PC shipments decline slows in Q3 2023, but Apple plunges over 23%
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The upgrade cycle for computers is 40 months.
With the move to work from home, or people just spending more time at home during covid, many people upgraded with a 15% increase in 2021 and 16% in 2022.
Everyone felt flush with cash, and wanted something to spend it on.
Now people don't feel rich. I've been waiting to buy a new computer until things get REALLY cheap, and I don't even think we're there yet. Maybe another quarter or 2.
On top of that, what are people upgrading for? I'm avoiding Windows 11, and based on the messages I'm not getting in Windows 10, I'm moving to Linux.
I also have a mac, but I don't love the OS, and the pricing for a new mac with the memory I need/want just doesn't make sense.
My Mom can easily get buy on an 8 year old machine, as long as she's getting security updates. Everything is in the cloud, she has no reason to buy something new.
My nieces and nephews (surprisingly) have chrome books. But they could also easily get buy on an iPad.
I just refreshed my hardware as my old gaming rig (top of the line at the time) couldn't run LLM engines or diffusers without overloading the power supply and shutting down in the middle of a run.
I switched to Linux in the process (no Win 11 for me). The only reason for not going Mac desktop is that Nvidia is still the king of the hill for ML workloads.
The OP missed out a word, it should be the average upgrade cycle for PC ( or specifically Laptops ) is about 40 months. But if you look at Data closely, lots of company buy a new laptop for their employees every 24 months. Some even gets 12 months as some sort of perks.
If you ignores these outliner you will see average drops to 50 to 60 months.
Maybe FAANG are a bit more open with their wallets.
I can usually trust my people to spend some time yak-shaving before they'll ask, so when they ask I take it seriously.
But for personal, non-work equipment... different story. I'll use it until I can't anymore.
There is also the M1 possibly having a bit more longevity. Consumer grade Windows laptop usually starts degrading at the 3 years mark because of the battery decaying. Since the M1 had much longer battery life out of the box, it seems likely this adds a delay in the replacement cycle.
After all of this I feel compelled to say, I don't own a Mac or Apple stock, I just think the headline might be slightly misleading.
the M1 is marketed at the right price point to bring in volume sales, and they are still winning converts from Windows
so a decline this deep seems to speak more about rapidly deteriorating consumer activity
IT folks that use Apple, wouldn't surprise me if new hires get something from a previous round of layoffs.
Regular consumers, between everything else being more expensive and/or seeing store financing rates go even higher, are more likely to repair their existing device to get by or just stick with a non Apple laptop.
A laptop does not really degrade much apart from cosmetic wear or physical damages - instead, what the same amount of money can get you changes, and at some point you feel like that cost has been amortized and that the gap between back then and now has increased enough to justify a new purchase. The only reason M1's would last longer in that regard would be stagnation on Apple's behalf.
Same with how the PC market had stagnated with minimal generational improvements until both Ryzen and M1 shook things up in interesting ways.
Sure after 2-3 years you still have some charge, but it's more like 1 hour when browsing the Internet and not the 6-7 hours that it had originally.
I might just be buying shitty laptops though. Do your phone batteries also last 5 years?
Below a certain dollar amount, the refurbish vs replace from a value standpoint changes quickly.
This applies to me. My laptop is 10 years old, has 16G memory and is running Linux. I have replaced battery once before (and definitely need a new battery again now).
Edit: replace 9 years old with 10 years old
The GTX 1080 MSRP was $599 in 2016, the RTX 4080 launched $1199 this year.
Much easier to recommend a console nowadays than years ago, even with for example Sony increasing the PS5 price after launch
[1] https://windowsreport.com/desktop-vs-laptop-market-share/
The only people who are familiar at all with desktop PCs are gamers. That's why every consumer desktop PC component is called "Stryker Ice Wraith Elite"
Anyone at work who still uses the desktop form factor is a creative person (they use a Mac Studio) or a workstation tower from Dell/Lenovo or similar.
Edit: maybe more helpful. The highest end recent games I’ve played without any issues at max include Resident evil 4 remake and remnant 2 off the top of my head.
DLSS upscaling tends not to work well on my laptop but I also think caring about that is dumb
Nvidia shifted their entire product stack up in the 4000 series - the 4080 should be badged as a 4070.
From my experience an RX 6650 XT provides me with a similar experience, and I picked that up for £200.
With a Ryzen 5600x from £120 stuck in an Era ITX, it's just a shame that we don't have prebuild Steam Machines like this. That's the only reason I would recommend a console, prebuilts.
Otherwise I'm able to play games that are otherwise only able to be played on one console brand or the other. That's a massive savings.
