I'd be curious to see what the industry-wide numbers look like, but I wouldn't be surprised to see PCs skew even higher in favour of laptops.
Desktops are increasingly only relevant for specialised workloads like gaming or high-end content creation. Assuming that Apple still holds on to the lion's share of the content creation market, and that content creation as a whole is more common than high-end gaming, Apple would then have a larger share of their sales go to desktops than the industry average.
Manufacturing plants, gas stations, mechanic shops, every single retail store, restaurants, movie theaters, bars, call centers, farms, police stations, prisons, libraries, etc. Basically everywhere my guy. The world isn't just dev shops.
Most of those aren't offices. And many of the computers at places like that either are POS terminals or other specialty hardware. And even at most of the places you listed, I bet you'll find most of the actual office work is still done on laptops. The accountants back at the office for the movie theatre and gas station companies almost certainly have laptops
I would expect any call centre type operation would have desktops.
The employees would never work from home (outside of a pandemic) and work set hours.
So if desktops costs less, they will of course be used here since there is nothing to be gained from paying extra. Similarly, these users would not be using pricier Apple products.
> The employees would never work from home (outside of a pandemic) and work set hours.
This isn't quite true, the call center at my Co. is partially remote for call center staff, they use jabber and other VoIP connected to their PC's to work from home.
I do Windows application development and the company I work for is all desktop machines. Some of the static analysis tools need a lot of RAM and CPU (I have 128 GB and a pretty new Threadripper with a lot of cores). There aren’t good laptop options for this type of development machine, at least not ones I’d like to use (ie minimal fan noise).
I think since COVID I haven't seen an office that actively chooses those "SFF" PC's anymore, and those were as anaemic as laptops performance-wise... and weirdly: not much cheaper either.
Granted, I don't see a lot of offices, but everywhere that I have seen seems to be choosing docking stations or USB-C enabled displays (Dell has an excellent selection of those) and some kind of business laptop like a Precision or Elitebook.
Incidentally, those same screens are used for the staff who have Apple computers, and, largely, those are laptops too.
Desktops seem to be practically dead except for workstation-grade ones in the businesses I've been to.
Where the stationary work PC survives (I think): point of sale like desks that are half way between cash register (not personal at all) and notebook computer (each employee got their own). E.g. the computer feeding the screen at the hotel check-in counter. Not a big market relative to the number of systems existing because they aren't frequently replaced and when they are replaced, very cheaply, but the number existing is huge. And leaning to the PC side a lot, I think?
Workstation-grade, I'd say, is extremely limited and shrinking fast. Particularly outside of the tinkerer niche. Think "gamer", even if I suspect that actual gaming isn't half as big in that niche as marketing approaches would suggest. But in any case very much not-Apple.
What’s the point of using a laptop with a docking station? You still need an external keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. Is the main reason to save money? Or is it because laptops are now more powerful than desktop PCs?
For example, do MacBook Airs paired with external monitors perform better than traditional PCs? If not, are people opting for MacBook Pros with docks instead? And if so, is a top-tier MacBook Pro with an external monitor and keyboard actually cheaper than a Mac Studio setup?
I wouldn't underestimate the number of dedicated gaming PCs, but at the same time I don't have hard numbers to back that up.
FWIW re the article, I'm surprised that the share of desktop Macs is so high compared to Mac laptops. I've never seen one in the wild outside shops, but plenty of people using their Mac laptops as desktop (eg connect a keyboard and monitor)
I think this is down to what I was saying: they're not general purpose machines anymore, they're mostly used for specialised workloads. If you don't spend any time in the sort of environment where those workloads are common, you won't see them. Similarly, many people will go all their lives without ever seeing a gaming PC, even though they're completely mundane in my (and, I assume, your) world.
- people who use their hardware to the full extent of what it's capable of, namely professionals of any kind and some power users that do the same things pros do but maybe not for monetary gains
Apple is useful in some niches of that but not a lot of them.
- gamers
Apple has no idea about gaming, in spite of their mostly laughable recent attempts.
The rest of the users who don't need all the power / don't even use a computer a lot are better served by a portable device with a built in monitor.
