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Apple announces new Mac sales record following MacBook Neo launch
- sourcegrift 7mo agoThis is how you extrapolate one fluff marketing tweet into a full article, watch and learn. I also had the best sales this season
- groundzeros2015 7mo agoUh yes generally corporations emphasize their success.
- 65 7mo agoMaybe PC manufacturers will finally get a wake up call to stop making plastic shitboxes. Maybe Microsoft will get a wake up call too. Though, I kind of doubt it as the incompetence in PC land is comical.
- imeron 7mo agoOh I think Microsoft got the memo: This is Microsoft’s plan to fix Windows 11 https://www.theverge.com/news/897834/microsoft-windows-11-quality-performance-commitments-changes https://www.theverge.com/news/897834/microsoft-windows-11-qu...
- baal80spam 7mo agoThey SAY they got the memo. Colour me very skeptical, but we'll see.
- rocketvole 7mo agoI mean, a lot of the issues that they says they'll fix can be patched with third party tools. They won't get rid of ads or tracking, or anything significant. affect their bottom line. As someone who has never owned a mac, the only reason I would buy a pc at this point in time is to install linux on it.
- jrmg 7mo agoI liked Ars Technica’s snarky take: If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/microsoft-keeps-insisting-that-its-deeply-committed-to-the-quality-of-windows-11/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/microsoft-keeps-insi...
- pants2 7mo agoFunny how their plan to improve Windows 11 is basically to make it more like Windows 10. Apparently they already brought back "never combine taskbar buttons" which is why I left W11 in the first place, but seems like they have a long way to go. I really can't believe they thought W11 was a good idea. And putting copilot in notepad... Come on now.
- nicoburns 7mo agoYep, they could literally have done nothing with their Windows 10 codebase and it would fulfil most if not all of their targets.
- bigyabai 7mo agoPlastic shitboxes are a very lucrative segment of the laptop market. I don't think the $600 Macbook will be displacing $200-$300 Chromebooks anytime soon.
- kube-system 7mo agoNo, but the $600 MacBooks are coming straight for the $600 plastic shitbox windows laptops. The competition at this price point is weak.
- bigyabai 7mo agoWhich was formerly challenged by the $700 Macbook Air, to little avail.
- wat10000 7mo agoWhat $700 MacBook Air?
- bigyabai 7mo agoCostco and other in-person retailers marked down the M1 MBA to $799 and then $699 while reducing their stock.
- wat10000 7mo agoIt doesn’t make sense to compare MSRP of one product to sale prices of another. I’m sure the Neo will see similar discounts in those situations too.
- s0rce 7mo agoMy M4 Air was $750 on black friday 2025. I bought it after I cracked the screen on my M1 and the cost to repair was half the cost of the much newer computer.
- Marsymars 7mo ago
- solatic 7mo agoArguably, only Apple is able to pull this off, due to huge investments in their supply chain and fully ordering out entire factories. It also comes in the worst political climate for their competitors. Dell, HP, and others announcing large supply chain investment anywhere but the US would be insane. Making that supply chain investment in the US would make a $500 price point impossible. Microsoft and Intel threw their OEM partners under the bus and they're going to have a very, very difficult time getting out from under it.
- nielsbot 7mo agoApple also gets to fund their manufacturing investments using phone and other revenue
- Avamander 7mo agoI truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat. Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides. I hope Apple eats into their market share hard.
- ndr42 7mo agoCook: "Mac just had its best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers." I don't doubt that it will sell well (I ordered one myself) but I really dislike this kind of marketing. I would like to get some numbers not "best launch on a Tuesday in a year that ends on 6..." Edit: (Apple stopped reporting sales numbers in late 2018)
- tonymet 7mo agoThe reporting and headline are even worse. “Best launch week ever” says nothing about sales.
- pfannkuchen 7mo agoDoesn’t it mean that it sold more units in its first week on the market than any past Mac? How does that say nothing about sales? It’s literally about sales numbers, they are just using a relative metric instead of an absolute metric.
