MacBook Pro and MacBook Air overwhelmingly drive Apple Mac sales
New research claims to have details on exactly how dominant MacBook Pro and MacBook Air sales are, versus desktop contemporaries.
Apple customers prefer portable devices across Mac, iPhone, and iPad
Mac sales have been declining, with even the 2023 MacBook Air seeing a significant drop in demand. A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) says that of all Apple's Mac sales, though, a clear 90% are the portable MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.
Apple does not release the details of its Mac sales figures, and CIRP does not detail its research methodology. The report does claim to cover all US Mac sales for the year of 2023.
In that period, CIRP says that the MacBook Pro represented 51% of all Mac sales in the US. The MacBook Air took 39%.
The remaining 10% of sales is distributed fairly uniformly across the various desktop Macs available. The iMac and Mac Pro comprise 4% and 3% of the total sales, respectively.
Then both the Mac mini and the Mac Studio represent just 1% of US Mac sales each.
Mac computer shares (twelve months ending December 2023)
Within the MacBook Air sales, there's a small but noticeable preference for the larger screen size. About 53% of buyers chose the 15-inch model.
With the MacBook Pro, the small difference is reversed as 54% chose the 14-inch edition, while 46% bought the 16-inch model.
The preference for larger display sizes in laptops suggests a changing consumer mindset towards portability without compromising functionality. Apple's strategic focus on laptops doesn't diminish the value of desktops.
CIRP's report concludes that, naturally, the sales figures are why Apple tends to concentrate on promoting its portable Macs. It theorizes that new, thinner designs are making the larger-screen MacBook Air more attractive than their arguably bulkier predecessors.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Apple's Mac ASP would be on order $2000 if these numbers are right. That would be the envy of the PC world.
I would believe for dollar share, not necessarily unit share.
https://cirpapple.substack.com/about
1% = 5 people.
According to survey sites, this sample size should be enough for reliable data on tens of millions of customers:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
https://www.checkmarket.com/sample-size-calculator/
but these numbers are clearly off, possibly due to the people they are surveying and where. If they do the surveys outside Apple Stores, that wouldn't represent online purchasing data.
Steam has a hardware survey:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Ignoring the unidentified segment (Mac Studio is missing), that says roughly:
Macbook Pro: 54%
Macbook Air: 32%
iMac: 10%
Mac mini: 4%
Mac Pro 0.5%
These are weighted by gaming but would be a larger sample survey. Laptop proportion is 86%. People wonder why the desktop lines get less attention, it's because the trend is continuing down and people are moving to laptops.
Another test is number of Geekbench results (if they filtered duplicate hardware, it would be more accurate):
Macbook Pro = 7028 pages (55%)
Macbook Air = 2485 (20%)
iMac = 1179 (10%)
Mac Studio = 483 (4%)
Mac mini = 1141 (9%)
Mac Pro = 408 (3%)
The numbers vary between different sets of data but the overall proportions are fairly similar.
When did it drop this low?
Wasn't majority of dekstop mac sales iMac in the past?
You can make a good guess when the Mac Pro sales started dropping. Probably 2010 time frame. After 2010, Apple's Mac Pro development went bonkers. iMac? Probably in the 2019 time frame. No big updates to the iMac happened after that date or so. Today, very very few people need an iMac let alone a headless Mac. It's a niche of a niche at less than 5% share of total Mac sales.