After having owned a new (non-Touchbar) Mac for the last few weeks, I cannot fathom what the meltdown on HN was about this thing. It's the best Macbook I've ever owned --- and I've used nothing but Apple laptops since the Titanium Powerbook.
I hate the USB-C dongle and do miss MagSafe, but I wouldn't trade the new machine for the old one.
After everything I'd heard, particularly about the keyboard, I put off buying a new Macbook. Ultimately, I was forced by circumstance to buy one, or I'd have coasted on my 2-year-old MBP for a few more years. I feel sheepish about that plan now.
Those sorts of groups are the worst about personal computers. Enthusiasts care about shit that nobody cares about.
My team is responsible for tech specs for a huge global enterprise. We A/B survey people for different hardware starting with our Windows 10 rollouts. Very, very few people, even tech people report any difference in satisfaction with PCs with 8GB vs 16GB or more, price optimized i5 vs fast i7, etc.
The three things that most affect satisfaction are SSD, not telling people what the specs are, and giving them Macs.
Normal people give no shits about 95% of the handwringing complaints.
So I finally got around to an Apple store. We have a couple close by, but I haven't had an opportunity for a casual stop.
This was my first chance to see the new touchbar Macs.
I thought the touchbar was nice, super responsive, looked better than I expected. I thought the keyboard was great for typical typing. I'm a spacemacs/vim user, and yet I found no problem with the escape key on the touchpad. Not really enough time to truly evaluate, but the first impression was "This is really nice." Like walking into a really nice kitchen, or sitting behind the wheel of a high end car.
My expectations had been tempered by all the naysaying about it, so perhaps because of that I was very impressed.
If my mac were a few years older, I'd buy one in a minute. I actually find myself wishing my mac was a few years older to justify upgrading.
That said, I'm not happy about only having USB-C. Mainly because I really like magsafe. My power cable gets kicked out several times a week, and sometimes a day. And on laptops of ages past (HP), the power socket has been the first thing to break on me. There are options out there for magsafe style USB-C cables, so that might mitigate.
Of those 3 figures you listed, the more interesting statistic is the YOY comparison (+1.1% increase) of Q1-2016 to Q1-2017 since new Macs are often introduced in the preceding 4th quarter.
Yes, some of the HN crowd may have over-dramatized the decline of the new Macbook Pro. However, the financial report's "Mac" category includes Macbook (not Pro), Macbook Air, iMac, etc. Since all those different Mac variations are baked into one opaque category, it's possible that the new Macbook Pro sales numbers were bad but it was offset by strong iMac sales. A +1.1% increase in sales quantity (+62000 units) may not be all that impressive.
I recall that MacRumors still have a forum thread from the first iPod release in 2001. The commentary is almost identical to the vitriol we see online today.
This really confused me at first, but upon looking at the data sheet from Apple [1] it's much more clear -- the units are in thousands and the revenue is in millions.
So for this quarter 5,374,000 Macs were sold generating a revenue of $7,244,000,000.
The majority of people do not care about the same things we (HN) do. My friends will by Macs regardless because they are scared of something different.
The interesting part of all this is $7.2B in revenue on 5.37M Macs giving an ASP of $1347 (compared to $1174 for Q4 and $1269 for Q1 for the two other numbers you mention).
Let's look at the models below that ASP:
- 13" Macbook Air for $999/1199 for 128/256GB
- 12" 256GB Macbook for $1299
- 21.5" iMac for $1099/1299 for 1.6/2.8GHz and 1/2TB HD
- Mac mini for $499/699/999
So, the only current generation Mac on that list is the 12" Macbook and the entry level model barely makes it in. So assuming the ASP here isn't too far from the median it seems to suggest the majority of Mac sales are last generation tech.
Also bear in mind that we don't precisely know what this number includes. Does it include peripherals for Macs? Possibly not. It probably includes AppleCare though you'd think. So the hardware ASP is likely lower.
I honestly don't think these numbers are as good for Apple and a testament to the success of the latest refresh as some would suggest.
Probably by this time next year the Macbook Air will probably be gone. The USB-C landscape will be better no doubt. I really wonder how those numbers will look.
