Why did Mac sales plunge an ADDITIONAL 23%?

[Aston441]

PC shipments decline slows in Q3 2023, but Apple plunges over 23% | TechCrunch

The PC market decline slowed this quarter, but Apple shipments were down 23% according to Gartner, IDC and Canalys.

techcrunch.com

Is anyone buying Macs any more?


Well here is my data point of one:


After swearing off Apple in the 90s for screwing me over with their reneged promise for System 9, I couldn't deny that in 2011, the best value for the money in a windows PC was a bootcamped Macintosh.

That got me into OS X, which was obviously superior to Windows. Then. The integrated ecosystem was great.

Fast forward a few years, my perfectly functional, perfectly capable, 2011 Mac was dropped from updates a few years ago. (It still has enough power to run the latest MacOS, but Marketing through forced obsolescence reigns) Fully updated Windows still works on it, so thats OK. I guess. So I bought another new Mac in 2019. Four years later OS X support was dropped. Again. 🤔

So should I buy a new Mac I ask myself? Well it can't run Windows any more. Jobs' brilliant bootcamp move, that made Macintosh the most popular Windows capable PC, 13 years ago, is no more.

I just bought a new Dell last month. Dell is now the highest performance per dollar.

Apple hasn't just lost it's way, THERE IS NO WAY ANY MORE.

Going to 100% ARM without making a deal with Microsoft was astonishingly short sited.

The Mac is back to being an isolated, niche machine. It's the 90s all over again, except without all the thin beautiful women everywhere.

 

[Chuckeee]

3Q sales are an interesting data point but I would be interested in YTD sales. I thought Apple Mac sales were extremely strong during 1Q and 2Q as compared to the rest of the company sector. And 3Q drop was [at least partially] adjustment to rise from the 1st half.

 

[Aston441]

3Q sales are an interesting data point but I would be interested in YTD sales. I thought Apple Mac sales were extremely strong during 1Q and 2Q as compared to the rest of the company sector. And 3Q drop was [at least partially] adjustment to rise from the 1st half.

This makes four consecutive quarters of plummeting Mac sales.

Apple’s sales fall for the third consecutive quarter | CNN Business

Apple said Thursday that its revenue slipped 1% to $81.8 billion for its quarter ending July 1, marking the third consecutive year-over-year drop in quarterly revenue for the world’s most valuable company.

amp.cnn.com

ARM without any other compatibility, not just Windows, but Linux too, is something the market is not wanting to spend their dollars on any more.

Additionally, Apple's sudden aggressive cutting off support, of fast and powerful Macs, to try to force people to buy new Macs, was short sited. They did not realize how much that would anger their (now) former fans.

 

[phrehdd]

PC shipments decline slows in Q3 2023, but Apple plunges over 23% | TechCrunch

The PC market decline slowed this quarter, but Apple shipments were down 23% according to Gartner, IDC and Canalys.

techcrunch.com

Is anyone buying Macs any more?


Well here is my data point of one:


After swearing off Apple in the 90s for screwing me over with their reneged promise for System 9, I couldn't deny that in 2011, the best value for the money in a windows PC was a bootcamped Macintosh.

That got me into OS X, which was obviously superior to Windows. Then. The integrated ecosystem was great.

Fast forward a few years, my perfectly functional, perfectly capable, 2011 Mac was dropped from updates a few years ago. (It still has enough power to run the latest MacOS, but Marketing through forced obsolescence reigns) Fully updated Windows still works on it, so thats OK. I guess. So I bought another new Mac in 2019. Four years later OS X support was dropped. Again. 🤔

So should I buy a new Mac I ask myself? Well it can't run Windows any more. Jobs' brilliant bootcamp move, that made Macintosh the most popular Windows capable PC, 13 years ago, is no more.

I just bought a new Dell last month. Dell is now the highest performance per dollar.

Apple hasn't just lost it's way, THERE IS NO WAY ANY MORE.

Going to 100% ARM without making a deal with Microsoft was astonishingly short sited.

The Mac is back to being an isolated, niche machine. It's the 90s all over again, except without all the thin beautiful women everywhere.

Your post is similar to some thing I wrote way back elsewhere. However, I am running a VM of Windows 11 ARM in Parallels which seems to work reasonably well.

