US Mac market share grew 22% in Q1, likely helped by new MacBook Air models | Hacker News Reader

US Mac market share grew 22% in Q1, likely helped by new MacBook Air models

9to5mac.com

36 pointsalwillis74 comments

Likely helped by Microsoft adding even more spyware and anti patterns to Windows.

The average consumer doesn’t consider any of that.

I’d guess lots of people upgrading from Intel Macs and to some extent PCs now that Apple Silicon Macs are hitting their stride.

I think the average consumer does notice the amount of crap that pops up when they boot their brand new computer, and gets frustrated when they can't remove it easily.

Sure, but if you've been using Windows for the past 5, 10 or 15 years, it's always been like that.

There was a nice period with devices like the Surface or "Signature Edition" hardware sold through Microsoft where you could get a minimally fucked up Windows install from the factory.

But it turned out that was just the intermediate step between "quit gunking up our OS with so much awful garbage and spyware" and "because it should be gunked up with our awful garbage and spyware."

I think any given day here you can find at least one article getting attention that, no, it has not always been like that and has been getting worse. The most obvious being the Recall debacle. That is in my memory the first time outrage got big enough that Microsoft had to walk back an entire feature they were trying to opt everyone into by default.

No, but the average consumer does Google "what laptop should I get" when they want a new one, and I think at least some of the people writing those lists do consider the downsides of Windows.

When I Google that the first result is from the Verge, and they recommend a MacBook Air because "The Apple MacBook Air M3 is the best laptop for most people — Mac users, of course, but also the platform-agnostic or anyone who wants a no-fuss, straightforward machine that doesn’t bombard them with advertisements or bloatware."

> I’d guess lots of people upgrading from Intel Macs

Why would you guess that? It's +22% Mac marketshare, not +22% Apple Silicon Mac marketshare.

Apple hasn't manufactured Intel Macs since 2020.

The last one to be discontinued was the Intel Mac Pro in June 2023, after the Intel iMacs and Mac Minis were discontinued in 2022 and early 2023.

Fair, it would have been more accurate to say Apple shipped no Intel Macs in Q1.

Someone upgrading from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac doesn't increase Mac marketshare.

This is year-on-year for Q1. If I want whatever Macs I bought in Q1 '24 to net out neutral here, I need to have bought an equal number of Macs in Q1 '23.

Per a sibling commenter, Apple did still sell Intel Macs throughout Q1 '23, so it's possible for the earlier set to have been Intel and the later to have been M-series, which we could count as the upgrades you describe. Intuitively it seems difficult to imagine very many people would have done this, but to set an upper bound we would need M-series vs. Intel share figures for Q1 '23.

Obviously, because all macs now sold are Apple Silicon.

Someone upgrading from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac doesn't increase Mac marketshare.

The article has a bit of an angle to get clicks. Better to look at the source: https://canalys.com/newsroom/us-pc-market-q1-2024

Lenovo shipments increased 22.4% in the same period.

Mac is synonymous with Apple's OS and ecosystem, whereas Lenovo is one contributor to Windows' market share. According to the data source HP and Dell lost market share YOY which takes a bite out of Windows' slice of the pie.

> “However, the first quarter also saw an uptick in commercial sector performance. Shipment growth in small and medium businesses indicates that the anticipated refresh brought by the Windows 10 end-of-life is underway. With enterprise customers set to follow suit, the near-term outlook for the market remains highly positive.”

Good move linking to the source. This analysis is odd. The total market grew by 703,000 computers. Apple and Lenovo combined to grow by 854,000 computers. So basically the rest of the market shrank. How can someone conclude that a Windows10-to-Windows11 upgrade cycle is in progress, unless Apple and Lenovo are the only Windows11 vendors (which is a preposterous idea)?

> Mac shipments are estimated to have grown from 1.7M in the first quarter of 2023 to 2.1M in the same quarter this year. That represents year-on-year growth of 22%, giving Apple a 14.2% share of the US PC market.

