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Narrative killer: Mac unit sales up 10% YoY, revenue up 25% YoY

I'll never understand this. The pattern is the same every year. They announce a product, "journalists" say it's a failure, they sell more units and make more money than ever before, and the cycle repeats. Apple will definitely drop the ball someday but I think people are a little too quick to make that call. I realize most of that is in the never-ending quest for clickbait but still...

Well, I do think that Touchbar is an absolutely awful gimmicky product. The design is baffling : you lose tactile feedback on the function keys and even the nice additions have had zero thoughts put into them (for example the lock key sounds like a good idea but in practice is extremely annoying since I hit up accidentaly 2/3 of the time .. it would have been easy to make it a slide to activate button).

The thing is : unlike what the pro monicker suggests, I am not at all the target of this product. So while it is objectively worse in all the criterias that matter to me, it does not matter to apple sales.

What's the lock key? That seems like something you need to either explicitly turn on or press.

I’m not sure what gp was talking about. The TouchID sensor also doubles as a physical power button(or a sleep if pressed briefly). It is a physical button too, not like the iPhone ⅞ buttons.

Yeah... I'm aware of that which is what made OP confusing. They're either talking about the Power/TouchID button (which is still physical as it has been on every other MacBook prior) or they purposely added a "Lock" button to the TouchBar and are complaining about something they added that isn't there by default.

>complaining about something they added that isn't there by default

it is part of the OS, not a third party app. So I think that complaining that it is badly designed is fair.

I can complain about the default configuration too if you want. It takes away the function keys I actually need and replaces them with a screen. The lack of tactile feedback is really annoying. Even after configuring the touchbar to display the function keys by default in my IDE, it still bugs me and make me 'mistype' more than ever on this strip.

It's not badly designed, though. It's a button on the TouchBar just like any other. If OP is accidentally hitting it all the time then they added it in a poor location. I have a completely customized TouchBar (thanks to Better Touch Tool) and I have never accidentally hit a button. He's blaming the hardware for user error.

'you are holding it wrong'

it is a 'lock your session' key : you have to enter your password or fingerprint in order to continue using the mac.

So then you purposely added that to the TouchBar or you're unintentionally hitting the power button that is in the exact same place as it was on all previous MacBooks and that's somehow an issue with the TouchBar?

I added it to the touchbar : my laptop is connected to a larger screen, so if I close the lid, it just switch to 'external display only mode'. With this button, I can close my seesion in one tap. however I hit it accidentally way too often. I myst hit it accidentally at least as much as purposefully.

Ctrl+Cmd+Q in High Sierra

oh nice !

I used to have very hacky scripts in order to enable this feature, and this awful touchbar button is even worse.

Good that it is finally implemented ! Weird that it took so long but it is finally here.

Thanks for the tip !

Oh absolutely (and not just journalists, but all the Apple-haters). Every year since at least 1984, "Apple hasn't come out with a new product in _weeks_! They're doooomed!"

Every single year. For at least 30 years. "Dooooooomed!"

If NeXT had not bought Apple, because that was what actually happened, Apple would be gone by now.

it is the other way round apple~next

Not at all.

Apple did buy out NeXT, but then Steve Jobs and his team took ownership over Apple key positions from inside.

A situation that happens quite often where the bought company, manages to own the buyer.

So on the paperwork and bank transactions, Apple bought NeXT, on management level, NeXT bought Apple.

I guess he means NeXT == Jobs

In their defense, it was very nearly doomed for 10-15 of those years :-P

But I agree, anyone who has said this since 2007 clearly isn't paying attention. Almost all the people with iPhones are going to keep buying a new iPhone every 2 years for a long long time.

They won't be doing that forever....

Perhaps not forever, but even a couple more iterations of this buys them a LOT of time and cash reserves

Kondo?

b-but someday, the doom-sayers will be right! SOMEDAY!

Tim Cook mentioned specifically that the Mac growth was driven by China. So keep that in mind.