I have several Macs and my daily is a MacBook Pro. We have a "house computer" that's in the living room. I recommend every family to have one. It's obviously an iMac - one of my favorite computers of all time.
A computer doesn't have to be just a laptop or a mobile device (phone, tablet, etc). It's nice to have a stationary PC that is accessible to anyone who happens to walk past. My son will sit down and start up a little game, or start GarageBand to play on the MIDI piano.
I'm also a fan of laptops but they are more personal, requiring a login and so on. And screens are usually smaller.
I meant specifically as a family computer in the living room. It's a nice concept - just sit there and do some light computing or play a game. Ours is connected to a MIDI keyboard and has Garageband.
It's a nice option and it's not the same as a small laptop that is constantly moving around.
For a while I had a Sweep [0] keyboard that I'd carry with me and use everywhere, even in trains when travelling. It was small enough to be placed on my laptop, one half to each side of the trackpad.
I use a ThinkPad with Linux for personal use and a MacBook Air for my job, I used the Sweep with both. While I prefer trackpad to mouse, I imagine mouse enjoyers would probably do something similar.
You don’t have to use a trackpad with a laptop. For 95% of people, a modern laptop can do everything the desktop can, plus it has battery backup, plus it it is portable if you ever need it to be. And if you don’t like the trackpad or the keyboard, just spend a little money to connect the ones you do like.
And when an M4 Air costs $1k plus or minus a couple hundred, it’s almost a negligible price premium.
And it easily overheats when you put any pressure on it (except for Apple silicon, but many of us are not interested in that). Also zero configurability, upgradeability, repairability except for a couple of specialized devices like framework. Portability isn't important when you have no use for it — I used a laptop for about five years as my only computing device, and the total number of times it left my desk can be counted with one hand.
Personally, in my own bubble I know few people with laptops, most continue using desktops, especially IT professionals of any kind.
You can use a mouse with a laptop the exact same way as with a desktop. That's what I do, when I'm home, my laptop is essentially a desktop with all the peripherals, it just has the added benefit that I can unplug the screen and take the whole thing with me, whether to the couch or to the office.
I suspect a lot of professionals that need decent compute find desktop PCs to sit in something of a no-man’s-land these days.
Personally I find my MacBook Pro plenty powerful for most day to day activities, including testing out ideas. The kicker is that when I need real compute, a desktop that’s maybe 3-5x faster pales in comparison to jumping onto a hosted GPU cluster. It also ends up cheaper because I’m not paying for a chunky GPU that’s sitting idle on my desk half the time.
From limited conversation with people in other industries, their experience is similar.
If you need to run mostly Windows-only software, a MacBook probably isn’t a good choice.
You have to look at Windows laptops and it’s pretty grim. Plasticy machines with some combination of garbage keyboards, shitty displays, terrible trackpads, short battery life, and loud fans (my last 3 machines have been ThinkPads) that are worth almost nothing when you want to upgrade after a couple years.
You can have a win-win combination of high quality components, high performance components, and a low cost device by reuse and iterative upgrades.
- family members of such people
Since they may get the hand me down parts.
Also, it's nice not to have battery fatigue unnecessarily. I'm sure if I used a laptop as if it were a desktop I'd be replacing its battery at least once through its lifecycle.
the age of the desktop is almost over. even if you have a desktop, you'll still most likely need a laptop.
for most people, multi device just isn't worth it.
Each has their own purpose. I couldn't work with a laptop, even when docked at a station. Not appropriate for what I do. A laptop is simply an additional device for travel or bedtime. For whatever I do, I would always rather use a desktop computer than a laptop.
I don’t know why they stopped making 11inch MacBook Airs - the 1kg size makes them easy to carry around. I’ve recently picked up an old final 2015 8GB 256GB edition and it works fine with Linux on it.
They probably dropped it because the Intel chips were hard to tame in such a small space, but with how efficient the M chips are it should be much easier to pull off now.
Less the weight than the increased size for me. Admittedly I don’t use it for very long periods so the smaller screen is less of an issue. I think for my needs it just lets me stick it in a small backpack and forget it, and I prefer the keyboard to a tablet (though no doubt someone will tell me there are fancy tablets with keyboards now!)