I admit I have a love/hate thing with Apple and I don't see that changing any time soon. As for Windows - honestly hate what happened to it after Win XP. I stopped with PCs as I got lazy about Linux and now just remain with Apple stuff for now. Apple's marketing is based on frustrating some of us - leave some feature off a system only to have it show up on the next one or two incarnations later (even though it is available on PCs), and killing opportunities for people to upgrade their system or fix them. The latter also suggests that Apple is not exactly so green as they boast. I'll remain with my favourite Macs I have had being my first Mac - a Mac Pro that was great for updating and my 2015 MBP. I have A Studio Max now and I do like it quite a bit.

 

[Aston441]

Your post is similar to some thing I wrote way back elsewhere. However, I am running a VM of Windows 11 ARM in Parallels which seems to work reasonably well.

I admit I have a love/hate thing with Apple and I don't see that changing any time soon. As for Windows - honestly hate what happened to it after Win XP. I stopped with PCs as I got lazy about Linux and now just remain with Apple stuff for now. Apple's marketing is based on frustrating some of us - leave some feature off a system only to have it show up on the next one or two incarnations later (even though it is available on PCs), and killing opportunities for people to upgrade their system or fix them. The latter also suggests that Apple is not exactly so green as they boast. I'll remain with my favourite Macs I have had being my first Mac - a Mac Pro that was great for updating and my 2015 MBP. I have A Studio Max now and I do like it quite a bit.

I don't have much to add, except to say that for the time, WinXP was pure awesomeness. Could do anything with it, and it never fought me trying to get done what I needed done. MacOS is still a huge pain sometimes just to do simple things, that didn't require any thought or effort, or searching or googling under WinXP.

I haven't liked an OS as much, fore or since. It was extremely transparent as to what was going on under the hood compared to today's mess of Op Systems.


ETA: I think what I really liked about Win2000/XP, is that they were more or less VaxVMS, which was pure simple multitasking beauty. Unfortunately at this point, so much kludgey inefficient code has been glommered on top of it all, it doesn't feel remotely the same any more.

 

[apostolosdt]

Parallels on ARM Macs (especially, the Business version that sees more than 8 GM RAM on the VMs) works with Windows 11 running PS, among other demanding apps. I have a Mac Pro 5,1 and what I miss most from the latest Macs is their lack of upgradeability.

 

[phrehdd]

I don't have much to add, except to say that for the time, WinXP was pure awesomeness. Could do anything with it, and it never fought me trying to get done what I needed done. MacOS is still a huge pain sometimes just to do simple things, that didn't require any thought or effort, or searching or googling under WinXP.

I haven't liked an OS as much, fore or since. It was extremely transparent as to what was going on under the hood compared to today's mess of Op Systems.


ETA: I think what I really liked about Win2000/XP, is that they were more or less VaxVMS, which was pure simple multitasking beauty. Unfortunately at this point, so much kludgey inefficient code has been glommered on top of it all, it doesn't feel remotely the same any more.

Yes XP days were great and to be honest, my favourite OS of all time was OS/2 followed by DOS and XP...then early Mac Pro series of OSX cat family.

 

[DaveEcc]

The M1 was a big leap. The M2 was a minor increment, and it was late... and sporadic. The iMacs still haven't bumped to M2, nor have the iPad Airs, even though both use the base chip. People hoped the M2 being late was a sign it included the die shrink to 3nm. It did not. The base models laptops had slower storage than the M1 models they replaced... It won't matter to most, it's still plenty quick, but the speed loss was being reported everywhere, and it really doesn't paint a picture of a compelling upgrade.

The Mini getting a Pro chip and the 15" MB Air were nice additions, sure, but nothing else warranted another upgrade to most people. Apple not bothering to upgrade the whole lineup emphasizes that. Anyone thinking long term is waiting for the die shrink to get either meaningful performance boosts, extra battery life, or a mix of both, ray-tracing, and whatever else gets included. Maybe M3 Mac Pros will be able to accept video cards... what a concept.

It seems like the next M is late again, which may be TSMC related, or maybe they're not late, but Apple is waiting 12 months from when M2 launched rather than cutting the M2 generation short, or perhaps they've switched to an 18 month cycle and not bothered to tell anyone.

Outside of Apple's control... let's not forget rampant inflation, making computer upgrades a lower priority for many.

 

[theluggage]

Is anyone buying Macs any more?

Well, yes - otherwise sales would have plunged by 100%.