Because?...

Because it could mean that sophisticated markets are not impressed by the stagnating offering and the only reason the Mac is seeing growth is that people are buying Macs for the first time in developing countries.

That being said, they just said on the call that all geographic areas grew by at least 20% in Mac sales so maybe I was reading too much into Tim Cook's earlier comment.

The Mac is stagnating ?

They dropped the ball on the MacPro but everything else saw evolutionary upgrades this year.

The MacBook Pro is the 2nd generation of this design which usually see more people upgrading to. And to be fair it's a dramatic upgrade over older models.

Most Mac products saw evolutionary downgrades since 2015.

On the bright side, dongle life has never been more exciting.

There needs to be a term for the feeling you get when watching MacBook owners trying to work out which of the identical looking plugs will work.

all i have is usbc. they do all look identical. how is that a problem?

Sometimes they pass power through, sometimes they don’t. Some are thunderbolt, some aren’t. Try getting a monitor to work with peripherals plugged into the monitor and have the laptop charge. It is a pretty incredible corner that Apple have painted themselves into. https://marco.org/2017/10/14/impossible-dream-of-usb-c

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486174

That's an opinion not a statement of fact.

The fact is that Mac sales are growing which contradicts your opinion.

And as the owner of a MacBook Pro 2015 and 2017 which I both use everyday I would disagree with your opinion.

"That's an opinion not a statement of fact."

That is not accurate. The MBP keyboard, for example, is objectively worse, both ergonomically and due to quality control issues.

https://9to5mac.com/2017/02/21/macbook-pro-keyboard-problems...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/10/17/johnston-macboo...

"The fact is that Mac sales are growing which contradicts your opinion."

This is a non sequitur. Popularity is not a definitive measure of quality.

Beyond that, Mac sales are down from 2015 in every single quarter.

Q1 5519 5312 5374 Q2 4563 4034 4199 Q3 4796 4252 4292 Q4 5709 4886 5386

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy17-q4/Q4FY17DataSummar...

You don’t understand what objective means.

For example- everyone I know with one LOVES the new keyboard. Myself included: for me it’s the best laptop keyboard I’ve used, period.

That alone tears your point apart but it’s also telling that you picked 2015 (one of the peak sales years for Macs in the last decade). You either deliberately intended to mislead or you just don’t actually understand how market fluctuations work.

Anecdotal, but my brand new late 2016 Macbook Pro developed a stuck key within a few weeks of starting to use it. I only used it on my desk at work and didn't take it to the beach or something crazy. This is not an imaginary problem.

PC sales have stagnated since before 2015. Apple continues to gain market share, despite not increasing unit sales.

Apple's Mac sales are around

• 7% in worldwide units (up from 2% at it's nadir two decades ago)

• 15-20% of worldwide PC revenues

• >50% of the entire PC industry profits.

Implying that China is not a "sophisticated market"?

It's certainly filled with people who have never used Macs. You have to take that into account when using global growth to try to predict future US growth.

Mac usage is a metric for sophistication? What a silly set of comments. People seem to grossly underestimate China. That hubris will only hurt you in the long run. Half or more of the stuff in those “sophisticated” computers is sourced in China.

I think you're reading the wrong meaning into this particular word. I would take the term 'sophisticated market' to refer to a market that is established and has largely passed the initial saturation phase. There will a number of different actors in the market competing on axes other than "who can offer the most product for the least money," with more complexity in trade as participants' marketing and sales strategies evolve, or as consumer behaviour starts to be affected by other forces.

In this sense, China is a less sophisticated market – that's not a problem or a negative, it's just a different stage of market development. It's reasonable to point out that sales behaviour will be different for that market as a result.

People don't tend to be equally sophisticated buyers across all product categories. Mac usage is definitely a metric for buyer sophistication, when we're talking about Mac sales!

I think the grandparent could have characterized China as an "emerging market" relative to say the US which is a "developed market".

