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Apple seems to overlook how much timing matters for Mac sales in academia. Macs—especially MacBooks—absolutely dominate among professors (I’d guess ~90% in my d
by behnamoh 1y ago
Apple seems to overlook how much timing matters for Mac sales in academia. Macs—especially MacBooks—absolutely dominate among professors (I’d guess ~90% in my department).
The academic fiscal year often ends in Aug/Sep, and new faculty usually get a “technology fund” for buying their first computer. A lot of us use that to get the latest Mac. Historically, Apple’s October refresh was just late enough to miss that budget window, but people would still wait a month or two for the new models.
If they push announcements even further (as the article suggests—early 2026), it’s a different story. New hires can’t wait half a year with no laptop, so they’ll just buy whatever’s top-of-the-line right now. For research folks who need GPU power, that could easily mean a 5090-based laptop instead of a Mac.
- moralestapia 1y agoThey would just buy the M4? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The average user, even the "power user", does not care/know the difference between an M4 and whatever the M5 will be.
- behnamoh 1y agoLike I said, most people want something that's the "latest"; M4 is already one year old. wrt the second part of your comment: Academics care about speed, RAM, battery life, the ability to run the latest AI models at a decent speed (M4 is still relatively slow).
- nickthegreek 1y agom4 laptop checks the boxes on ram options (albiet a high price) and battery life. The m4 macbook is running AI slow compared too..... what competitive alternative? I'm impressed at how fast gpt-oss-20b ran on my m2 24gb system.
- AceJohnny2 1y ago> (M4 is still relatively slow). How does it compare to Windows laptops?
- rbanffy 1y agoThere are Windows laptops with faster GPUs. Being Nvidia certainly helps with software support. Are they comparable? No way. Laptops with x86 CPUs and discrete GPUs need a lot of power and dissipate a lot of heat. This makes them larger, heavier, louder, and with terrible battery life. If they are gamer laptops, they also look like toys.
- sofixa 1y agoUnless you compare base models (entry level MacBooks are very price competitive, but then upgrades are very expensive), they blow Apple devices on performance and price/performance. An HP Omen or Asus ROG Zephyrus with 1-2TB SSD, 32-64GB RAM, powerful CPU, and a proper NVIDIA 4/5070-5080 (which is better at gaming and AI than M chips, or if you need "unified memory" for bigger AI models, AMD APUs are pretty good) for less than a similar memory and disk (let alone performance in most tasks) MacBook. Battery life is worse though. Depending on the use (3-4h gaming, 7-8h regular use) still plenty though.
- cromka 1y agoBut as you said, 90% use Apple anyway, so why would Apple bother at all?
- mrweasel 1y agoMost of academics write papers, they care about none of those things. Unless you work on AI, which most don't, then you don't care that the M4 is a little slow for that purpose. The academics who are working on large dataset frequently have access to cluster computers or large servers running in the university datacenter... or frequently sits under their desk, because they have trust issues.
- exasperaited 1y ago> most people want something that's the "latest" Most people want something affordable and adequate. > Academics care about speed, RAM, battery life, the ability to run the latest AI models at a decent speed (M4 is still relatively slow). Most academics do not give a flying fuck about running local LLMs. Academia is more than LLM researchers. Most academics probably care most about battery life and portability and whether it runs Teams, like every other person.
- rbanffy 1y ago> M4 is still relatively slow Don't expect too much from a single generation upgrade. M4 to M5 won't be anything like the move from Intel to their own silicon.
- socalgal2 1y ago> most people want something that's the "latest" citation needed. AFAICT, sales data says that "most people" want a bargin and would prefer $200 off than 10% faster newest etc... Most people buy 1 or 2 generations old.
- zaphirplane 1y agoDouble reverse Citation needed
- crinkly 1y agoAs someone who hangs around with academics outside the comp sci field regularly they mostly seem to have old MacBooks which are falling to bits. Not sure I’ve even seen an ARM one yet. They mostly don’t need a lot of juice and don’t want anyone changing anything on it. Also I don’t think I’ve seen anything more than a sneer on AI.
