News Apple's M1 Chip Is Bringing Long-Time x86 PC Users to the Arm-Powered Mac

[Admin]

Apple said in an earnings call that half of its Mac and iPad sales in 2Q21 were to people who'd never owned the devices before.

Apple's M1 Chip Is Bringing Long-Time x86 PC Users to the Arm-Powered Mac : Read more

 

[hotaru.hino]

...was followed by Apple CEO Tim Cook announcing that 66% of Mac and iPad sales in China were to new customers during that same time period.

Title feels kinda misleading given that.

 

[rgd1101]

for the overprice pc/phone/pad? no thanks.

 

[excalibur1814]

Total sold? 74 laptops and 47,000 ipads. /s

Clickbait title is clickbait.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Title feels kinda misleading given that.

"...roughly half of the Mac and iPad sales in the second quarter of 2021 were to people who'd never owned those devices."

It can be spun plenty of ways, but half of the new devices going to people that haven't owned an equivalent Apple product before is a big deal. Imagine Dell saying, "50% of people buying our new products have never owned a Dell before." That's a ton of new users, and considering Apple is selling a lot of M1 devices to existing Apple users, it's an even bigger deal.

Total sold? 74 laptops and 47,000 ipads. /s

What's the split between laptops and iPads? I doubt it's as skewed as you sarcastically suggested. Maybe not 50-50, but 33-67 is reasonable, and almost certainly better than 25-75.

 

[crimsonfilms]

for the overprice pc/phone/pad? no thanks.

For personal computers, Macs are really not over-priced on its first cycle (when they are introduced). They do become overprice since their product cycle is slower compared to PCs. However, Macs resale value is much higher than comparable PCs.

For iPhones and iPad, I have no idea.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

Some of us like to buy tablets and phones that actually work and are not pieces of junk. And that also can be software upgradable for many years to come and not useless junk in two years

 

[hotaru.hino]

"...roughly half of the Mac and iPad sales in the second quarter of 2021 were to people who'd never owned those devices."

It can be spun plenty of ways, but half of the new devices going to people that haven't owned an equivalent Apple product before is a big deal. Imagine Dell saying, "50% of people buying our new products have never owned a Dell before." That's a ton of new users, and considering Apple is selling a lot of M1 devices to existing Apple users, it's an even bigger deal.

It seemed misleading to me in that one thing was being said, then said another, but I guess I was looking too hard into this.

On a side note, I do believe the iPad figure. The Android tablet market is kinda of lacking and your options is either cheap tablets that are only good for reading Wikipedia or high-end, doesn't really make sense for everyone tablets. There's a significant gap in the ~$300 market, and while I believe Samsung has a tablet in there, it's not as compelling overall as Apple's.

 

[The Art Vandelay]

Different audiences, different application, different budgets, different different goals, different thought process then x86 Windoze diehards. They are about as much competition as Sun Microsystems was to Amiga.

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

As Apple improves their ecosystem even further with refinements to their own in house silicon, I expect these kind of sales will continue for as long as they have a similar or at least mostly similar update/refresh cadence as their x86 counterparts. So far, the M1 seems to be ahead of whatever options Apple had to work with had they continued to use 3rd party CPUs.

 

[-Fran-]

Heh, no.

Apple is just good at making noise and sell devices for a (mentally) captive audience. Anyone that truly uses a normal X86-bsed PC to its full potential will never move to Apple until they fix their Stockholm Syndrome tactics.

Cheers!

 

[tripleX]

Last quarter:

Intel's CCG (Client Computing Group - PC chips) - $10.6 Billion
Apple Mac's - $9.1 Billion.

Now, Apple Mac's sell as finished devices, so they make far more money per unit. However, this is a blowout gain for Apple - nearly double the income quarter over quarter. Some of those sales consist of previous-gen Macs, yes, but Apple says it already sells more M1 macs than Intel-powered versions.

You could argue the topic many ways, but regardless, Apple is making stupid fast progress here.

 

[Heat_Fan89]

Mac's suck at playing real AAA titles. Can it run MSFS 2020 30 or 60FPS without spending $20K? Nope. Can it run Nvidia cards? Nope.

The title is misleading as others have noted. If you want to play Civilization V or VI or Apple Arcade games, sure you can game on a Mac. If you are looking to play something like Project Cars 3 or the latest Metro or Cyperpunk games then look elsewhere because if it could you will get locked in to the hardware ecosystem where you'll be spending gobs of money on their hardware.

 

[The Art Vandelay]

Mac's suck at playing real AAA titles. Can it run MSFS 2020 30 or 60FPS without spending $20K? Nope. Can it run Nvidia cards? Nope.

The title is misleading as others have noted. If you want to play Civilization V or VI or Apple Arcade games, sure you can game on a Mac. If you are looking to play something like Project Cars 3 or the latest Metro or Cyperpunk games then look elsewhere because if it could you will get locked in to the hardware ecosystem where you'll be spending gobs of money on their hardware.

I completely agree, people who play games should not be Apple customers.

 

[mwestall]

Some of us like to buy tablets and phones that actually work and are not pieces of junk. And that also can be software upgradable for many years to come and not useless junk in two years

Whereas most of us can't afford the Cupertino idiot factory's 40% mark up. Notwithstanding I cannot bear the fisher-price Macos UX.

 

[King_V]

I do find the M1 fascinating, though. I vowed that I wouldn't upgrade my old Haswell until AM5 came out.