If you search for "mac sales figures" it appears that mac sales have, somehow, simultaneously soared and plummeted. Just pick whichever figures back the story you want to tell.

Unfortunately, all the actually useful statistics (like, Mac sales over the last 5 years) are safely tucked behind paywalls - it's really not much use trying to extrapolate from a single quarter. Quarterly Mac sales have dipped during a quarter where no new mass market MacBooks or MacBook Pros have been released?! Please give me a moment to contain my shock and awe.

What seems to have happened is that Apple saw a huge uptick in Mac sales around 2021-2022 (best reference I can find quickly). You can have fun speculating why, but there are plenty of reasons why 2021-2022 might have been special - launch of the new M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros in late 2021? Covid increasing work-from-home, so more people buying their own systems rather than using (PC dominated) work PCs? Apple better at dealing with component shortages that other manufacturers? All likely - Apple certainly seemed to have a "better" pandemic than others - and all now returning to normal, replaced by a cost-of-living squeeze. So, yeah, seeing Mac sales falling off now is hardly surprising.

As for Windows/x86 compatibility - that was great in 2006 when Windows was still king and lots of people had that one weird Windows application that they still needed, and even web apps tended to need Internet Explorer to work properly. The world has changed. "Available on iPhone and Android" is the new "Requires Windows 95", Safari is the new Internet Explorer (that's not a compliment, but its an improvement for Apple users...), people can remote-desktop from their Mac into a work PC, you can spin up an x86 Linux instance in the cloud whenever you need one... and if all that fails, Windows-on-ARM is legitimately available via Parallels (and will become more useful if MS makes a success out of WoA).

Boot camp was low-hanging-fruit on Intel Macs - they were effectively PC clones which only needed a BIOS emulation module adding to the EFI firmware (which EFI was always designed to support) to allow Windows to run pretty much out-of-the-box. It was never part of Jobs' plan and Apple only introduced it after hackers managed to install an open-source BIOS on an Intel Mac and demonstrate Windows running rather well. Once the firmware module was added as standard, Boot camp was nothing more than a point-and-drool tool for partitioning disks and pointing the Windows installer at the correct installation drive.

Boot camp on ARM - even with "Windows on ARM" - is a far more complex concept - there's really no concept of a "standard PC clone architecture" for ARM systems and Apple Silicon is very different from other systems based on ARM SoC designs. WoA would need new boot loaders, storage drivers, accelerated graphics drivers etc. to run on Apple silicon. Not impossible - but far more than just "signing a contract with Microsoft" - who would be nuts to sign such a contract anyway (officially endorse a processor which would blow the Qualcomm stuff out of the water but which none of the PC makers who make MS's money for them could buy?)

Apple's choice was to "not do Bootcamp" (needed by a tiny minority of Mac users) or "not do ARM" (which gave the ultra-portable laptops accounting for most of Apple's Mac business a massive power/performance advantage).

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

macOS Sonoma

macOS Sonoma brings stunning screen savers, desktop widgets, new ways to share work and web apps, along with fun personalization tools and Game mode.

www.apple.com

What did you buy in 2019 that isn’t supported by Sonoma?
Are you aware the prior two versions of macOS continue to get updates?
My 2013 Air on Big Sur just aged out…

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

The M1 was a big leap. The M2 was a minor increment, and it was late... and sporadic. The iMacs still haven't bumped to M2, nor have the iPad Airs, even though both use the base chip. People hoped the M2 being late was a sign it included the die shrink to 3nm. It did not. The base models laptops had slower storage than the M1 models they replaced... It won't matter to most, it's still plenty quick, but the speed loss was being reported everywhere, and it really doesn't paint a picture of a compelling upgrade.

The Mini getting a Pro chip and the 15" MB Air were nice additions, sure, but nothing else warranted another upgrade to most people. Apple not bothering to upgrade the whole lineup emphasizes that. Anyone thinking long term is waiting for the die shrink to get either meaningful performance boosts, extra battery life, or a mix of both, ray-tracing, and whatever else gets included. Maybe M3 Mac Pros will be able to accept video cards... what a concept.

It seems like the next M is late again, which may be TSMC related, or maybe they're not late, but Apple is waiting 12 months from when M2 launched rather than cutting the M2 generation short, or perhaps they've switched to an 18 month cycle and not bothered to tell anyone.