Have the HN and Reddit crowds been claiming anything about low sales? Disliking a product change and accepting that the product will sell well are not mutually exclusive.
And not only did they sell more Macs, their average selling price per Mac was up significantly.
Probably due in part to pent up demand for the higher-end Macbook Pros, but since the touchbar models are significantly more expensive, likely due to that as well. Will be interesting to see the ongoing trend, but I would guess that people keep buying these machines.
We bought 3 of these new MacBooks where I work. There is literally tons of issues, way too much to list them all in a single post. The biggest of all being the drivers for external displays over USB being glitchy and greedy as hell. While some of us hope they will fix that in a future software release, we already moved to xps laptops for newcomers.
So, yeah, people/companies are buying the new Macs. But, if it was my own personal machine I would already have returned it to the store.
Are you really surprised that HN and Reddit don't represent the majority? In my experience, most people don't pay a lot of attention to what's inside their laptop and wouldn't mourn the loss of function keys. Brand loyalty, whether it works, is aesthetically pleasing and the learning curve of alternative options are probably more important factors.
There is no year-over-year growth in Mac unit sales.
It took 2-3 years for Nokia's handset revenues to collapse, from when people started noticing warning signs and complaining that they were falling behind.
As an AAPL shareholder I'm not surprised. Just because the masses seem to be complaining, it does not represent the actual masses. They are just the loudest at complaining.
Where are all the people criticizing Cook right now? I mean, I honestly think that the majority of the things that have been told about Apple in the last month are complete BS, he was seen as the CEO in crisis not able to do his job, abandoning the Mac, iPhone 7 was a joke etc...
Marvelous.
Beyond recent news, there's got to be something related to the length of time people are able to use a Mac and have it be very viable. I'm getting 5-7 years from any I've purchased, vs. 2-4 for most of the Windows machines I had been purchasing prior to getting on the Mac train. While I think the Windows machines have upped the ante on that a bit, at least from what I hear anecdotally, you can likely track some of these sales to seasonality, new products, etc. and get a legit handle on how sales are truly going.
The interesting takeaway for me is that services is now the equal second biggest revenue centre at 9%. It is still way behind iPhone, but it is growing at a phenomenal rate. By all accounts Apple is just getting started with services (e.g.: rumoured original video content, video streaming service) so we can expect this to grow even more.
Finally Apple is capitalising on its install base to sell more addons after sale. This offsets slowing hardware upgrade rates, although not sure if it is enough to offset iPad declines.
The narrative often heard is that if they want to shift to being a services company, Apple would need to dramatically change its org structure. I may be wrong, but no one has ever monetised consumers with recurring monthly revenue as successfully as Apple has (utility companies and mortgage brokers excluded!). And it didn't even need an org restructure!
Since September I've been reading nothing but how much of a failure the iPhone 7 is, and how removing the headphone jack was going to be the final straw for Apple. Similar story for the new MacBook Pros.
It seems that the geekerati have very different priorities from the rest of the world, and maybe Apple still knows what's it's doing.
I bought into apple after falling for osx during college right around the financial crisis. I've been a fan of their approach to products since then.
But the new macbook pro's are pretty revolting to me -- I used one at the apple store for a few minutes and could barely type on the (horrible) keyboard. I played with the touchbar and immediately found myself trying to touch the screen -- something that as a fan I definitely knew would not work.
Even with just a few moments use, it was immediately utterly clear to me that to the extent that the touchbar is a good idea, a touchscreen would have been a better idea ... The good idea within the touchbar is the attempt to 'augment' the keyboard/mouse user interface with touch -- augment, not replace. Microsoft tried to make touch/keyboard-mouse interchangeable but in real-life not all elements on the screen should be touchable -- the touchbar realizes this and deserves props for getting that much right. But even after acknowledging that success, the touchbar is just ... wrong -- its not any easier to lift your hands from the keyboard and use the touchbar than it would be to touch the screen -- its actually harder because you have to take your eyes from the screen and look somewhere you would not normally look to aim your fingers.