Can you share any source for this claim? It strikes me as improbable.
Windows and Thinkpad/Dell running Linux, on the others.
Otherwise it is mostly for iDevices app development.
So you can argue about how much better the mac is for costing nearly 2x as much, but it sure isn't 2x unless your already stuck on OSX.
http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117494.png
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117495.png
Apple silicon does extraordinarily well in CFD, it does extremely well at compiling, it does extremely well at any sort of JVM workload (IntelliJ) or JavaScript workload.
Also worth noting that as of cinebench 2024, the numbers have really changed, it was unfairly favoring x86 because of a small scene and short dependency chains, CB23 was basically just measuring Simd performance.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-zen4-mobile
and some other random google hit for zen4 vs m2 (geekbench & passmark)
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m2-pro-vs-amd-ry... https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m2-max-vs-amd-ry...
The trends seems to be that heavily multithreaded benchmarks seem to do better on the amd machine, and one could argue that the m2 + linux benchmarks aren't quite right due to power mgmt, which is why some of them are run with different governors. And one could argue the 7945hx is a bit big for a laptop, but people have repeatidly shown that hard limiting the TDP by 1/2 or so only takes 10% or so off the top of line per. So, its not at all clear that apple is leading the CPU field at this point. I have a smaller zen based machine that can easily pull ~15H with light usage under linux, so the incredible battery life of the mac's isn't unreachable on the amd either. I personally suspect a large part of the poor battery life on amd/windows machines is largely a windows problem (and on some machines a firmware issue, or the use of nvidia graphics).
So, this isn't to say that the mac isn't a good machine for macos, just that they picked a good time to launch a product, and people now have this idea that their product is world beating, and while its better than much of the trash at your local big box retailer, there are a lot of products in the x86 space. And particularly if your a linux user your going to be alot better served staying away from the mac.
And people that never used Apple stuff only have to listen to a couple of rants on ATP Podcast, Under the Radar, Swift by Sundel, among others, to validate that.
Specially how they handle Radar issues, and stuff that breaks between releases.
They have Apple with 5.4 million shipments in Q3 2019. The matching Q32023 number is 6.4 million, and Q32022 is 9 million.
Longest update cycle since at least 2014 and it's not close https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#iMac
So for a wide spectrum of professionals, that is good enough.
However, you're right, they have nothing to offer to professionals that need towers with replaceable parts.
For those users using a virtual Mac on the cloud isn't also a viable alternative, as Mac hardware is no longer customisable as PCs anyway.
From all the rumors it is going to be a beast, and anybody interested in Apple hardware may want to at least see how it compares. Even if they don’t go with it, M3 will push down the prices of M2 and M1
As long as vscode and chrome continue to run a rock-solid 60fps in Linux, I don't have much incentive to upgrade. I used to need to upgrade every 2-3 years to stay on the curve but it's such a long tail now, it's usually a hardware failure that necessitates upgrade, rather than technology itself.
The manufacturers (Apple and otherwise) need to keep iterating on technology to make sure their current line is competitive for those who do need to buy, but the sweeping "must upgrade" pressure only arrives when there's an especially disruptive shift.
I suspect that you and your wife will at least consider upgrading sooner once generative AI products and Apple hardware converge on some new "you can only do this revolutionary new thing with the latest Neural Engine chip" milestone, but until then, all three platforms of PC/Phone/Tablet are in a pretty mature and stable phase.
It’s either some sort of decline in high end computing generally or with Apple specifically.
As to why Apple specifically would decline, they have become quite a bit less competitive in terms of value for money compared to 3 years ago.
Unless you care about Mac GPU performance.
"Overall, Apple's claim of up to 20% better performance seems to be right on the money, as is normally the case with these things."
https://www.imore.com/iphone/iphone-15/the-iphone-15-pros-a1...
Now they have chips that are low power but also not very competitive at any price point so it's not particularly exciting (batteries are cheap...).
On the higher end chips the power consumption advantage isn't as big of a deal as they make it out to be and doesn't matter that much in real world applications (if you run an M2 Max at full power, you gonna get less than 2h of battery life anyway). But they lose hard particularly in 3D (GPU) applications.
The hope with M3 is that they at least figure out how to make GPU somewhat competitive with similarly priced offerings from NVDIA. As is you can buy a mid range windows laptop and get better perf it doesn't look good...
Um... It is far more likely M3 will be based on A18 rather than A17.
Why complicate the headline?
The derivative of PC sales is increasing, from a negative number to a less negative number.
It's still shrinking, but shrinking at a lower rate.
The headline is as simple as it needs to be to be accurate.