Now I wonder - is this architecture a big enough leap that Intel and AMD's CPUs now seem like they've missed the boat, in a manner?

 

[arrigob]

I am a PC/Android guy and still am. But I dropped Android last year and went all in. New M1 Macbook Pro, iPad Pro 12.9, iPhone, and Apple Watch. It's my first time owning a Mac and I love it. I will always use PCs for work as I write software for PC but I am slowly learning to program on Mac OS now. So, who knows where this will go. The reason I say this, the article makes sense to me.

 

[Giroro]

Apple seems to be getting almost all of its new business internationally, which makes sense given that the global iOS market share is 13% (And falling), and the global Mac OS market share is usually under 10% (far lower excluding America).

But mostly, it's just a bummer that a company who brands itself so heavily on freedom-of-expression and privacy is pulling out all the stops to win over favor from the Chinese government. Although, again that's not surprising given the draconian controls Apple has in place to keep the company in control over its users, their data, and their locked-up walled-garden app eco system.
Of course, Apple also put out a press release unironically calling the depressing washed-out faded-grey denim colors of their new iMac line "Vibrant", so no reasonable person should ever expect the unrelenting crap blasted out of this company's iMarketing iCannon to come anywhere close to the real-life product.

There's a reason Apple presented this data as a ratio, instead of raw numbers. You really have to ask yourself if the M1 platform actually attracted a lot of new users, or if the M1 Platform caused current Apple customers to abandon ship as quickly as possible. Both are possible with the misleading way they spun this information. With the way Apple continues to lock down and raise prices, I have a hard time believing that their userbase actually grew, at least until I see some real data. I'm sure they made plenty of money since nobody had anything better to do except sit around the house and dump their whole paycheck into making f2p timers tick faster (not to forget an extremely impactful inflation spike) - but growth in revenue is not the same a healthy influx of new users.

 

[kaalus]

Let's hope Microsoft builds their own ARM-based chip soon and releases Windows for ARM. Windows users don't want to become laughing stock, stuck on the outdated x86 architecture. Apple M1 at 20W matches or outperforms 125W Intel chips. M2 will probably completely wipe the floor with anything x86. I'd love to play Flight Simulator 2020 on a 125W ARM64 PC...

 

[Giroro]

It can be spun plenty of ways, but half of the new devices going to people that haven't owned an equivalent Apple product before is a big deal. Imagine Dell saying, "50% of people buying our new products have never owned a Dell before." That's a ton of new users, and considering Apple is selling a lot of M1 devices to existing Apple users, it's an even bigger deal.

Imagine something more realistic, like Dell saying "50% of Dell users refused to buy another Dell".
Same number, different spin. The statistic is at its core very misleading. Apple clearly wants to imply its userbase is exploding with growth. But if that's the case, then why are they pushing this weird specific ratio, instead of saying something like "We grew by XX Million new mac/ipad users, and YY million were converted from PC/android."
Did the company experience poor retention? Was the growth merely in thousands not millions? Was there any growth in Apple users, or did they shrink overall?
Maybe they did great, but there isn't actually enough information given to assume that.

 

[spongiemaster]

I read years ago that Apple owned over 90% of the $1000+ PC market. If those numbers are still relatively accurate, then Apple isn't converting anyone, they are just maintaining their dominant high end market share among new people willing to pay a lot for a prebuilt system. That's still great news for Apple, but not really newsworthy for the PC side as it doesn't indicate any sort of market shift.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Did the company experience poor retention? Was the growth merely in thousands not millions? Was there any growth in Apple users, or did they shrink overall?

This also brings up a point. What defines "new user"? Does Apple secretly know if their users ever used their computers before?

My best guess is they're simply using how many new Apple accounts were made, because how else can you define "new users"?

 

[TheJoker2020]

For personal computers, Macs are really not over-priced on its first cycle (when they are introduced). They do become overprice since their product cycle is slower compared to PCs. However, Macs resale value is much higher than comparable PCs.

Define overpriced...

If someone wants a really basic desktop or laptop for office applications and da intawebz then the cheapest possible Apple is vastly overpriced.

If someone wants a high powered workstation, then for the raw performance an Apple is in the realm of double the price/performance of a non-Apple product.

The "value" of Apple machines is primarily down to software as re-learning a software package can cost a lot of money (and time, which is more money), and likewise the software eco-system. This is why "design" companies often have the secretary using an Apple even though a dirt cheap PC costing half the price would do the job just as well because if anyone else in the company needs to use the secretary's computer they might not be able to easily find their way around, likewise for the server side of things.

Apple is essentially differentiated from all else by the software and software ecosystem, and that is where the majority of the "value" lies IMHO.

 

[Makaveli]

"The M1 chip outperforms much of its x86 competition in various benchmarks even though it's more power-efficient and, in the MacBook Air's case, might be throttled if it starts to get too hot. But in many types of workloads, that combination of performance and power efficiency is essentially unrivaled in notebooks equipped with x86 processors."

Which benchmarks are these the only thing i've seen are useless Geekbench scores?

 

[zodiacfml]

not even click bait or exaggeration, not in my life have I considered Apple products until the M1. Considering Apple products have fat margins and the pricey M1 part at 5nm, one has to wonder how fat the margins are in Intel products since they stagnated at 14nm. Intel lagging and declining is just so disappointing from a tech point of view.