Do you think declining Mac sales will motivate Apple to address the MBP complaints?
https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/01/apple-mac-sales-services-revenue/
I’d like to see costs associated with MBP returns, keyboard repairs, etc.
I’d think they’ll want to see what effect the 2018 MacBook Pro (which came out right at the end of the quarter) has on sales.
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Declining sales but with increasing base means people are holding on to them longer. Basically people see no reason to upgrade, but just hold on to their old Macs. I know we have seven in use in our house but only one is more recent than 2014.
I think the reason for the sales decline is simply related to the age of the current hardware. Although the MBP just refreshed, the remaining hardware is between a year old (iMac) and several years old (Mac Mini). IMO, update the hardware and the sales will increase.
Not a direct answer, but perhaps some leading questions relating to my thought process on this.
Who make up the majority of Mac users? People who must have the latest and greatest or people who use the device until it is no longer fit for purpose?
Who gets Macs having never had one before? Why do they get a Mac over a PC running Windows or Linux, or a tablet (Apple or Android)? How do they actually compare feature and usability-wise against MacOS these days for this particular group? How much would cost be a driver when directly comparing things like technical specifications?
Based on thinking about the above, the global economic climate, the mobility of modern society, geographic penetration of Apple products and the jump in cost from other Apple products up to a Mac… are the size of these two groups of primary Mac purchasers expected to be rising, at a plateau or falling? Is there potentially a correlation there?
Is there hopes that the 2018 MBP will have improvements on the issues of crashes and keyboard problems? I am looking to buy an MBP but am contemplating buying a used previous model over the new MBP because of all the bad issues.
Short answer: not any more than usual.
The PC market is shrinking, and the Mac market has weathered the contraction better than its competitors. With nearly as many iPads sold as Macs, and Apple clearly focusing more on iOS-based hardware and services, with the resources it has it’s moving at about the speed it wants to. There’s no evidence, after all, that MBP complaints (which the typical consumer knows nothing about) are a significant reason for declining overall Mac sales.
I also don’t think so. Macs have a high entry price. If you just want to “do mail, surf the web, write the occasional letter and do some stuff”, why would people buy an expensive Mac if you can get a laptop for $500?
This makes the most sense especially when we consider that Apple is probably making more money from app sales and accessories then they used to from Mac sales.
If you click through to the reports they both got Apple’s numbers wrong for the quarter (one said sales were up, the other said they were flat), so how accurate are those numbers overall?
Also note that Gartner did declare that sales were down in 2017 by 2.8%, and for the last several years, when we definitively did see a significant contraction worldwide, Apple did substantially better than most (all?) PC vendors, in terms of sales and profit.