I have an M1 13” Air and my wife still sometimes uses my old 2016 12” Macbook (920g). Whenever I pick hers up by accident I’m reminded how noticeably thin and light it is. It seems like a small difference but it changes the feel quite a bit.
They had a really big bezel, so the current 13" MacBook Air is barely any bigger than the 11" MacBook Air:
- It's 0.5cm thinner
- It's 0.41cm wider
- It's 2.3cm deeper
- It's 200g heavier
The aspect ratio on the 11" model was kind of weird too, a lot of apps would barely fit. But a retina screen would help there - just make everything smaller.
Apple at its grandest would have made a huge deal about how something was 200g lighter. They loved shaving grams off widgets in the good old days of the 2010s.
Whatever the difference is, it's super noticeable. I gave mine away last year and I regret it daily—it was the perfect travel laptop.
I consider the air line dead, tbh—they just lost the magic when they made them bigger and they're just "macbooks" to me now... yea yea it's fanless, but that was never part of the appeal per se. Fewer ports, smaller screen, lighter. Please.
I agree. It is very noticeable. I commute on foot to work several times a week and having a laptop that I barely noticed was a delight. When I am at my desk, my laptop is docked, so the screen size is not an issue. And I’m willing to accept the trade off for the times when I do need to use it as a laptop like when sitting in an airplane; unlike my coworkers, I was never worried about the person in front of me leaning back and crunching the display. I would gladly buy an 11” Air again.
Importantly, if laptop makers stuck to screen size rather than overall dimensions, a 11" with the same bezel today would be smaller than an 11" of the past, and that could be too small for a good keyboard for some.
Have a look at the 12" Retina Macbook [0]. It's just called the 'Retina Macbook' (not air or pro). It was produced between 2016 and 2019. It is absolutely tiny, it ways just 920gr.
It took me a while to find a decent one second-hand, but it has been my ultimate travel companion since. It's small enough to just drop into any bag (handbag even) and can charge of any USB-C charger. No other brand of laptop in that form factor comes even close to build quality. I don't think any other unibody laptop of that size even exists.
If you get a later model (2017-2019, 3rd gen) then you get MacOS 13 (Ventura), which still receives updates. If you can find a later-model with upgraded CPU (i5) then performance is actually quite decent, lower-spec models are also still just fine for browsing, email and terminal work.
Supposedly it runs Windows just fine using bootcamp (I haven't tried). I have mine setup for dual-booting Linux. Linux support is decent, though out of the box no support for speakers (headphone jack works), it has a broadcom wifi/bt chip and the wifi works just fine, but bluetooth is currently broken. There are some out-of-tree patches that add limited BT support. I'm working on writing Linux drivers for audio and BT in my (admittedly limited) free time, if someone is interested in helping with that: find my email in bio.
Upsides:
- Very small and light
- Robust unibody
- Does 10 hours on a battery
- Spare parts still available
- Later models still get updates, including Windows
Downsides:
- Probably won't be long before MacOS 13 goes EOL
- First gen (2015-2016) supports up to MacOS 11 (EOL) and second gen (2016-2017) up to MacOS 12 (still receives security updates).
- Only one USB-C 3.1 port for everything, so if you want to charge and use USB peripherals at the same time you need to carry a dongle
- Very low travel keyboard (obviously)
- It's rare, so limited documentation for Linux support
If you update desktops once in 3 years you gonna loose some potential buyers. iMac is still a great concept, retina screen + computer in one good looking package, what's not to like. I had to by studio display and MacBook Pro b/c there was no 27 inch m4max iMac
The iMac is a terrible concept whose main contribution to society is sending a lot of perfectly good LCD monitors to the scrapyard because they’re inseparably bonded to a computer that goes obsolete far faster then they do.
Not quite inseparably, there are unofficial driver board kits available which convert an iMac into a monitor. It would be much better if that were possible without having to do iMac surgery of course.
I completely get your point and agree with it (hence why I never wanted to buy an iMac). But I also see it as people having been used to having a separate monitor and being able to even treat a computer as a sum of parts where individual peripherals/parts can be changed or upgraded if and when needed or desired.