Author does not understand what market share means

2.1M/14.8M = 14.2% marketshare. Marketshare is the percentage of new shipments, which is the way its always been measured for this space and others (such as smartphones), the author got it right.

And… where is 14.2M coming from and where is 22% market share growth coming from?

Seems awfully likely they conflated 22% sales growth with market share growth

What do you propose to measure it more accurately?

Should we add questions about computer OS usage to the US Census?

I propose recognizing that 22% greater sales does not mean 22% greater market share

I typo'd the number - it was 14.8M. But per the article it came from a company called Canalys.

If Mac could simply play a greater percentage of my Steam library, I’d have no need for Windows.

It’s funny I wonder if MS do start to properly support Arm, it might have the opposite effect they want by forcing games makers to make arm versions, which can then be easily ported to the Mac…

We had the same phenomenon with x86-64 Mac OS X and macOS, but it didn't actually help. Their hardware was then, and still is chronically underpowered for current generation games.

They build beautiful, but really slow hardware for their price point.

They eventually deprecated OpenGL, and their then and now implementation is implemented as a wrapper around Metal. As a result, underlying OpenGL structures don't exist, and so you couldn't actually debug those games on Apple hardware. You had to resolve it on Windows PCs.

Apple will never be serious about gaming, so it's just not ever worth the time.

The challenges of porting games from Windows to MacOS have very little to do with processor architecture, and everything to do with system APIs. Valve's work with Proton seems like a much more plausible path toward unseating the dominance of Windows gaming, with the ironic consequence of solidifying the Windows APIs as a de-facto portable standard.

As people on forums are already lamenting, the most stable API for building Linux games, is Windows.

In my mind; that is completely true and a serious indictment of the immaturity of Linux userspace.

Does this not seem to rather imply that using the proton/windows APIs works well and is a good solution with many advantages?

Is the large portion of windows/mac/linux productivity software that targets chromium/electron an indictment of the immaturity of windows/mac/linux?

Nah, by that logic we would have seen that happen when Apple transitioned to Intel processors all those years ago. Never happened.

Same for Linux. I only use my Windows machine for gaming these days. I'd love to get rid of the second computer under my desk.

I do most of my gaming with Steam, and have for a very long time.

I also like running Linux, and have for an even longer time.

For a fair number of years (6 or 7), I ran both Linux and Windows on the same hardware (my daily use desktop rig) using qemu and virtio tricks. That was a fun experiment that taught me a lot about virtualization. I did gaming and browsing on Windows, and more stodgy things with Linux (sometimes using an X server on Windows), and this met my goals.

But a few months ago I dove in fairly deep and got Void running the hard way, with as little system-wide Poettering as possible, and started using that as a daily instead.

I put Steam on there. Games, so far, Just Work.

I don't know if they're running with a compatibility layer like Wine, or if they're native ports, or what.

I mean, I can certainly find out -- but I don't really care enough about that when I'm in a mood for gaming.

Maybe I am doing something wrong, but it seems fine.

Many games work fine on Linux, and if you don't care about competitive online games, it's probably most games.

I play games almost exclusively with friends these days and they tend to be those games that don't work on Linux, so I'm stuck with a Windows Dual-Boot unfortunately. Or rather: I'd rather boot Windows and deal with it than miss out on those shared experiences.

You're right -- that does fit my selection of games pretty well, and does explain my "Works For Me" findings.

What are some (modern, ish) online games that specifically are unlikely to work with what I'm doing?

Any games employing strong anti-cheat are unlikely to work without support from the vendor. Games that do not work are e.g. Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Destiny 2, ARK 2, Trials Rising. Some of these may eventually be supported, others likely never will be.

Ah. Gracias.

That's a whole list of stuff that I have not yet had any interest in playing, but I may change my mind some day. And on that day, I will be disappointed.

I think it's completely reasonable to demand that all of these titles work on Linux. I doubt it will make much difference in the world, but now that I have some examples in front of me I'm completely willing to switch my mentality from "works for me" to something a lot more pragmatic.

