Because most users are happy to stick with older hardware, Macs aren’t selling as well as they used to • The Register

Apple Mac owners simply aren’t purchasing new hardware as quickly as they used to.

Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) reported that 68 percent of Mac owners had a device that was more than two years old in March 2024. Four years ago, that number was just 59 percent.

“The trend toward holding devices longer is slow but steady,” Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz of CIRP wrote in the report.

The pair attributed the decline in Mac sales to the same reasons the smartphone market has seen a recent decline in new devices: updates have become incremental and uninteresting, hardware is more durable, and upgrading processing power is irrelevant to most people.

“As PC users increasingly rely on streaming and Internet-based applications and programs, the traditional motivation to upgrade PCs is fading,” Levin and Lowitz said. “For most PC owners, their current PC has sufficient storage and fast processing speeds.”

Let’s not forget that constantly rising prices haven’t helped the mobile phone market, and they probably won’t help the PC and Mac sector either.

Will Macbooks with AI come to our aid?

The personal computer market has been in decline for several years now, roughly since the COVID-19 pandemic caused a one-time sales spike as many people moved to remote work.

That’s not to say the market isn’t recovering, with PC sales recently posting three consecutive quarters of growth after a multi-year decline. The reason for the recovery, beyond the fact that all the PCs bought during the pandemic are now more than four years old, lies with AI and its entry into the PC market—at least according to PC manufacturers.

So as the AI ​​PC era arrives, will Apple users similarly upgrade their devices? CIRP isn’t sure that will happen.

When asked whether Mac owners who make heavy use of their devices’ hardware—such as video editors or some developers—can buck the trend toward longer update cycles, Levin replied: Register that CIRP does not have enough detailed data to determine whether such users are updating early.

“These heavy users will represent a small percentage of Apple’s user base, so analyzing their update patterns will be difficult,” Levin said in an emailed statement.

It’s also unclear whether Apple’s AI integration, expected to arrive over the next few device generations, will shorten Apple’s update cycle in the way that PC makers envision.

“While it’s definitely too early for us to have consumer survey data, we don’t see how this would shorten update cycles any more or less than other software solutions,” Levin predicted, reiterating, “Mac users who need more powerful processors to run AI would upgrade sooner, but they make up a relatively small percentage of all Mac users.”

Canalys analyst Kieren Jessop says even these users won’t positively impact Mac sales because the latest Macs already come with chips that handle AI workloads.

“Canalys defines an AI computer as a laptop, desktop, or workstation that has what’s generally called an NPU (Neural Processing Unit),” Jessop told us in an emailed statement. “This includes any Apple Silicon Mac, as it has the Apple Neural Engine.”

Apple stopped selling Macs that don’t have Apple Silicon in them in 2023, when it ended production of Intel-based Mac Pros. In other words, even people interested in using Apple’s upcoming AI integrations likely won’t need to upgrade, and Apple knows that, Jessop said.

“Apple is already adapting to longer update cycles. The growth of their services business over the past few years demonstrates this as they leverage their large installed base, which now accounts for more than a fifth of the company’s total revenue,” Jessop noted.

Mac sales as a percentage of Apple’s revenue have been declining steadily since 2000, when the devices accounted for 86.2% of Apple’s revenue.

Last year, the Mac accounted for just 7.7 percent of Apple’s revenue, according to Statista. Whether Apple will continue to devote resources to improving this part of its business, especially with AI-enabled Macs already in wide circulation, is everyone’s question. We asked Apple but didn’t get an answer. ®