Outside of Apple's control... let's not forget rampant inflation, making computer upgrades a lower priority for many.

The “M” series is just a continuation of the old “A-X” series, and those were never on a yearly upgrade cycle.
A9X: November 2015
A10X: June 2017
A12X: November 2018
A12Z: literally the same everything as the A12X plus an additional GPU core, does not count.
M1=A14X: November 2020
M2=A15X: June 2022

There was never any indication that there would be yearly upgrades of the “M” series, other than random posters on the Internet saying “well the iPhone does it, so the Mac should too”.

Watching apples release cycles throughout the 2010s should have made it very clear that the majority of Macs were not on a yearly upgrade cycle, but apparently it wasn’t made clear enough.

Throughout the 2010s, the MacBook Air went three and a half years without being updated, even though there were perfectly fine brand new Intel chips that could’ve been put in it.
The Mac mini went two years without an upgrade, then another four years without an upgrade, despite the fact that it could’ve been upgraded several times in that time period.
The iMac wasn’t touched in 2016 or 2018 when it could have been.
The Mac Pro went three years without an update, then another six years without an update, then another four years without an update.

Some of this is on the fault of Intel.
But certainly not all of it.

 

[eicca]

Apple’s trend of changing things just to change things, and often making them much worse than before, might have something to do with it.

 

[mielie]

Well, yes - otherwise sales would have plunged by 100%.

If you search for "mac sales figures" it appears that mac sales have, somehow, simultaneously soared and plummeted. Just pick whichever figures back the story you want to tell.

Unfortunately, all the actually useful statistics (like, Mac sales over the last 5 years) are safely tucked behind paywalls - it's really not much use trying to extrapolate from a single quarter. Quarterly Mac sales have dipped during a quarter where no new mass market MacBooks or MacBook Pros have been released?! Please give me a moment to contain my shock and awe.

What seems to have happened is that Apple saw a huge uptick in Mac sales around 2021-2022 (best reference I can find quickly). You can have fun speculating why, but there are plenty of reasons why 2021-2022 might have been special - launch of the new M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros in late 2021? Covid increasing work-from-home, so more people buying their own systems rather than using (PC dominated) work PCs? Apple better at dealing with component shortages that other manufacturers? All likely - Apple certainly seemed to have a "better" pandemic than others - and all now returning to normal, replaced by a cost-of-living squeeze. So, yeah, seeing Mac sales falling off now is hardly surprising.

As for Windows/x86 compatibility - that was great in 2006 when Windows was still king and lots of people had that one weird Windows application that they still needed, and even web apps tended to need Internet Explorer to work properly. The world has changed. "Available on iPhone and Android" is the new "Requires Windows 95", Safari is the new Internet Explorer (that's not a compliment, but its an improvement for Apple users...), people can remote-desktop from their Mac into a work PC, you can spin up an x86 Linux instance in the cloud whenever you need one... and if all that fails, Windows-on-ARM is legitimately available via Parallels (and will become more useful if MS makes a success out of WoA).

Boot camp was low-hanging-fruit on Intel Macs - they were effectively PC clones which only needed a BIOS emulation module adding to the EFI firmware (which EFI was always designed to support) to allow Windows to run pretty much out-of-the-box. It was never part of Jobs' plan and Apple only introduced it after hackers managed to install an open-source BIOS on an Intel Mac and demonstrate Windows running rather well. Once the firmware module was added as standard, Boot camp was nothing more than a point-and-drool tool for partitioning disks and pointing the Windows installer at the correct installation drive.

Boot camp on ARM - even with "Windows on ARM" - is a far more complex concept - there's really no concept of a "standard PC clone architecture" for ARM systems and Apple Silicon is very different from other systems based on ARM SoC designs. WoA would need new boot loaders, storage drivers, accelerated graphics drivers etc. to run on Apple silicon. Not impossible - but far more than just "signing a contract with Microsoft" - who would be nuts to sign such a contract anyway (officially endorse a processor which would blow the Qualcomm stuff out of the water but which none of the PC makers who make MS's money for them could buy?)

Apple's choice was to "not do Bootcamp" (needed by a tiny minority of Mac users) or "not do ARM" (which gave the ultra-portable laptops accounting for most of Apple's Mac business a massive power/performance advantage).