Linux is legit at 99% nowadays, and you actually have to hunt for examples where compatibility leaves a game at unplayable. I think something like Call of Duty might still be weird, just due to anticheat. Give it a shot; you probably won't revert back to Windows.

The vast majority of issues I see people have with Linux nowadays are actually with Gnome; its generally really good, but it can sometimes cause some instability, and I've found Kde to be more pleasant.

Yep, and for games with anticheat, you can check this list[0] to see its compatibility with Linux. I've been running Gnome under Fedora for years, and the times I need to boot into Windows are becoming rarer as time goes on. It's usually just for flavor-of-the-month live service games that eventually get Steam Deck verified anyways.

[0] https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Hey, thanks for sharing, I had no idea. If you don't mind, what distribution do you recommend if you wanted to play a couple games and have as low-hassle as possible good power management?

If you just want it for gaming, might as well put SteamOS on there? https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown

This is an ancient version that is NOT the one supported by Valve for Steam Deck.

The Deck has a recovery image that's linked to from that page. But if you're building your own machine, can it still run the Deck image or is this version more appropriate?

Ubuntu/Kubuntu are my go to still. Snap isn't great, but you don't really have to use it if you don't want to.

thank you

Yeah these days I'm mostly playing either Helldivers 2 or Call of Duty. I used to play a lot of Warframe and Overwatch. My experience was that Overwatch worked great (a bit slower than Windows on the same hardware but still fine) while Warframe worked pretty well but crashed on the large maps (the open-world-ish stuff). Call of Duty didn't run at all (anti-cheat as you said). I haven't tried Helldivers 2 yet as I currently have a dedicated Windows machine where it's installed.

Especially with Valve having pushed for anti-cheat systems to work on steam deck, proton support is getting better and better. Depending on what you play, your library may already mostly be supported. https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

Don't you guys already have Proton? If you install Steam on Linux, a lot of games will just automatically run: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

Sincerely, Jealous Mac user

If Apple would work with Valve to support whatever they need for a Proton equivalent layer for Mac, that would be awesome.

The current state is that a large chunk of the few steam games that have been ported to Mac were 32-bit and refuse to even run on newer macOS version.

Apple has the Game Porting Toolkit, but adoption has been lackluster.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752164/apple-mac-gaming-...

You don't have to wait for the game devs to adopt it, you can (try to) run any software using it:

https://getwhisky.app/ (free but poor support/compatibility)

https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover (paid app using similar technology, easier to use)

They sort of have done some work except it's not aimed at enabling Valve to run a competing app store for games on macs for obvious reasons. It's called game porting toolkit. Allows game developers to easily port windows games to run on macs. Of course this is not about enabling Steam but about bypassing steam. But I'm guessing it's doing a lot of the same kinds of things as proton technically. Possibly even building on some of the same OSS components. I don't know enough about this to say definitively.

The good news with 32 bit is that a lot of the 32 bit games are pretty old at this point and should run well enough in an emulator given good enough GPU emulation. So you might get something going with linux and proton running in an emulator.

But of course, Valve has an opportunity here as well. And they should step up. There's a lot of good stuff happening in Asahi linux that they could borrow probably.

Porting is not enough. Valve succeeded because they made their layer “just work” for 90% of games by default.

Apple could do it without Valve. They could actually make a big effort to bring tons of game devs into their store with a system that doesn't require them to modify their games to run on Mac or iOS.

But they haven't, and I'm not sure they care enough to actually follow through on such a project, both technologically and in making and maintaining all of those publisher relationships.

I have thousands of dollars in my Steam library. Don’t want to purchase it again in order to get rid of my windows system. Steam has a ton of other benefits. I can literally stop playing computer games for years, and when I come back to Steam, I just click install and everything works again exactly as it did before. Compare that to almost every iOS game I’ve ever bought for $1 or $2 years ago. Now all of those have become loaded with ads or paywalls to unlock content. Angry Birds I’m looking at you. Garbage.

