Mac sales fly as PC declines – did the M1 chip save Apple? | Hacker News Reader

Mac sales fly as PC declines – did the M1 chip save Apple?

techradar.com

16 pointsdoener33 comments

Save Apple from what? Being the most valuable company in the world?

Article’s conclusion:

> In short, there's no specific reason that Apple is doing so well in the global laptop market right now, but it's certainly not undeserving of that success.

Betteridge's law of headlines:

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

I believe save the Mac by apple, with the premise being that Mac sales being on decline for some years prior to M1.

Mac sales haven’t been declining by any noticeable amount in the last 20 years, but I suppose growth from 2014-2019 may have been close to flat.

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

The keyword is “laptop market”. There were quite a few years where it looked like they were going to completely kill their desktops (nothing released for years after the trash can), and doing everything they could to make laptop users unhappy (butterfly keyboard, touch bar). iPhones, iPads, and services (Music, etc.) were “clearly” going to usher in the post-PC future, and given how Apple usually drags people along, it seemed clear that that’s where they were going with things.

Then the M1 came out, and they backpedaled on the mistakes they were making on laptops (ports, keyboard, etc.), and laptop users were able to feel like they weren’t using a dying form factor anymore.

The report from Gartner, that this is based on, says that "Excluding Chromebooks, the worldwide PC market grew by a modest 3.3%". So PC sales did not decline, but Chromebooks have dropped off a cliff. Don't even wanna read their analysis when they bend their source like that.

Quite the insult for PCs to be named in the same bracket as Chromebooks to be honest. Not that they are necessarily bad, but this is comparing a toothbrush to a dental laboratory.

what even are chromebooks? i ve never seen one. i assume it s one of the obscure things 'only in america'

They're in Canada too. Mostly children use them. Sometimes hackers will install linux on them and use them as a super cheap (~$300) one-time-use laptop.

As a side note, you can't just easily replace ChromeOS with Linux like you'd do on most Windows laptops.

I want one, b/c UNIX and USB-C charging fits my personal needs very well. But the devices are either so cheap or badly equipped storage wise (Pixelbooks) that my 8 y/o Thinkpads outperform them. So I guess a MacBook will be my next buy in a few years to again have an ultra portable 10-year-proof device.

For me the best thing about Chromebooks are the tablet experience (either 2-in-one or detachable keyboards). Specifically, the fact that touch screen isn't implemented the same way a mouse is, but gestures work the way you expect (i.e., swiping on a browser window scrolls it instead of selecting text like a mouse would). Also, the browser is a desktop style browser instead of tablet / phone style. And once they included the ability to run Android and plain Linux apps, that made it much more useful. Still not a full PC / laptop replacement for all my use cases though, but a nice accessory.

Very cheap "laptops" running chrome os, mostly targeted towards schools. They can be centrally managed which is an attraction in addition to the price.

They may be using arm processors and tiny flash memory like a phone with a large display. Although there are higher end ones with specs similar to low/medium end windows notebooks.

I don't think they are exclusive to America, but hackernews isn't the target for low capability machines.

Lots of schools here in Sweden give them out to students. That being said, I don't think I've seen an adult spending their own money on one for themselves.

> i ve never seen one.

Really? At least the Walmart here stopped selling PC laptops and only sells chromebooks now.

Used mostly by schools, they are pretty close to a zero-admin laptop that generally only runs chrome. So students can see slides, do homework, access the web, access shared spreadsheets/documents, etc. It's all tied to your google account, and the school district can literally get by with zero admins. If a student drops one in a pool overnight, they can get a new laptop, login, and all their work is already there.

They are rather cheap, I bought my kid one for $180, like 7 years ago and it's still going. The intro instructions showed that if you poured a soda into the keyboard shake it out a few times and it should be fine. In highschool they handed my kid a laptop on the first day, quite a bit nicer than the 7 year old laptop, and of course quite familiar.

I've seen minimal market penetration outside of education. It is nice that they upstream patches for linux and to be called a chromebook they have to support a dev mode where you can install your own OS. So you can get a laptop, without paying the Microsoft tax.

"a modest 3.3%" after the strongest years ever in PC sales. The journalist is an idiot.

Might Chromebooks have, "dropped off a cliff", because so many people bought one over the past two years for their children to school from home that few people need a new one yet?

It may be obvious for readers of HN, but when talking with non-tech (or casual tech) friends, there's a large swathe of them who don't seem to realize how far ahead the M1 chip is and still believe Wintel is what folks in tech (ie. developers, etc) primarily use. And when one points out that times have changed, they nod but will still believe in what they have always believed. These articles seem to be targeted to that demographic.

Probably because it's not a like comparison anymore. One is an ARM chip. One is x86. They don't run the same software, they don't work the same, and they sure as hell aren't built on the same silicon.

I don't really think Apple is very "far ahead" in that respect. They're just doing what Apple does best: changing lanes and catering to the people who already use their machines.

> who don't seem to realize how far ahead the M1 chip is

If they don't use macOS, it's irrelevant for them.

For what is worth, I don't feel that much of a difference in gradle builds time in Android Studio between M1 and 5600U (although I use 32 GB RAM with the latter).

There are also people who forget Apple is using TSMCs best node exclusively. Don't get me wrong, it's impressive stuff, but nothing AMD or Intel cant do in the future.

The real question should be - did using this headline save this article from being not read at all?

What a silly headline. The M1 has apparently saved Apple according to sales data which compares two quarters both of which are significantly after when Apple introduced the M1. Also really appreciate the insight:

>In short, there's no specific reason that Apple is doing so well in the global laptop market right now, but it's certainly not undeserving of that success.

So basically the summary is "Apple Mac sales grew slightly more than usual and we really don't know why"

Save Apple? Is this 1997? The M1 was great for Apple, but I wouldn’t say a 2 trillion dollar company needed “saving”.

I probably should have saved the few minutes I spent reading that article.

I do wonder, though: what’s behind Asus’ huge gains? I didn’t realize they were doing something big, but they must be.

I'm not sure if it saved Apple, most people who buy a Mac were going to buy it anyway, price is usually not a primary factor on Apple products.

Objectively, the M1 is a great chip, it is *very* fast and has low thermal output.

most people who buy a Mac were going to buy it anyway

I don't know. I know several people who where completely unimpressed and uninterested in an Intel Mac that now own an M1 Mac. I'm certainly one of them.

As long as I read stuff like that you need a second Mac to restore a Mac Studio, I will stay away from Apple products. Too many times I thought it will be fine, but restrictions like that always bite me in the ass later on.

Also that they actively put effort into making things not repairable is also quire annoying.

That's only in the case of you bricking the firmware though. I'm sure they'd help you get back on the road over at the Apple store if you didn't have another Mac handy.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/apple-configurator-mac...

I got my info from LTT, where they swapped the Disks and had to do it with a secondary Mac. So now I wonder if they could have done it without it.

Oh come on. Right under Apple in that chart is ASUS with a 20% growth rate.

And anyway, Mac sales are a small fraction of Apple’s total sales.

What they don’t show you is how much money all the manufacturers are making.

Most of these brands’ median notebook price is well below Apple, so Apple is taking way more in revenue for consumer computer sales.

But the story doesn’t end there. It’s all about how much profit you’re generating. ASUS has a profit margin of about 5% on its sales. Meanwhile, Apple has done a little bit better, with a profit margin of 40%.

I agree: I’ve always been fascinated by the charts showing that Apple + Samsung sum to more than 100% of the phone industry profit, and have been mildly curious about the same thing in the PC market.

I just responded to that crap article on the basis it presented.

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