I hope the idea of 'augmenting' the macOS user interface introduced with touchbar evolves to the main display -- where it might be a good idea ... I don't know how this would be accomplished though -- maybe the api's created for touchbar could be re-targeted towards user interface elements on the main touch display ...
At the end of the day, the MBP isn't built only for developers and creatives. We're a subset of the customer base, always have been. (I suspect they sell more to soccer moms and college kids than "pros")
This "professional" narrative is seriously annoying. I work on software 10h+ a day, some of it is (hopefully) at the cutting edge of biology. I even get paid. Use neural nets. And vim. So I should probably fall within the "professional" category. At least more than "soccer mom", with regards to gender, reproductive status, and offsprings' choice of sports.
I have never felt the need to plug in 6+ peripherals. 16GB work fine even with a Linux and a Windows 10 virtual machine running. If I run out of battery after 12h of working on a flight, I sleep – but I don't dream of replaceable batteries.
Whatever all these self-professed "professionals" are doing, it sounds a lot more like what I did in high school: spending weeks swapping components, recompiling Linux kernels for 2% higher values at some useless benchmark, building incredibly-convoluted setups to really finally create a media centre rivalling Fleet Street etc.
Pro does not only mean "for professionals." In the average person's mind it just means "better." Nobody says "oh I'm using this at home, can't get the pro."
I fail to see how this was a dynamite quarter, in Cook's words.
Net income shrank year over year
Operating income shrank year over year
China sales imploded by another 12%
Margins contracted
Sales growth was a piddling 4% (it didn't contract granted, I don't see how that's "dynamite")
iPad sales continue to implode, down 19%
And there's Cook cheering on the results. It reminds me of the Steve Ballmer days under Microsoft. The profits were there, the sales were there, and yet you could easily spot the icebergs on the horizon.
I think the most interesting category to watch is going to be services: 2 straight years of 20% growth, and it's now virtually tied for second largest revenue source with Mac.
For a computer company with so many billions in the bank it's amusing how Apple has married itself to the iPhone.
Why not try to leverage the relatively secure walled garden of iOS to open a business selling hardware and software to enterprises? Why not make Unix servers with distinguishing features? Management could get away with it while they were surfing the iPhone wave but it was always obvious that it wouldn't last forever.
I wonder how much if "services" is due to the iCloud revenues because iPhone keep getting bigger, and the free hosting is not getting bigger..... Bugging people constantly to increase storage.
Mac might be a victim of the high profit margins. Frequent updates and competitive pricing do no good for the profit margin. Much easier to maintain those if you sell a bit outdated hw (thinking about Mac Pro and Mini).
What would the "markets" think if Apple sold more Macs, maintained the same absolute profits but let the margins slip? Would that be considered as a bad thing?
How many Macs sold from the Apple refurb-shop helped push those Q1 Mac sales figures? I bought my brand new (2015) refurb model the week the new Macs were shown, as did several of my colleagues.
China Iphone sales took a pretty big dip, but US sales looked good and their ASP hasn't gone down. The Chinese Market is more price sensitive than US market.
[+] [-] hasperdi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
I hate the USB-C dongle and do miss MagSafe, but I wouldn't trade the new machine for the old one.
After everything I'd heard, particularly about the keyboard, I put off buying a new Macbook. Ultimately, I was forced by circumstance to buy one, or I'd have coasted on my 2-year-old MBP for a few more years. I feel sheepish about that plan now.
[+] [-] pcurve|9 years ago|reply
Q1 2017 sale should've benefited from Mac Book refresh, but Apple essentially sold the same number of units as Q1 2016.
Increase in revenue came from higher pricing strategy in US and Europe.
Don't expect that to stick. Apple is in worse shape than these numbers indicate.
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
My team is responsible for tech specs for a huge global enterprise. We A/B survey people for different hardware starting with our Windows 10 rollouts. Very, very few people, even tech people report any difference in satisfaction with PCs with 8GB vs 16GB or more, price optimized i5 vs fast i7, etc.
The three things that most affect satisfaction are SSD, not telling people what the specs are, and giving them Macs.