A really nice summary explaining why bootcamp is not available for ARM, thanks! I also feel virtualisation has come on in leaps and bounds now, even VM Player does a very passable Windows 11 machine on an M1 and Linux runs beautifully.

But I think a previous poster nailed the major issue with Apple machines currently, and thats the fact they are a closed system (not on its own a problem, and actually has some advantages) and Apple drops support for perfectly good hardware way to early. This has the effect of turning still very capable machines into paperweights.

With the level of control Apple has over their products, it shouldn't be that difficult or expensive to maintain compatibility with major OS releases. I certainly feel that some of the premium paid on Apple products should go towards maintaining support for longer.

I can't imagine I would ever move to Windows, but I run Linux in a VM quite a bit now for work and could see a future where I switch from Apple to Linux if Apple continue this force obsolescence nonsense.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

PC shipments decline slows in Q3 2023, but Apple plunges over 23% | TechCrunch

The PC market decline slowed this quarter, but Apple shipments were down 23% according to Gartner, IDC and Canalys.

techcrunch.com

Is anyone buying Macs any more?


Well here is my data point of one:


After swearing off Apple in the 90s for screwing me over with their reneged promise for System 9, I couldn't deny that in 2011, the best value for the money in a windows PC was a bootcamped Macintosh.

That got me into OS X, which was obviously superior to Windows. Then. The integrated ecosystem was great.

Fast forward a few years, my perfectly functional, perfectly capable, 2011 Mac was dropped from updates a few years ago. (It still has enough power to run the latest MacOS, but Marketing through forced obsolescence reigns) Fully updated Windows still works on it, so thats OK. I guess. So I bought another new Mac in 2019. Four years later OS X support was dropped. Again. 🤔

So should I buy a new Mac I ask myself? Well it can't run Windows any more. Jobs' brilliant bootcamp move, that made Macintosh the most popular Windows capable PC, 13 years ago, is no more.

I just bought a new Dell last month. Dell is now the highest performance per dollar.

Apple hasn't just lost it's way, THERE IS NO WAY ANY MORE.

Going to 100% ARM without making a deal with Microsoft was astonishingly short sited.

The Mac is back to being an isolated, niche machine. It's the 90s all over again, except without all the thin beautiful women everywhere.

Nonsense clickbait headline (it worked, I clicked). Apple remains 4th in worldwide personal computer sales, duh. Jabbering about poorly reported single-quarter sales details is just trolling IMO.

 

[Aston441]

Well, yes - otherwise sales would have plunged by 100%.

If you search for "mac sales figures" it appears that mac sales have, somehow, simultaneously soared and plummeted. Just pick whichever figures back the story you want to tell.

Unfortunately, all the actually useful statistics (like, Mac sales over the last 5 years) are safely tucked behind paywalls - it's really not much use trying to extrapolate from a single quarter. Quarterly Mac sales have dipped during a quarter where no new mass market MacBooks or MacBook Pros have been released?! Please give me a moment to contain my shock and awe.

What seems to have happened is that Apple saw a huge uptick in Mac sales around 2021-2022 (best reference I can find quickly). You can have fun speculating why, but there are plenty of reasons why 2021-2022 might have been special - launch of the new M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros in late 2021? Covid increasing work-from-home, so more people buying their own systems rather than using (PC dominated) work PCs? Apple better at dealing with component shortages that other manufacturers? All likely - Apple certainly seemed to have a "better" pandemic than others - and all now returning to normal, replaced by a cost-of-living squeeze. So, yeah, seeing Mac sales falling off now is hardly surprising.

As for Windows/x86 compatibility - that was great in 2006 when Windows was still king and lots of people had that one weird Windows application that they still needed, and even web apps tended to need Internet Explorer to work properly. The world has changed. "Available on iPhone and Android" is the new "Requires Windows 95", Safari is the new Internet Explorer (that's not a compliment, but its an improvement for Apple users...), people can remote-desktop from their Mac into a work PC, you can spin up an x86 Linux instance in the cloud whenever you need one... and if all that fails, Windows-on-ARM is legitimately available via Parallels (and will become more useful if MS makes a success out of WoA).

Boot camp was low-hanging-fruit on Intel Macs - they were effectively PC clones which only needed a BIOS emulation module adding to the EFI firmware (which EFI was always designed to support) to allow Windows to run pretty much out-of-the-box. It was never part of Jobs' plan and Apple only introduced it after hackers managed to install an open-source BIOS on an Intel Mac and demonstrate Windows running rather well. Once the firmware module was added as standard, Boot camp was nothing more than a point-and-drool tool for partitioning disks and pointing the Windows installer at the correct installation drive.

