Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

bloomberg.com

271–280 of 367 posts

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird having an insightful factual beginning of a sentence just to conclude with weak and hugely incomplete speculation ignoring the bulk of the picture (Apple's all other products, what actually needed actually entails, ...).

Apple have been wildly successful in selling Rolls-Royces to the masses. In pretty much all categories they've entered, Apple are considered to be the premium brand. However the masses generally don't need the level of engineering that Apple products typically feature - people have been compelled into forking out for it in order to status match with their peers (e.g. the green/blue text thing). Now times are tight, t…

> Apple have been wildly successful in selling Rolls-Royces to the masses

This analogy doesn’t make any sense: a Rolls Royce comes with a significant price premium, whereas Apple products tend to cost about the same as equivalent quality PC/Android devices, often cheaper in the M1 era, and most of the cost factors directly benefit the core function of the device whereas what makes a Rolls cost an order of magnitude more tends to be a lot of bespoke luxury details which don’t help you get somewhere faster, safer, or proportionately more comfortably. If you want a car comparison, I’d go with Audi/BMW – premium but still a mass market manufactured good which marks you as at most upper middle class.

Also, you’re not doing your argument any favors by repeating Google’s marketing push about blue/green text message colors. Green was the original color on the iPhone 1 and hasn’t changed. What did change was Google trying to make a play to get governments to bail them out of their decision to throw the messaging business to competitors like Facebook. They have plenty of pricey PR people getting paid to dissemble about that, there’s no need to contribute your time pro bono.

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of Apple's customers don't know what an M1 is or what the difference is to an Intel CPU. I don't think that actually matters at all to most Apple customers. What I do think matters to most is the advertising that went into it that turned "Apple Chips" and "Apple Silicon" into phrases people actually using outside of tech circles. They wanted one because it was new and different, regardless of what those differe…

Why have this level of disdain for the mental capabilities of a huge subset of the population? Why even say this out loud if you must think it? 99% of Apple's customers can certainly recognize "it's a fuckton faster than my previous laptop" when they see it. Apple Silicon is across the board perceivably faster than any previous Macs.

It's not as easy to see, when you take their crusty old OS that hasn't been wiped in 10 years, and compare it to a fresh installed new PC.

People are often blown away at how fast their old machines are when they are just wiped and reloaded.

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies usually buy base models. Apple is also struggling with supply chain, as M1 is still prominent. Another feature of this issue is that because of their parsimonious storage configuration and linkage of M2 chip and storage, upgrades are nuts - it costs as much as an iPhone to get a storage upgrade that is like $100 with commodity SSD storage.

> upgrades are nuts - it costs as much as an iPhone to get a storage upgrade that is like $100 with commodity SSD storage. I generally agree that Apple's SSD and RAM upgrades are too expensive. I'd like them to be cheaper. However, I'd like to point out that Apple's SSDs have built-in protection against data-loss from power loss which is usually an enterprise SSD feature. Also, Apple uses LPDDR5 on their Macs which a…

> Apple's SSDs have built-in protection against data-loss from power loss which is usually an enterprise SSD feature.

It's a bit arguable. On Macos the well-known operation 'fsync' which exists for the sole purpose of committing files to durable storage doesn't protect files against data loss if there's power loss. You can ask for data to be committed more durably through a Macos-specific API, in which case those Apple SSDs are a lot slower than other good SSDs at doing this.

As most software uses 'fsync' to durably commit files, that stored data is not protected against power loss for some time. VMs either use the equivalent operation to implement filesystem barriers, or the very slow but more durable Macos-specific operation. Either way, these are not great SSDs for protection against data loss on power failure.

As measured by Asahi Linux folks:

"Apple's custom NVMes are amazingly fast – if you don't care about data integrity" (https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1494213855387734019 / https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-flash-storage-in-ma... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30370551)

"Well, this is unfortunate. It turns out Apple's custom NVMe drives are amazingly fast - if you don't care about data integrity. If you do, they drop down to HDD performance. Thread."

"For a while, we've noticed that random write performance with fsync (data integrity) on Asahi Linux (and also on Linux on T2 Macs) was terrible. As in 46 IOPS terrible. That's slower than many modern HDDs. We thought we were missing something, since this didn't happen on macOS." [Except it does happen on Macos when the equivalant API is used.]

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#276

Still slightly higher than Q1 2020 or Q1 2019, so really just regression to the mean after the unusual spike in demand created by the pandemic. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263428/apples-revenue-fr...

Don't you have to "inflation adjust" any value that is denominated in dollars (like this revenue metric) over time?

$1.00 in January 2019 is $1.20 in 2023 https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#277

As 'free money' is sucked out of the system (by reversing ultra low interest rates and QE), people are going to focus their spending on what they actually need - which often is not an Apple product.

I think it has a lot more to do with everyone who was considering an upgrade jumping on the m1. Apple's macbook pipeline is now dry since most of their customers now have a new computer.

I think that’s especially true this far into the pandemic telework shift: that both forced new purchases for a ton of people who had desktops in the office and also pushed more work into cloud services for ease of sharing. Neither of those are absolutes of course but think they line up well with your observation, further reducing the number of people who think that they need a new computer to be more productive.

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#278
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

second this - purchased and use non-cloud Adobe software, BBEdit, the nice terminal apps and a few minor things, on hardware that is at least six years old. I look for good condition older Macs and have a few of those that I keep safely. Really big aversion to the "phone like" OS, secret changes to the filesystem, app-store apps, increasingly intrusive phoning home and other "modern improvements"

Whilst I agree with your sentiment wait until you try a gently used M1 Macbook Air one day. After a tawdry love affair you'll want to toss the hot noisy intel machines in the garbage .. at least I did, anyway

no, I try to use desktop machines mostly

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#279
post #139

Here's data. # of Apple shipment. 2019 Q1 - 3.9m 2020 Q1 - 3.1m 2021 Q1 - 6.7m (111.5% increase YoY) 2022 Q1 - 7.0m 2023 Q1 - 4.1m Apple experienced explosive growth in 2021Q1 over 2020 Q1 compared to other PC makers. Lenovo (+59.1%) HP (+64.1%) Dell (+23.4%) Apple (+111.5%) Acer (+73.5%) Where as Lenovo and HP declined ~15% in 2022 Q1, Apple managed to gain 4.5%. So compared others, Apple had more to fall. Looking a…

To be honest, I think it's pretty obvious this has less to do with M1/M2 tech specs and more to do with the vast majority of Americans getting a couple checks from the government which basically cover the exact price of a new Macbook.

Re: Apple’s plunge in PC shipments is steepest among major computer makers

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be because it’s the “soldering in” that boosts its performance. So if you can plan ahead you come out ahead.

That's true for the memory (RAM), but not the storage (SSD). Socketed SSDs are just as fast and almost as light as soldered, and there is no good technical reason why they shouldn't be upgradable for a long time. I'm in the market for a new Mac. I'm currently using a late 2013 15-inch Retina as my trusty friend. If the M2 Max came with socketed SSD I'd buy it today with the 96GB RAM and max spec in every other regard…

Does modularity increase size/weight? Increase in warranty fraud? More complexity so higher probability of breakage?
Post reply on HN