Normal people give no shits about 95% of the handwringing complaints.
[+] [-] DigitalJack|9 years ago|reply
I thought the touchbar was nice, super responsive, looked better than I expected. I thought the keyboard was great for typical typing. I'm a spacemacs/vim user, and yet I found no problem with the escape key on the touchpad. Not really enough time to truly evaluate, but the first impression was "This is really nice." Like walking into a really nice kitchen, or sitting behind the wheel of a high end car.
My expectations had been tempered by all the naysaying about it, so perhaps because of that I was very impressed.
If my mac were a few years older, I'd buy one in a minute. I actually find myself wishing my mac was a few years older to justify upgrading.
That said, I'm not happy about only having USB-C. Mainly because I really like magsafe. My power cable gets kicked out several times a week, and sometimes a day. And on laptops of ages past (HP), the power socket has been the first thing to break on me. There are options out there for magsafe style USB-C cables, so that might mitigate.
[+] [-] jasode|9 years ago|reply
Yes, some of the HN crowd may have over-dramatized the decline of the new Macbook Pro. However, the financial report's "Mac" category includes Macbook (not Pro), Macbook Air, iMac, etc. Since all those different Mac variations are baked into one opaque category, it's possible that the new Macbook Pro sales numbers were bad but it was offset by strong iMac sales. A +1.1% increase in sales quantity (+62000 units) may not be all that impressive.
[+] [-] 1290cc|9 years ago|reply
Here it is: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.50...
[+] [-] thecosas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultimoo|9 years ago|reply
So for this quarter 5,374,000 Macs were sold generating a revenue of $7,244,000,000.
[1] http://images.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q1FY17DataSummary.pdf
[+] [-] dan1234|9 years ago|reply
See also the Brexit and Trump victories nobody saw coming (except everyone who voted for them).
[+] [-] matart|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|9 years ago|reply
Let's look at the models below that ASP:
- 13" Macbook Air for $999/1199 for 128/256GB
- 12" 256GB Macbook for $1299
- 21.5" iMac for $1099/1299 for 1.6/2.8GHz and 1/2TB HD
- Mac mini for $499/699/999
So, the only current generation Mac on that list is the 12" Macbook and the entry level model barely makes it in. So assuming the ASP here isn't too far from the median it seems to suggest the majority of Mac sales are last generation tech.
Also bear in mind that we don't precisely know what this number includes. Does it include peripherals for Macs? Possibly not. It probably includes AppleCare though you'd think. So the hardware ASP is likely lower.
I honestly don't think these numbers are as good for Apple and a testament to the success of the latest refresh as some would suggest.
Probably by this time next year the Macbook Air will probably be gone. The USB-C landscape will be better no doubt. I really wonder how those numbers will look.
[+] [-] brandon272|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlevine|9 years ago|reply
Probably due in part to pent up demand for the higher-end Macbook Pros, but since the touchbar models are significantly more expensive, likely due to that as well. Will be interesting to see the ongoing trend, but I would guess that people keep buying these machines.
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|9 years ago|reply
It's fast and touchbar is fun to use. Was reserved b/c of donglegate but it's not a big issue.
People are missing out with charging their laptops with usb c. I have a 265000 mah battery that I can use to charge the laptop.
[+] [-] Fiahil|9 years ago|reply
So, yeah, people/companies are buying the new Macs. But, if it was my own personal machine I would already have returned it to the store.
[+] [-] jameslk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasiaj|9 years ago|reply
It took 2-3 years for Nokia's handset revenues to collapse, from when people started noticing warning signs and complaining that they were falling behind.
[+] [-] skc|9 years ago|reply
That's a very vocal but ultimately tiny sliver of their customer base.
[+] [-] nodesocket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tatoalo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanky|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombiro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrock|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emdowling|9 years ago|reply
Finally Apple is capitalising on its install base to sell more addons after sale. This offsets slowing hardware upgrade rates, although not sure if it is enough to offset iPad declines.