Most of China doesn't have internet. I don't know what your definition of sophisticated is.

Wikipedia has Chinese internet usage at 50.3%, so to be accurate a majority of Chinese people now have internet access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

I think 'internet' includes any one of the services of the big three. That's hardly the internet usage we have in mind.

I don’t imagine internet usage stats show a rosy picture anywhere.

China has 3x as many internet users as the US. India also has more internet users. So yeah, percentage wise they may be lower, but that's still a billion folks between those two countries alone.

Yeah, and rural Indians have to use peer-to-peer networks to download their apps because service is so spotty and expensive. That's materially different from an "internet user" in Western Europe or Japan or the United States.

What narrative would that kill?

There’s been constant whining that Apple doesn’t care about the Mac and has abandoned the platform, the line is stagnating and they don’t sell any models anybody wants to buy because they’re all terrible and everybody will buy big ass Windows laptops with proper keyboards, 32GB RAM and an escape key for EMACS.

Except for actual customers that are buying Macs by the truckload, that is.

Yes that was Microsoft all the way into the 2000s. Power users are the canary in the coalmine. Once you lose them they are gone. With power users gone your computing problem devolves to creating common denominator apps / platforms. Lack of interesting work eventually catches up with the company since it becomes progressively harder to hire top talent since there is no compelling "mission" or "vision" anymore.

Having thought about this, I guess there are different concepts here

a. Apple as a business b. Apple as a force that shapes the future of computing

By any metric they are doing a great job of a, on the second I think they could do a lot more.

Interesting comment, I can see that is a reasonable concern. But where are power users going to go? Windows has been a mess for a full decade now. Microsoft’s management of the platform has been a joke. Maybe they’re turning a corner with it, but maybe not. It’s really hard to say. There are some real concerns with the Mac hardware, but whereas with the OS there’s one version and that’s it, for hardware they always have a range of options available and can experiment on certain lines while still offering an alternative. It’s a lot harder to pivot the OS the same way.

To be honest, there is no compelling alternative out there at the moment. The only possible contenders currently if they are to ever materialize are Google and Microsoft (Companies that have a proven track record of doing both software and hardware at Apples scale). Chances of someone coming up and beating Apple at their current game seem unlikely. What is likely however is that some one comes up with a better and more compelling definition of "computing" and Apple fails to react to that in a timely manner because they are too busy working on a thinner version of their current hardware lineup.

Losing Chris Lattner was a real shame on that score, but Apple does seem to be an organisation that can walk and chew gum at the same time. They have top flight hardware guys and top flight software guys and I don't see the software guys losing focus because of something the hardware guys are doing. On the contrary the two sids of the business seems to constantly challenge each other push the envelope that bit further.

There are risks. They don't seem to think AR or VR headsets are worth pursuing. I happen to think they are right and they are correctly avoiding an expensive and distracting technological cul de sac, but one of these days there is a chance they will call something like that wrong and miss something important.

Wait, what about an escape key for EMACS?

My heavy emacs use is the reason I didn't mind getting the touch bar. It's vim users I'd expect to be annoyed...

Pretty sure that's the joke

Yeah, I remapped ESC to the caps lock key a long time ago!

Its kind of sad that professionals will have to look elsewhere for a laptop. At least there is the new thinkpad retro! Oh wait...

Alternately you could remap esc to caps lock and get used to it in like 48 hours

What if I don't want to"get used to" my brand new $2500 laptop? Is it too much to ask for some convenience for the user?

All these takes https://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/10/27/new-macbook-pros-and-the-...

Ha, nothing kills the “Apple is doomed” narrative.

And iPhone X (exxx not ten) will blow it out of the park. Cook's da man.

Got a lot of Apple haters - I wasn't ripping on Android. Just pointing out the obvious. Why the down vote?

I assume you were downvoted because the comment is not really in line with what is expected on HN. It only tangentially relates to the parent, and does not add anything substantive to the conversation.

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