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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else think maybe Apple Silicon in the Macs is hurting their sales? I used to feel the need to upgrade my Macbook every 2 years or so, since the battery life would have dropped significantly and the fans were giving me a constant jet engine drone in the background of my work. But my M1 Macbook Pro still lasts all day, I've never heard the fans, and the only task I've given it that it struggled with was local AI image generation. It flies through everything else imaginable. So why would I buy another one?

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>> I used to feel the need to upgrade my Macbook every 2 years or so

You're a minority. The vast majority of Mac owners don't have thousands of dollars to spend upgrading every couple of years. And they don't need to - that's one of the great things about Mac's! I'm an iOS developer + do a lot of heavy music production on my Macbook Pro and after 4 years it's still working well. I'm starting to consider an update (mainly because of the vast improvements the Apple silicon chips bring) but I could probably use this reasonably for another year or two at least. More 'normal' users I know (docs + web browsing people) typically keep their Mac's 6+ years and those are the 'cheap' lower powered Mac's.

The Mac is only 9% of their sales[1], according to today's call. They probably don't think about it too much.

Making everyone (aside from pros/enthusiasts) feel like they have to upgrade every 2-3 years would hurt their market.

1. https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/11/apple-q4-2023-financial-r...

Yes but it wont show yet. It feels a little like the iPhone now, where a new iPhone doesn't "feel" much better. The M1 Max in particular felt lightyears ahead of it's time and I don't feel the need to upgrade it for a couple more years.

Most mac's are 3-5 year lifetimes tho, longer than phones.

I don’t think so. M1 helped them establish a clear cut lead in the laptop market. It’s not even close. I think people will gradually switch to Mac (switch rate is painfully slow). Unless MS does something here, they’re going to leak Windows market share.

Yes, that is a consequence of making really good products. Apple is suffering from success.

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