The narrative often heard is that if they want to shift to being a services company, Apple would need to dramatically change its org structure. I may be wrong, but no one has ever monetised consumers with recurring monthly revenue as successfully as Apple has (utility companies and mortgage brokers excluded!). And it didn't even need an org restructure!
[+] [-] djrogers|9 years ago|reply
It seems that the geekerati have very different priorities from the rest of the world, and maybe Apple still knows what's it's doing.
[+] [-] MarkMc|9 years ago|reply
Apple's quarterly profit is only up by 2.4% per share. Let's look at earnings per share for each calendar year [1]:
2016: $8.35 (down 11%)
2015: $9.42 (up 27%)
2014: $7.42 (up 29%)
2013: $5.76 (down 9%)
2012: $6.30
Looks to me like Apple's growth spurt is over.
[1] Note 12 in annual reports at http://investor.apple.com/sec.cfm?DocType=Annual&ndq_keyword...
[+] [-] Dramatize|9 years ago|reply
Programs are always crashing, has issues waking up, and has connection issue with the new LG monitor.
[+] [-] yig|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breatheoften|9 years ago|reply
But the new macbook pro's are pretty revolting to me -- I used one at the apple store for a few minutes and could barely type on the (horrible) keyboard. I played with the touchbar and immediately found myself trying to touch the screen -- something that as a fan I definitely knew would not work.
Even with just a few moments use, it was immediately utterly clear to me that to the extent that the touchbar is a good idea, a touchscreen would have been a better idea ... The good idea within the touchbar is the attempt to 'augment' the keyboard/mouse user interface with touch -- augment, not replace. Microsoft tried to make touch/keyboard-mouse interchangeable but in real-life not all elements on the screen should be touchable -- the touchbar realizes this and deserves props for getting that much right. But even after acknowledging that success, the touchbar is just ... wrong -- its not any easier to lift your hands from the keyboard and use the touchbar than it would be to touch the screen -- its actually harder because you have to take your eyes from the screen and look somewhere you would not normally look to aim your fingers.
I hope the idea of 'augmenting' the macOS user interface introduced with touchbar evolves to the main display -- where it might be a good idea ... I don't know how this would be accomplished though -- maybe the api's created for touchbar could be re-targeted towards user interface elements on the main touch display ...
[+] [-] bdcravens|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt4077|9 years ago|reply
I have never felt the need to plug in 6+ peripherals. 16GB work fine even with a Linux and a Windows 10 virtual machine running. If I run out of battery after 12h of working on a flight, I sleep – but I don't dream of replaceable batteries.
Whatever all these self-professed "professionals" are doing, it sounds a lot more like what I did in high school: spending weeks swapping components, recompiling Linux kernels for 2% higher values at some useless benchmark, building incredibly-convoluted setups to really finally create a media centre rivalling Fleet Street etc.
[+] [-] paulcole|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|9 years ago|reply
Net income shrank year over year
Operating income shrank year over year
China sales imploded by another 12%
Margins contracted
Sales growth was a piddling 4% (it didn't contract granted, I don't see how that's "dynamite")
iPad sales continue to implode, down 19%
And there's Cook cheering on the results. It reminds me of the Steve Ballmer days under Microsoft. The profits were there, the sales were there, and yet you could easily spot the icebergs on the horizon.
[+] [-] fisherjeff|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|9 years ago|reply
I'm a bit surprised by this. I got to try out a iPad Pro with the pencil yesterday for the first time and came away very impressed.
[+] [-] someguydave|9 years ago|reply
Why not try to leverage the relatively secure walled garden of iOS to open a business selling hardware and software to enterprises? Why not make Unix servers with distinguishing features? Management could get away with it while they were surfing the iPhone wave but it was always obvious that it wouldn't last forever.
[+] [-] ihuman|9 years ago|reply
https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-q1-2017-results-billio...
[+] [-] keyle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euyyn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildchild|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dashoffset|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpalomaki|9 years ago|reply
What would the "markets" think if Apple sold more Macs, maintained the same absolute profits but let the margins slip? Would that be considered as a bad thing?
[+] [-] nkkollaw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] econner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpweiher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erickhill|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] arrty88|9 years ago|reply