- zamadatix 1y agoIt's tough for me to justify upgrading an M1 device to an M4 device for the AI performance improvement, going from an M4 to an M5 for a small segment of the user base is not moving the needle enough to sway something like this. Anyone really geeked about AI performance to the level of not picking something because of it (be it price or performance) should not be looking at a laptop anyways.
- camdenreslink 1y agoI would venture a guess that 99% of academics could run whatever workloads they have on something half as powerful as an M1 Mac. Very few need or want to run cutting edge LLM models on their laptop.
- pjmlp 1y agoHow universities have changed, almost 40 years ago we cared to have access at a computer, any at all. I have had classmates that did the entire 5 year engineering degree in Software Engineering, using the computer labs computers, the modern ones running a mix of Windows 95 and Red-Hat dual booting, or the more ancient MS-DOS/Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and terminals to the DG/UX server. Anyone was happy to have a computer of some sort.
- titanomachy 1y agoTo a first approximation, 100% of Apple’s customers are not university professors.
- Detrytus 1y agoWhat about university students? They also start their classes in September, and while they have no "budgeting deadline", they still need to buy some computer around that time.
- cvwright 1y agoI think Apple has historically used the college student market to clear out their remaining stock of last year’s MacBooks. Otherwise why release the new models just after classes have started?
- OJFord 1y agoI agree with that - 'back to school sale' sounds a lot better than 'end of line clearance'.
- maratc 1y agoNothing changes about them, as (previously) new Apple MacBooks weren't available until October, more than a month after their classes start.
- Detrytus 1y agoBut the argument here was that one month delay was not ideal, but acceptable, but a longer delay will have more severe effect on demand.
- chasd00 1y ago> What about university students? interestingly, i have a teen that will be heading off to college in a couple years. My plan is to send him off to the dorm with a Macbook and not his gaming rig heh. Although, inevitably, it will be up to him to decide how to make the best use of his time..
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sys_64738 1y agoIs anybody buying x86 based laptops nowadays? It seems that there are few advantages over ARM based Windows/Linux or the M-series laptops.
- lenerdenator 1y agoMost people buying laptops, probably. The advantage is all of that legacy software that some process relies on and hasn't been meaningfully updated in 10+ years and won't be ported over to the ARM processors that you damned kids are running on because back in my day we paid for one copy of x86 software and that got us through 10 winters, dammit.
- simmonmt 1y agoUphill both ways
- lenerdenator 1y agoAnd you were thankful to have two uphills. A lot of people didn’t even have that!
- criddell 1y agoI think that's still most of what Dell, HP, and Lenovo sell.
- SwamyM 1y agoMost of corporate America is still primarily using x86 systems.
- wmf 1y agoWindows on ARM doesn't work well and has very low sales.
- unethical_ban 1y agoLink me to a reliable brand of ARM laptop that runs Linux and is high performance! I'm enjoying my framework AMD laptop although the battery life with suspend is miserable.
- whizzter 1y agoI think it might just be the other way around, if they front-loaded a lot of inventory shipments before tariffs were due to hit they might be loaded with unusually high inventory levels that needs shifting and will be hard to do so at price if a new model is out. Add to this the recent economic uncertainty and prospective buyers might just have been holding up purchases (thus further adding to inventory if they already front-loaded before tariffs). As for people buying powerful machines that could be worth going to a 5090 based machine instead, they're probably a fairly small part of the Mac purchaser market in the big picture.
- ryao 1y agoThey could just buy the M4 models.
- radicaldreamer 1y agoApple has pretty sophisticated modeling for their sales cycle so I assume that it they aren't simply looking at the academic lifecycle. Professors are a very small % of the education market, most of their sales come from high school and college students and during back to school season.
- mrcwinn 1y agoI can assure you that by now Apple has a near perfect model for timing releases to optimize sales.
- pjmlp 1y agoOnly in countries like US, across the globe many do with whatever they can get their hands on.