- ndr42 7mo agoThey announced a sales record where the metric is "sold to somebody that never ever had a mac before" combined with "in the first week of availability". The headline is worse than Cook's tweet quoted in the article. To get this record you need to have a long time were your costumers were buying something else from you (like Phones) and have a lot available inventory in a lot of places in the first week combined with a great media coverage. 3 things that Apple has an advantage in. As @ibero above points out it is more important for apple to tap into the vast demographic of relatively young iPhone/iPad customers - the older Mac customers are buying different machines.
- illiac786 7mo agoFrom your point of view it is, but the headline is what Apple is giving them, and it works perfectly well for them: Lots of attention for Apple, zero interesting data.
- 7mo ago
- zer00eyz 7mo ago> "best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers" Reading this line made me think of the old I'm Mac / I'm a PC commercials. This may be fresh on my mind because Justin Long and John Hodgman are selling Ozempic now.
- longislandguido 7mo agoIt's a fitting analogy as macOS has since become bloated beyond belief.
- longislandguido 7mo agoTahoe/iOS26 are still the most godawful buggy pieces of software Apple ever created. I counted 0 net improvements and countless new bugs. Apple is having their Windows ME moment. It doesn't matter how much cheap hardware you throw at the unwashed masses. It's all about the software they would say. The chickens have come home to roost.
- ndr42 7mo agoWell, I remember a time where I had to restart my PowerMac 7200 a lot because of some bug in MacOS 8... Edit: Apple turns 50 this year
- lateforwork 7mo agoBuggy as well as severe UX regressions. It is so unfortunate that their software division is underperforming when their hardware team is outperforming. Craig Federighi, get your act together!
- longislandguido 7mo agoSuch as new screenshot dialog in iOS, where one click has now become three, because we've hidden the primary controls under two pointless single-fold menus. I wonder if someone got a raise for that.
- lilytweed 7mo agoThe new screenshot flow is mostly to provide extra surface for Visual Intelligence. I've found it extremely useful for stuff like ingesting event details and doing Google Lens-esque searches.
- wincy 7mo agoI like the new dialog? I basically always crop the image when screenshotting so the new UI results in less button pressing for me. How often do you need to capture your entire screen? I almost always want to focus on something.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nodesocket 7mo agoNeo is wily popular, but don't expect it to generate significant profits for Apple (disclosure I'm a AAPL shareholder). I assume the profit/profit margin on Neo is paper thin.
- rishabhaiover 7mo agoI wonder if this move is to grab customer base as much as they can before the supply chain crunch dents Apple manufacturing for the first time ever
- ndr42 7mo agoI don't think that apple will be affected more than their peers.
- windowsrookie 7mo agoThe profit margin is probably better than you think. The iPhone 17e sells for the same price, and the neo is certainly less expensive to manufacture.
- bombcar 7mo agoThe talk for 20+ years has been about "halo" products - people buying iPods would be introduced to the Mac, same with the iPhone, etc. I think this may actually be the first real Halo product they have that will do this for Mac, because it is a Mac.
- tonyedgecombe 7mo agoI suspect they have managed to drive their costs right down and are still maintaining their typical profit margins.
- Archit3ch 7mo ago1) The way to manufacture things cheaply is to do it at scale, and Neo has that in spades. 2) They will generate more profits than the hardware itself. You're not counting services and ecosystem. Now you got a new matching iPhone to go with your Neo, and an iWatch, an iPad, an iPencil...
- yalogin 7mo agoThis was fully expected. They just fully exploited their economies of scale and entered the low end market. They are going to grab a lot of market there from windows
- hammock 7mo agoWho knew, people just wanted Apple to make cheaper products. People have been asking for iPhone SE to come back for what feels like decades, maybe they will do that next.
- isjdiwjxiwj 7mo agoThe iPhone SE was merely rebranded to iPhone (n)e. Exact same thing. Exact same product category.
- commandersaki 7mo agoNo Touch ID though.
- LinkSpree 7mo agoCheap Apple products is a long term net negative. Apple's justification for their price on high ticket items is not their technical edge, is the "cool people have it so might as well pay a premium for it". Lululemon did something similar to appeal to the masses and it backfired a few years after, opening the door for competitors that had nothing on them a few years back.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoHuh the neo can't really be the driver of this right? As it's barely out and I think not yet physically available in most places. The headline hints at a causation that I don't think exists.