Boot camp on ARM - even with "Windows on ARM" - is a far more complex concept - there's really no concept of a "standard PC clone architecture" for ARM systems and Apple Silicon is very different from other systems based on ARM SoC designs. WoA would need new boot loaders, storage drivers, accelerated graphics drivers etc. to run on Apple silicon. Not impossible - but far more than just "signing a contract with Microsoft" - who would be nuts to sign such a contract anyway (officially endorse a processor which would blow the Qualcomm stuff out of the water but which none of the PC makers who make MS's money for them could buy?)

Apple's choice was to "not do Bootcamp" (needed by a tiny minority of Mac users) or "not do ARM" (which gave the ultra-portable laptops accounting for most of Apple's Mac business a massive power/performance advantage).

Good post. A lot to consider in what you wrote.

 

[Aston441]

macOS Sonoma

macOS Sonoma brings stunning screen savers, desktop widgets, new ways to share work and web apps, along with fun personalization tools and Game mode.

www.apple.com

What did you buy in 2019 that isn’t supported by Sonoma?
Are you aware the prior two versions of macOS continue to get updates?
My 2013 Air on Big Sur just aged out…

12” MacBook. Released 2017, but purchased brand new in 2019. Apple stopped selling it about 6 weeks after I bought it, then dropped support this year.

 

[Aston441]

But I think a previous poster nailed the major issue with Apple machines currently, and thats the fact they are a closed system (not on its own a problem, and actually has some advantages) and Apple drops support for perfectly good hardware way to early. This has the effect of turning still very capable machines into paperweights.

With the level of control Apple has over their products, it shouldn't be that difficult or expensive to maintain compatibility with major OS releases. I certainly feel that some of the premium paid on Apple products should go towards maintaining support for longer.

Apple hardly has to do anything. The OCLP community did it all for them… In fact Apple has gone out of their way to actively roadblock what the OCLP people have been doing.

 

[GMShadow]

Apple hardly has to do anything. The OCLP community did it all for them… In fact Apple has gone out of their way to actively roadblock what the OCLP people have been doing.

Apple doesn't actively roadblock them - they are simply removing old features and code from the OS that are no longer needed. Removing things like USB 1.1 support isn't 'roadblocking' OCLP - it's "we don't support any machines that use this and haven't for a few years now, delete it."

Which they've been doing for quite some time - dropping 32-bit support was how Apple finally forced Microsoft and Adobe to stop using Carbon libraries (which dated back to Mac OS 8, I might add) in Office and Creative Suite, and was done in preparation for the switch to Apple Silicon which was just a few years off at that point.

 

[Aston441]

Apple doesn't actively roadblock them - they are simply removing old features and code from the OS that are no longer needed. Removing things like USB 1.1 support isn't 'roadblocking' OCLP - it's "we don't support any machines that use this and haven't for a few years now, delete it."

Which they've been doing for quite some time - dropping 32-bit support was how Apple finally forced Microsoft and Adobe to stop using Carbon libraries (which dated back to Mac OS 8, I might add) in Office and Creative Suite, and was done in preparation for the switch to Apple Silicon which was just a few years off at that point.

Neither of us have been in their meetings on this, so neither of us really know.

The fact is, that even 15 year old machines run the latest MacOS well.

Apple does not want those old machines to be doing anything except taking up landfill space. That is a fact. That is their deliberate decision. How much effort they are putting into forcing those machines into the trashbin is speculation. Might be a lot of effort (deliberate OCLP roadblocking decisions), might be a little.

But when they took out USB 1.1, they absolutely knew it would stymie the OCLP people. Only they know the conversations that took place around that decision, and others, vis a vis OCLP.

 

[floral]

...Not interested in the women part (if anything, a man) but I have sort of noticed that the Apple community has gotten something of a sweet-spot preference?

An example is the dreaded 2016-2018 era where the MacBook lineup was basically demolished because Apple tried new things, like a new keyboard layout, touch bar, and slimming up the form factor. People really did NOT like this, so I guess Apple used this feedback to learn to not make as much change. Meanwhile, the iPhone userbase was roaring (positively) over the famous iPhone X, but this got bundled with the Mac feedback to stop changing things.

