Cook: "Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers."
I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..."
Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
isn’t what cook is pointing out actually the most important thing?
a product created for the strategic purpose of expanding into a new clientele is doing exactly that. that is the win.
put another way, if the statement he said was “best launch week ever for Mac customers.” that does not speak to the entire reason for the existence of this product category. in essence, THAT would be the pointless statement.
Not really. An independent Mac company with 8% of Apple's sales would still be the #3 computer manufacturer behind Dell and HP, and Mac gross margins could easily support significantly larger investments in OS development if Apple chose to do so.
Relatively well-founded estimates will start to appear in a month or so. It's unfortunate they don't give exact model breakdowns, but everyone knows that the Mac is a hobby for them.
From your point of view it is, but the headline is what Apple is giving them, and it works perfectly well for them: Lots of attention for Apple, zero interesting data.
Doesn’t it mean that it sold more units in its first week on the market than any past Mac? How does that say nothing about sales? It’s literally about sales numbers, they are just using a relative metric instead of an absolute metric.
They announced a sales record where the metric is "sold to somebody that never ever had a mac before" combined with "in the first week of availability". The headline is worse than Cook's tweet quoted in the article.
To get this record you need to have a long time were your costumers were buying something else from you (like Phones) and have a lot available inventory in a lot of places in the first week combined with a great media coverage. 3 things that Apple has an advantage in.
As @ibero above points out it is more important for apple to tap into the vast demographic of relatively young iPhone/iPad customers - the older Mac customers are buying different machines.
Maybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.
Arguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
Funny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10.
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
I mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line.
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
Plastic shitboxes are a very lucrative segment of the laptop market. I don't think the $600 Macbook will be displacing $200-$300 Chromebooks anytime soon.
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
Also Apple are masters of the up-sell. Someone who knows $600 windows laptops are crap might just buy a cheaper Chromebook because crap is crap, but they might spring for another few hundred bucks for something they have confidence is actually pretty nice and has brand Caché.
I truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat.
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
I actually liked the Design of Neo more so than the Air. It is just more practical. I also like thin bezel rather than no / minimal bezel.
I still haven't found any concrete evidence but I think the Key travel on Neo is at least 1-2mm higher than Air and Pro. And back to the good old MacBook Pro Early 2015 era keyboard.
If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
Part of me thinks this is a bad sign for Apple. They have always been a premium brand. I'm not a business major, but it just feels like a bad thing when premium enters low-end markets.
But on the other hand, this is kind of the culmination of them owning their hardware stack. They can avoid the commoditization race to the bottom since they are the exclusive owners of a significant amount of their hardware vertical, From chips to enclosure. Perhaps that will let them retain the margins that were previously driven by a consumer base that prized prestige over price.
While my intuition is that this may be the last big cash grab that Apple squeezes out of their premium image, they did have a massive hit back in the day with the original iMac (the CRT based one). They've defined "cheap and premium" categories before.
> "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers"
Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
This was fully expected. They just fully exploited their economies of scale and entered the low end market. They are going to grab a lot of market there from windows
Neo is wily popular, but don't expect it to generate significant profits for Apple (disclosure I'm a AAPL shareholder). I assume the profit/profit margin on Neo is paper thin.
132 comments
I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..."
Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
a product created for the strategic purpose of expanding into a new clientele is doing exactly that. that is the win.
put another way, if the statement he said was “best launch week ever for Mac customers.” that does not speak to the entire reason for the existence of this product category. in essence, THAT would be the pointless statement.
for Apple to focus on fixing things in macOS again (as opposed to just backporting stuff from their other lines) Mac would need to grow by a lot.
To get this record you need to have a long time were your costumers were buying something else from you (like Phones) and have a lot available inventory in a lot of places in the first week combined with a great media coverage. 3 things that Apple has an advantage in.
As @ibero above points out it is more important for apple to tap into the vast demographic of relatively young iPhone/iPad customers - the older Mac customers are buying different machines.
It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible.
Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
This is Microsoft’s plan to fix Windows 11 https://www.theverge.com/news/897834/microsoft-windows-11-qu...
Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go.
I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/microsoft-keeps-insi...
As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
The competition at this price point is weak.
> The competition at this price point is weak.
Is it though?
6 months ago for $575, I picked up a 15" 1080p IPS display laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, Radeon 680M iGPU that can use up to 8 GB VRAM and a 1 TB NVME SSD with a backlight keyboard, a bunch of USB ports and HDMI port. It weighs the same as a MBP and comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. It's upgradable to 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB SSD. It has Windows 11 but all of the parts are compatible with Linux if you want to go down that route.
It's from a brand I never heard of, Nimo N155 but I took a gamble and so far I couldn't be happier. The only problem now is there's major shortages and prices are jacked because of the RAM situation. The same model is $700 today and much harder to find, even their official site is out of stock on this model.
Fit and finish (not being made of creaky plastic) Display brightness & colour representation Battery life Trackpad Keyboard
For a portable these are just as important as “the numbers”for most people and definitely more noticeable. Perhaps not the case for you though!
> 1080p
> It weighs the same as a MBP
A much larger laptop with less than half the number of display pixels is not really the same market. And how's that battery life?
Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides.
I hope Apple eats into their market share hard.
Apple is having their Windows ME moment.
It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses.
It's all about the software they would say. The chickens have come home to roost.
I still haven't found any concrete evidence but I think the Key travel on Neo is at least 1-2mm higher than Air and Pro. And back to the good old MacBook Pro Early 2015 era keyboard.
If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
But on the other hand, this is kind of the culmination of them owning their hardware stack. They can avoid the commoditization race to the bottom since they are the exclusive owners of a significant amount of their hardware vertical, From chips to enclosure. Perhaps that will let them retain the margins that were previously driven by a consumer base that prized prestige over price.
While my intuition is that this may be the last big cash grab that Apple squeezes out of their premium image, they did have a massive hit back in the day with the original iMac (the CRT based one). They've defined "cheap and premium" categories before.
People have been asking for iPhone SE to come back for what feels like decades, maybe they will do that next.
> "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers"
Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
The headline hints at a causation that I don't think exists.