PC makers unhappy at Apple’s big bright Mac future

Developers at Apple Park met the new processors

Apple’s growing market share has PC notebook manufacturers running scared, according to a paywalled report from Digitimes. It seems Apple’s competitors are facing dual headwinds of declining demand for their products while interest in what Apple offers grows.

Did you not see this coming?

It’s particularly telling (and utterly predictable) that the report cites the launch of new Apple MacBooks in the latter half of 2022 as being significant headaches to competitors.

It’s not a huge surprise. We know that Apple’s sales have broken out on strength of the company’s powerful M-series chips.

We also know that Apple has broken the traditional psychological resistance toward its solutions in the enterprise as that’s a pattern that has been emerging for years. “The way the demand is growing and the expectations of younger generations joining the workforce, Apple devices will be the number one [enterprise] endpoint by 2030,” Jamf CIO Linh Lam told me the other week.

Now that pattern is translating into market share gains even as the overall market size shrinks in face of declining consumer sentiment.

I know it hurts

The thing is, many PC makers work on relatively slim margins, which means the loss of market share hurts their bottom line. Not only this, but while their sales are high their margins aren’t, which leaves many less capable of managing problems in the supply chain as economic, health, and political instability continues to wreak damage.

With the M2 MacBook Air coming in at just over $1,100, competitors are really concerned they’ll lose further market share to the Apple juggernaut.

Well might they be concerned, given that these new Macs seem to be eliminating PC models in just about every performance test. “The 2022 Apple MacBook Pro 13 with M2 chip has completely outclassed a Dell XPS 13 Plus with Intel Core i7-1260P processor in a series of synthetic benchmarks,” reports NotebookCheck.

Given that the M1 MacBook Pro 13 and the M1 MacBook Air both displayed outstanding performance per watt, the die looks dark for PC makers seeking share. These are simply better computers, and because Apple owns the chips it can deliver them at prices that compete. Notebook Check gives the new M2 MBP13 system 92%.

To look at this future you’re gonna need shades

Which, coupled with Apple’s iPhone ascendancy and the looming appearance of its AR glasses, which even if no one buys them mean the company will absolutely dent reality, keeping the brand in the spotlight even as struggling PC vendors dance against each other for share in a receding market – Apple stands to make further gains.

And that’s even before the future of high-powered desktop computing appears in the form of the M-series Mac Pro, or the inevitable debut of M-class chips in iPhones probably by c.2024, at which point the power/performance discussion will pretty much resolve in favor of AAPL. What else are you going to do with low power 3nm Mac-class chip, but put it inside a phone?

I’m not surprised competitors are worried. To paraphrase the late and great Douglas Adams, “So long, and thanks for the GUI.”

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