- isjdiwjxiwj 7mo ago[flagged]
- wolvoleo 7mo agoIt even says so in the article: > If you want a MacBook Neo, you may have to wait. In the U.S., MacBook Neo orders placed through Apple's online store today are estimated to be delivered between April 6 and April 13. However, it may be possible to find a MacBook Neo sooner at one of Apple's retail stores, or through authorized resellers such as Amazon and Walmart. But I found the reason, it's not really a 'sales record'. It's a very specific thing, sales of new macs to first time mac users within the launch week.
- zoogeny 7mo agoPart of me thinks this is a bad sign for Apple. They have always been a premium brand. I'm not a business major, but it just feels like a bad thing when premium enters low-end markets. But on the other hand, this is kind of the culmination of them owning their hardware stack. They can avoid the commoditization race to the bottom since they are the exclusive owners of a significant amount of their hardware vertical, From chips to enclosure. Perhaps that will let them retain the margins that were previously driven by a consumer base that prized prestige over price. While my intuition is that this may be the last big cash grab that Apple squeezes out of their premium image, they did have a massive hit back in the day with the original iMac (the CRT based one). They've defined "cheap and premium" categories before.
- tim333 7mo agoIt's not really that low end though. Cheap Windows laptops and Chromebooks start at less than a third of the price. It's more mass market.
- cianuro_ 7mo agoThey dominate the premium market. Tim Cook, as CEO of a public company, is incentivized to deliver shareholder value. Entering this market with a good product does just that. Beyond that, this is an entry point for people to use Apple products. It can be bridge to get this consumer to buy more premium hardware and software later on.
- nickthegreek 7mo agoit’s also other gateway to sell subscription services.
- ratg13 7mo agoThey have made something that can more easily be adopted by schools for students. They are creating countless customers for life.
- CamperBob2 7mo agoI'm not a business major, but it just feels like a bad thing when premium enters low-end markets. Microsoft's malevolent stewardship of Windows has handed the market to them on the proverbial silver platter. It's only reasonable for Cook to take advantage of their generosity.
- ksec 7mo agoI actually liked the Design of Neo more so than the Air. It is just more practical. I also like thin bezel rather than no / minimal bezel. I still haven't found any concrete evidence but I think the Key travel on Neo is at least 1-2mm higher than Air and Pro. And back to the good old MacBook Pro Early 2015 era keyboard. If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air.
- isjdiwjxiwj 7mo ago> If it could make the trackpad completely silent and an A19 Pro with 12GB, double the SSD speed would have been perfect. Would have loved M5 with 16GB Memory but I guess that eats into Air. What you’re asking for is an Air.
- ksec 7mo ago>What you’re asking for is an Air. The design of Air and Neo is completely different. Air is non-repairable, worst keyboard, zero bezels. The Neo is easy enough to fix I dont even need to look at the manual.
- thejazzman 7mo agoI guarantee you that if you used both you’d prefer the Air. What advantage does the Neo’s keyboard have have over the keyboard that’s identical in all other modern Macs?
- ksec 7mo ago>What advantage does the Neo’s keyboard have have over the keyboard that’s identical in all other modern Macs? More Key Travel distance.
- erelong 7mo agoThat's a shame, although I'm not sure what I would recommend instead
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- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[flagged]
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[flagged]
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoI worked at a Dell repair facility as Apple adopted x86 architecture — and watched as all my bosses gawked at my plastic 13" MacBook Core2Duo [what the Neo most-closely reminds me of, physically and metaphorically]. They'd transition themselves onto larger desktop iMacs within just a few months. IIRC, 2006's 13" MacBooks started at ~$1000... with a conservative inflation metric this new Neo's pricepoint is absolutely incredible. The last time I remember something like this was 2023 M2Pro Mac Mini, but the above 2006 example was the previous... and so many new Mac users are minted with such brilliant hardware introduction. Wishing I owned AAPL right now =D
- fragmede 7mo ago[dead]
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[flagged]