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Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#61

Post by mschuster91 »

avidphantasm wrote: post #23
KptMarchewa wrote: post #14

M1 generation was so good that it prompted way more users to jump to it; that demand would spread over multiple generations if it was not so good. On the other hand purposefully gimping M1 would gimp ARM adoption. By delivering great performance, they've build up a lot of goodwill - people willingly port their stuff to macs.

Yes, I did this. I had a 2019 16” i9 that I replaced with a 14” M1 Pro as soon as I could because the Intel/T2 TouchBar machine was so crash prone, glitchy, and hot. The i9 was the worst Mac I’ve ever had. The M1 Pro is probably the best.

> because the Intel/T2 TouchBar machine was so crash prone, glitchy, and hot. The i9 was the worst Mac I’ve ever had.

I'm running the same machine, but for me it's the best Mac I ever had. Decent keyboard very similar to my prior 2015 MBP, larger screen while at the same time keeping the exterior footprint of the 2015, it can run virtually everything you throw at it (sans 32-bit legacy games, but not because of the hardware), and if you remember to restart MS Teams after a videocall (because Teams "hogs" the external GPU and doesn't release it after a video/screenshare call ends) the battery lasts hours, even after three years of extremely intensive abuse.

The only (but massive) issue I have with all post-2013 MacBooks is that their storage cannot be easily recovered in another machine in a disaster event, and with the 2019ff it is completely impossible "thanks" to Apple soldering the flash chips and locking the encryption keys in the T2 processor - without TimeMachine and an expensive NAS you're completely and utterly fucked.

Switching to an M-series Mac would provide me with even longer battery life and probably a notch better performance with IntelliJ, but that's it - I'd have to give up on running x86 Docker images which is a real problem as a lot of third party images don't provide ARM images.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#62

Post by Sakos »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #44
lenkite wrote: post #28

They simply need to reduce prices if they wish to see more sales. The economic slump means people have tightened their wallets.

A lot of finger-pointing at price in this thread (or how the M1 captured new MacBook sales) but I would be more worried about the segment in general. I think we've all seen a trend among users away from general-purpose PC's and toward phones and/or tablets. My bigger fear is that the rest of us, like some kind of ham radio enthusiasts, are going to become a dwindling market segment that fewer and fewer computer compa…

PC and laptop sales exploded during the pandemic. It's clear that these devices absolutely have their place and aren't going anywhere. I know it's popular to be contrarian, but sometimes the obvious answer actually is the answer. When you're facing double digit inflation in much of Europe and the Euro is falling against the USD, a 1650 Euro price tag for an entry level device simply isn't realistic.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#63

Post by afavour »

mattrighetti wrote: post #41
pigsty wrote: post #30

The dollar is insanely strong right now and global Mac prices raised in accordance with that. In places that don’t use USD, prices shot up by tens of percent overnight while the US prices are the same as ever. Japan, for example, got a price increase of about 40% on all items. Unsurprisingly, sales declined.

Probably also because a lot of people didn’t see the point in upgrading to this new M2. I noticed that a lot of users also seem to go for a used M1 because it got cheaper and it’s still insanely good.

Not even used: when I was shopping for a laptop for my wife Apple was still happily selling M1 MacBook Airs and I was happy to buy one. The premium for the M2 just didn’t feel worth it.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#64

Post by mkl95 »

shantara wrote: post #10

No surprises here. The new Mac release cycle is not transparent to the consumers, and the differences between M1 and M2 are marginal for most use cases.

Agree. You are set for a decade with a M1. Not much of a point in upgrading for 99%+ of users.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#65

Post by mgraupner »

izacus wrote: post #36

I was just buying a laptop for my family and the prices of MacBooks here in Europe are utterly crazy. The crappiest 8GB RAM (?!) 256SSD M2 Air model is 1650EUR. 1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years. The 16GB model is rounded 2000EUR, which was before reserved for a high-end gaming laptops. It's bonkers.

Which country are we talking about? German M2 Air base model is 1499€ on apple.com and you can get it for ~1250€ at various retailers.

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#66

Post by hellweaver666 »

mberning wrote: post #4

I feel like they went through a similar cycle at some point with the iPhone. They got to a point where they were so good and so expensive it was not necessary at all to upgrade every year. Now it is generally accepted that phones are upgraded on a 2-3 year cycle. The m series macs will be no different. Something that would help would be to roll out new series chips across the entire product line at the same time. Rig…

Still rocking my iPhone 11 Pro. Unless it has a catastrophic failure I'll probably struggle through until the iPhone 16 comes out. For the most part it works fine (although the battery is getting a little ropey!)

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#67

Post by cj »

the-dude wrote: post #21
sfpotter wrote: post #8

Too bad we can’t try to focus on building people computers that last decades.

I had a computer that was built to last for decades : an original IBM PC XT 8088. It had a chunk of metal ( paperweight? ) in the keyboard to make it heavier . It was extensible. The enclosure was made out of steel and it had a power switch which originated from a mainframe. It was built to withstand nuclear war and it only lasted for a couple of years.

32 pounds, and dual-floppy support! Fun wikipedia article to read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#68

Post by switch007 »

capableweb wrote: post #33
pigsty wrote: post #30

The dollar is insanely strong right now and global Mac prices raised in accordance with that. In places that don’t use USD, prices shot up by tens of percent overnight while the US prices are the same as ever. Japan, for example, got a price increase of about 40% on all items. Unsurprisingly, sales declined.

Also, inflation is increasing quickly almost everywhere, buying the latest and greatest MacBook has always been a luxury purchase for most of the people, so obviously less people do it when the economy doesn't do very well.

Apple doing their part in increasing inflation too. It’s impossible to reduce their profit margin, obviously. /s

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#69

Post by Dalewyn »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #55
izacus wrote: post #36

I was just buying a laptop for my family and the prices of MacBooks here in Europe are utterly crazy. The crappiest 8GB RAM (?!) 256SSD M2 Air model is 1650EUR. 1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years. The 16GB model is rounded 2000EUR, which was before reserved for a high-end gaming laptops. It's bonkers.

>1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years. That did not have enough ram 3 years ago... the fact they are still trying to sell 8GB as an useful amount outside of extremely budget laptops is insane.

Speaking as someone who has and uses an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM, I agree it's not a lot but it's more than sufficient for any use case a Macbook Air would generally see.

This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.

I will say the Macbook Pro really should start from 16GB RAM and at least 1TB SSD; it's for professionals, isn't it?

Re: Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales

#70

Post by enlyth »

GoToRO wrote: post #13
GeekyBear wrote: post #5

Given the state of the PC market it would be shocking if Mac sales were not also affected. >The PC market has experienced its largest decline ever, according to analyst Gartner. Preliminary results by Gartner shows that worldwide PC shipments totalled 65.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022, a 28.5% decrease from the fourth quarter of 2021. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252529126/PC-industry-se...

People forgot that everybody bought computers in order to attend online classes and wfh?

Apart from this, if you're an enthusiast who likes to build their own PC, component prices have gone insane. A flagship GPU is 2000 dollars, and motherboards are priced so high that Gamer's Nexus decided to do a 25 minute video rant about it.

The returns are diminishing, it's not worth to get a 4090 RTX with DDR5 and a compatible mobo, if for 1/3 of the price you can get 90% of the performance with a used 3090 and DDR4.

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