Top Apple analyst says MacBook demand has fallen 'significantly'

Technology@lemmy.world – 359 points – 9 months ago

Top Apple analyst says MacBook demand has fallen 'significantly'::A top Apple analyst said Wednesday that shipments for MacBook computers will decline around 30% year over year.

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M1 Macbooks were also the first "Not Completely Shit" Macbooks after many years of awful problems so there was pent up demand from Apple users for something worth buying. Now that the demand is satisfied, sales will return to a baseline.

I think we can probably also toss in demand from the pandemic. Lots of people suddenly had need for a new computer and now with return to school/office lots of those machines are probably seeing a lot less use. A couple of years ago the articles were "record demand for MacBooks."

That’s pretty much describes me. I was a notorious macOS hater for a long time. But the battery life, quiet cooling, and overall power of the m1/2 has totally converted me.

Eh, I have a MB from work and I'm still an unrepentant Mac hater. All the badass hardware in the world won't save you from crippled software. MacOS will never be keyboard friendly and "MacOS UNIX" will never hold a candle to real Linux.

This is just not correct. Keyboard support in particularly is a checkbox or two in prefs, and then you have out of the box support for mapping/remapping any menu command, remapping mod keys, text expansion macros, remapping all kinds of OS controls like spotlight/mission control, etc, easily typing your favorite symbols like º or ® just by holding a modifier... Toss in Keyboard Maestro and Raycast/Launchbar/Alfred, and you're going to have difficulty finding any GUI OS that handles keyboards as well.

“MacOS UNIX” will never hold a candle to real Linux.

This is another just purely nonsense statement. "Real" Linux is itself an open source reimplementation of Unix, more or less, and macOS is posix compliant. Idk what this comment is even supposed to mean - open a terminal, install whatever packages you like, carry about your day. I've had to spend a significant amount of time in linux/macOS terminals, and in practice all that I usually have to remember is which package manager I have to use or whether it's bash/zsh.

Does this mean brew install nvidia-drivers works for you?

"Posix compliant"? I'm not sure you fully understand the gap here. Linux has containers, performant and feature rich virtualization, robust networking, user friendly GNU utils, case sensitive filesystems, etc. It's not stuff you can duct tape on by recompiling Linux tools and be all set. You're trying to keep up with a Ferrari using a Fiat.

Apple hasn't shipped with an Nvidia GPU in like a decade, and has only shipped a machine that can add a third party GPU twice in as long, so I am going to guess no? I'm not sure what the point of this comment even is? If I can find a package you can't install on linux do I win the argument? And of all things in the world you want to count as a win for Linux, you're going with Nvidia drivers? Lol.

Most of the rest that you're describing are also mostly optional packages on most Linux distros/macOS or things you're just getting wrong. Case-sensitive filesystems on macOS are an option. You don't think macOS has containers, virtualization, robust networking or can't use GNU utils? You don't know what posix compliance is, and you're trying to convince me that GNU utils, many/most of which likely existed before Linux somehow can't be "duct-taped" on.

I’m not sure you fully understand the gap here.

It's entirely clear you don't understand the gap. Linux is a kernel. All of the things you're describing are packages or pieces of software that are going to differ from distro to distro. Most of coreutils ship in macOS out of the box. All of the things you count as wins are easily added on macOS (where they aren't out of the box already.)

like, you can just say "I don't like macOS." This set of comments read like "Well all of Linux is garbage because Mint doesn't ship with Solitaire, a game and program invented by Microsoft."

As much as I love making fun of Apple, isn't it all Apple silicone made in house? If they're not coming with Nvidia cards and Apple is not open to the idea of people modifying their computers it shouldn't matter how easy it is to install Nvidia graphics (not to mention Nvidia Drivers are a pain on Linux sometimes too).

POSIX is just a set of Unix-like standards for software. Mac is based on BSD if I recall correctly, they had Xorg and stuff as an option to install and things aren't 1 to 1 compatible but closely related.

robust networking

Dude you just gave me flashbacks to traumatic times trying to get Wifi to work on Linux

The Nvidia thing was a subtle way to point out that you can't "brew install" your way out of every bit of missing OS functionality. The subtly was sadly too subtle.

"Posix" is such a trivial set of APIs that until recently Windows claimed to be Posix compatible (and basically still is???). Darwin, the MacOS kernel, lacks pretty much everything above that slim foundation. No user or network namespaces. No capabilities. Even if you switch to GNU coreutils (ls, ps, netstat, etc), you get a reduced featureset because Darwin lacks /proc, /sys, ioctls, and other knobs&levers to make stuff work the way it does on Linux. Xorg works because X11 was common across all Unixen back then. And on the built in BSD utils, stuff gets weird like ls ~/Downloads -l doesn't work and case insensitivity leads to weird bugs in things like shell wildcards (like ls ~/downlo*/*).

The Linux network stack is complicated because it can do absolutely everything, at insane speeds and scales. MacOS' network features are geared towards being a laptop and not much else. I won't defend Linux as user friendly but it's been my daily desktop for 25 years, I guess I've figured it out. I use and appreciate stuff like VLANs, bridging, nftables, ebtables, etc. If you need to change behavior, there's probably a /proc/net flag that will do it. It's stuff that MacOS hides or simply doesn't have.

Agreed, I've never been into the Apple ecosystem, but last time I needed a new laptop I bought an open box M1 MacBook Pro from Best Buy. I boight it solely off the Apple silicon being Arm based for power and efficiency. It's been a great laptop and probably won't need to upgrade it for a long time. When the battery finally gives out I'll just replace that myself and keep going. Plenty of compute power to keep it going for what I do with it.