab server. We're at about 17 users and 300 projects right now. I think it's on a 4vcpu box right now.

8 users, 850 projects, 6GB+ of Git data.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#216

Post by im_down_w_otp »

I just want a MacBook Air 11" that's been upgraded to have 16GB of RAM and a slightly larger 12.5" screen put in it.

I've been waiting for that for years. Through 3 other MacBook Air purchases; always hoping the next time around they'll make what I want.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#217

Post by srazzaque »

The only links provided in the article are to other 9to5mac articles. There are no links provided to the actual Gartner/IDC analysis that they've derived the content from - perhaps due to content restrictions. I managed to find some related links [1] and [2] through some searching. But [1] was unlikely to be a source due to the release date (and the fact that it doesn't include Apple data for some reason), and [2] is a little old.

But my thinking is that if the sources of data are based purely on "units shipped" as per [2], then this relates to both consumer and commercial use. We know that HP, Lenovo and Dell basically dominate commercial sales - thus a drop in consumer PC sales alone could be highly correlated with a drop in Apple sales.

A drop in consumer sales could be due to negative shift in design and direction as many have suggested. But it could also be due to many macro-economic factors that simply do not affect the people here, and are thus hard for us to appreciate - Brexit, no. of mobile devices owned, . As developers or designers, we're not exactly price-sensitive when it comes to buying PCs - so it's likely to be about value proposition and getting exactly what we need. But this cannot be said for everyone.

Speaking for myself, I had the opportunity to buy a Macbook Pro last year, but I chose not to due to value proposition, even though I'm willing to spend the cash. I considered the Lenovo X260, Macbook Pro 13", and Dell XPS13. I will admit a bias towards Thinkpads, and I'm indifferent towards Mac OS X (my only OS preference is "not Windows"). I went with the X260 not because of said biases, but purely because at the same price for the Macbook plus one or two upgrades, I got a maxed out X260 with an incredible battery life, plus left-over $ to buy an SSD for Linux (I've never booted the stock hard drive). Screen resolution was the only compromise. My wife then inherited my 5-year-old X220 and its docking station - still running strong.

BTW - it always gives me a smug smile inside when Apple or Dell markets a 12 hour battery life as though it's miraculous. I had that on my X220 which is now nearing 5 years old (oh - and I could buy a new battery for it as recently as November 2016). Close to 20 hours with the battery slice.

[1] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prEMEA42255917 [2] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3474218

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#218

Post by redwall_hp »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #202
astrodust wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're having trouble finding their way in the post-PC world. Jobs knew this day was coming, that the PC would take a back seat to other devices, and brought up the analogy of Apple as BMW: The German company started out building motorcycles and while car sales soon vastly eclipsed that, they continued making really good bikes. It was a point of pride for them. If Apple goes back to that approach, of making…

It's not a post-PC world. It's a post-everyone-needs-a-PC world but definitely not a post-PC world.

Something something Steve Jobs "truck" analogy.

We're in a world where the masses don't need/want a PC (which is unfortunate, since that will arguably mean children will have less access to fully-functional computers in formative years when they may develop an interest in programming, but I digress). Apple, a company that claimed to grasp that concept just a few years ago, is completely failing on it right now. So, they make their money on phones and tablets, the devices for the "I don't need a real computer" people. Logically, that means the laptops should be targeted at the people who actually do need/want powerful and flexible computing devices...or they should drop them entirely if they don't wish to service that demographic any longer.

Instead, we have this bizarre situation where Apple is delivering underpowered and overpriced machines. They're expensive and overkill for people who want luxury Facebook/word processing machines, and they're expensive and underpowered for people who want to do real computing. It's very inconsistent and out of touch.

One thing that not enough people are bringing up: who in their right mind sells a "Pro" machine with 256GB of storage? In essence, every machine ships with half the storage they did five years ago. Yes, they're using NAND now, but the cost-per-gigabyte for raw NAND isn't that expensive. For a $2000 laptop, it should bloody well come with at least 512GB of internal storage, with a reasonably priced 1TB upgrade. I can forgive the 16GB limit on the RAM, but storage? On a machine that was marketed for video/photo/software professionals? You lose all of your mobility when you have to tote around an external drive to carry your footage/photos/VMs/builds/whatever.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#220

Post by slededit »

mciancia wrote: post #206
bootload wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"RCA out hasn't ever been in a MacBook to my knowledge." You're right, got confused with 3.5mm jack. Removed the 3.5mm jack. What about the current USB confusion? ...and yes mid 2012. Since when is a thiner laptop ever really been a TOP priority for programmers? I would have though it would be power: processor, battery life, HD, then weight, etc. For manufacturers shaving off millimetres/grams off each machine transl…

But 3.5mm jack is still present on all Apple computers

People don't hear that "IPhone 7 TM" removed the headphone jack. Just "Apple doesn't have headphone jacks anymore".
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