Now, we're getting little to no change from every device across the board. Minor spec bumps here and there, little to no design changes, just general necessary upgrades every year, no strings attached, for Macs, iPhones and iPads. It's what the Mac users wanted, but now we're suffering the side effects of this... mainly, everything is just pretty boring now, and people are keeping their devices for years, hoping for that "one big new upgrade", but it doesn't look like it will happen soon. :/

 

[DaveEcc]

demolished because Apple tried new things, like a new keyboard layout

The keyboard wasn't just a preference issue, they were a broken design. I could not find a single system with a working keyboard within my local Apple Store. Every single machine I tried had at least one dead letter (I typed "The quick brown fox..." phrase on each, or tried to). The machines were not fit for purpose. The internet, in this case, was not exaggerating. After 3 years of trying to tweak it into being less bad, they reverted to a working keyboard design.

The lesson here should not be "don't innovate", but "don't f**k up a primary input device", and "ensure parts prone to failure can be quickly, easily, and cost effectively be swapped out".

 

[GMShadow]

Neither of us have been in their meetings on this, so neither of us really know.

The fact is, that even 15 year old machines run the latest MacOS well.

Apple does not want those old machines to be doing anything except taking up landfill space. That is a fact. That is their deliberate decision. How much effort they are putting into forcing those machines into the trashbin is speculation. Might be a lot of effort (deliberate OCLP roadblocking decisions), might be a little.

But when they took out USB 1.1, they absolutely knew it would stymie the OCLP people. Only they know the conversations that took place around that decision, and others, vis a vis OCLP.

I hate to break it to you but Apple's engineering teams don't even consider OCLP when making decisions. That userbase is a tiny minority of a tiny minority. There's no conspiracy.

Most Macs sold are laptops. Laptops wear out physically with regularity, or are damaged. By the 5-7 year mark most of them are pretty much done.

Right now we know they're on the march to phase out Intel Macs. That doesn't require guesswork. Apple Silicon Macs are where the development focus is, and they don't need old legacy support.

 

[floral]

The lesson here should not be "don't innovate", but "don't f**k up a primary input device", and "ensure parts prone to failure can be quickly, easily, and cost effectively be swapped out".

What I mean is, I think they misread the feedback as "don't innovate" instead of "don't ruin a keyboard".

 

[theluggage]

An example is the dreaded 2016-2018 era where the MacBook lineup was basically demolished because Apple tried new things, like a new keyboard layout, touch bar, and slimming up the form factor. People really did NOT like this, so I guess Apple used this feedback to learn to not make as much change.

Which isn't a bad thing. The inconvenient truth is that the personal computer is now a "mature" product and sales will inevitably fall back somewhat, especially compared to the good old days when an 18 month old computer was obsolete.
I think the 2016 MBP fisaco was a classic case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" - the pre-2016 MacBook Pro design was near-perfect and Apple had one job to do - update it to the latest processors and display tech. Apple tried to change things that didn't need to be changed, and got burned as a result.

 

[Timpetus]

The keyboard wasn't just a preference issue, they were a broken design. I could not find a single system with a working keyboard within my local Apple Store. Every single machine I tried had at least one dead letter (I typed "The quick brown fox..." phrase on each, or tried to). The machines were not fit for purpose. The internet, in this case, was not exaggerating. After 3 years of trying to tweak it into being less bad, they reverted to a working keyboard design.

The lesson here should not be "don't innovate", but "don't f**k up a primary input device", and "ensure parts prone to failure can be quickly, easily, and cost effectively be swapped out".

Interesting. I still have my 2016 15" MBP and it has a perfectly functional keyboard that I actually quite like. I guess I'm not as picky as many, as I also like my 14" M1 MBP's keyboard. I did get a "free" replacement from Apple when I had them replace the battery, since they swap out the top case when you do that so it's included in the $200 battery service. Not a bad deal, although the only thing wrong with my old keyboard was my own fault (a few keys were sticky because a sugary drink was spilled on the laptop). I miss the touch bar sometimes, especially when autofilling forms as it was great to tap my choices on it!

Overall, I feel I got my money's worth from the 2016 MBP. I do miss being able to run windows games in PlayOnMac, but eventually we'll get some sort of emulation working with Apple Silicon that's workable enough for older programs.