Right, which is why I'd rather Apple accept that their heart isn't really in the PC games business and work to enable Valve or others to handle that experience.

My point was Apple could do it themselves, but they haven't, they almost certainly won't, and even if they did I don't think their heart is really in it to do it properly.

The only people willing to support Mac stuff is people who use Macs, because apple mandates that you do so. No cross compiling allowed.

Just use linux.

In what way is cross compiling not allowed for Mac OS?

Proton doesn't require devs to cross compile either. The point is it runs unmodified Windows games on Linux.

Apple could be having the same benefits that the Steam Deck is currently seeing if they actually bothered to care.

Apple's position is that if you want to develop or compile for apple devices you have to do it from apple devices. Apple says cross compiling is not allowed for MacOS. It's a pain in the ass for people doing user space software development and as a result apple ensures you get worse software and worse compatability layers. That's the apple premium (TM, cha-ching) you pay for. Maybe find a better ecosystem to get locked into.

I think you're talking about the certificate signing stuff which isn't technically the same as cross-compiling.

But anyway, the whole topic I brought up is Valve's Proton layer which doesn't require cross-compiling the game to Mac OS. That's the whole reason I think that solution would be the best way to get decent gaming support on the Mac. Cross-compiling literally wouldn't have anything to do with it.

Counterstrike Go worked fine on my macbook until Valve released Counterstrike 2, which automatically upgraded everyone's version of Go to 2. Then it no longer worked on MacOS. Valve responded by just refunding anyone who used Go on a mac in the last x months, it was pretty frustrating.

I sold my Windows gaming desktop a few years ago and have been pretty happy with GeForce Now for AAA graphics-heavy games (it streams from a 4080 in the cloud) or Crossover/Whisky for indie/low-graphics titles.

I've been surprised by the number of games I can play on one or the other. And Apple Silicon native games are slowly making an appearance on Steam too (but they usually run far better on GFN than local hardware).

I dislike Apple’s abuse and censorship with the App Store, but I trust them for privacy a lot more than Microsoft. That’s my reason to abandon Windows now - it’s apparent Microsoft cannot be trusted with my data.

Eventually someone will make a Desktop Linux distro that targets macos exiles, using macos keybindings everywhere. When that day comes, I will be back on Linux like a shot.

For the average person (or even average tech person), what advantage would desktop Linux have over macOS, especially now that Apple is on proprietary hardware again?

Wasn't there already a desktop Linux for Apple Silicon (forget its name, Asahi maybe?), but last I checked, a bunch of things don't work right.

It's nice having a POSIX shell on Mac combined with the ability to use common business apps like Adobe or Microsoft stuff. What would Linux offer?

I tried to do this manually and it was partially successful, but a nightmare. Most people who want this seem to use and enjoy Kinto, which is supposedly very easy.

https://kinto.sh/

"Mac shipments are estimated to have grown from 1.7M in the first quarter of 2023 to 2.1M in the same quarter this year" note that it is an increase of 22% of Macs being sold, and not a total market share of 22%; instead Mac are about 14.2% of total units.

Helped by having fricken ports.

MBAs don’t have that many ports — just two USB ports and the MagSafe charging port. It’s better than before, but you still have to go with an MBP to get HDMI, SD, or ports on both sides.

I wish they'd put a usb-c on both sides so you could route the charging cable either way.

For sure. I'm just glad there's a separate charge port. On previous generations, you would sometimes have to unplug from power in order to back up an iPhone to an external hard drive, for example. Given the lousy battery life on those (Intel) machines, it wasn't such a no brainer to unplug back then!

I have to believe there's more than 15 million PCs in the US... with approaching 400m, and even a household of 5 (80m)... fewer than 1 in 5 homes having a PC/Laptop just seems, off.

I think that's just 15 million shipped in a single quarter. That's measuring new sales across a few months, not preexisting ownership.

> PC (excluding tablets) shipments to the United States grew 5% year-on-year to 14.8 million units in Q1 2024.

That's new PC shipments, not total PCs on the market.

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