For the current youngest generation of humans (Generation Alpha onwards), an iMac is the same as a smartphone or a tablet — neither of these have any interchangeable or individually upgradable parts and both being complete units in themselves. If something breaks or if the performance or function of one part isn’t good enough, the entire unit is (typically) to be replaced.
The iMac is what the MacBooks and MacBook Pros have become over the years. If this trend continues, we probably may not see a computer, display, keyboard and mouse/pointer input made or sold separately. They may exist only in old movies, old TV shows and museums.
I have a MacBook Pro for my professional life and a high end PC for gaming and I can definitely say if it wasn’t for gaming I would have bought a mac for my personal usage as well. It’s not only the quality and portability that offer a good performance, it’s also that quite frankly I am extremely disappointed with windows nowadays.
I would also be curious at the stats on people who have a laptop, but exclusively (or 99% of the time) use it at a desk. I had a macbook but when it came time to upgrade, I got a mac mini since it was cheaper than a similarly specced macbook by about $400, and performed slightly better, plus I could just use it with the existing peripherals that I was docking the macbook to anyway.
<tin foil hat time>
I guess it’s easier to add planned obsolescence to a laptop since the battery only lasts so long, keyboard tends to be more flimsy, thermals always running hot (though that’s less of a concern with the apple silicon mac’s)
</tin foil hat time>
I’m curious what % of sales the iPhone 13 Mini had compared to the other iPhone 13 models. Evidently the percentage can slip so low Apple will cancel an entire beloved product line.
I think nobody buys mac desktops because apple devices and desktop use cases barely overlap. Worst OS for gaming, they're not upgradable, and probably half the specialty software that demands something more than a laptop is exclusive to Windows or that the Windows PC is going to be better value for the thrifty professional.
I think the natural share should be 22%, when their Apple Silicon rollout strategy made sense.
I would really love to buy a Mac Studio, but it was two generations behind all year and now it’s a generation behind over a year into the M4 generation.
Their Apple Silicon chip rollout strategy makes no sense and they should update their devices all at once or at least their high end devices. How can they release an M3 Ultra chip almost a year after they put an M4 chip in their iPad?
Makes sense. I used to work in electronics retail around 10 years ago and barely anyone bought a desktop unless it was gaming.
Now I work in corporate IT and all the desktops are being replaced during the next upgrade cycle. The desks have docking stations and everyone has a personal laptop that they can use for WFH or the office.
Personally though, I prefer a desktop at home, I like to sit at my desk and use a big screen to get stuff done, if portable, a laptop is too annoying and I usually only want to look up stuff or view content, so for me Desktop + iPad is the best combo.
74 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadDesktops are increasingly only relevant for specialised workloads like gaming or high-end content creation. Assuming that Apple still holds on to the lion's share of the content creation market, and that content creation as a whole is more common than high-end gaming, Apple would then have a larger share of their sales go to desktops than the industry average.
Any cubicle farms, like call centres.
University labs, Hospitals.
The employees would never work from home (outside of a pandemic) and work set hours.
So if desktops costs less, they will of course be used here since there is nothing to be gained from paying extra. Similarly, these users would not be using pricier Apple products.
This isn't quite true, the call center at my Co. is partially remote for call center staff, they use jabber and other VoIP connected to their PC's to work from home.
Granted, I don't see a lot of offices, but everywhere that I have seen seems to be choosing docking stations or USB-C enabled displays (Dell has an excellent selection of those) and some kind of business laptop like a Precision or Elitebook.
Incidentally, those same screens are used for the staff who have Apple computers, and, largely, those are laptops too.
Desktops seem to be practically dead except for workstation-grade ones in the businesses I've been to.
Workstation-grade, I'd say, is extremely limited and shrinking fast. Particularly outside of the tinkerer niche. Think "gamer", even if I suspect that actual gaming isn't half as big in that niche as marketing approaches would suggest. But in any case very much not-Apple.
For example, do MacBook Airs paired with external monitors perform better than traditional PCs? If not, are people opting for MacBook Pros with docks instead? And if so, is a top-tier MacBook Pro with an external monitor and keyboard actually cheaper than a Mac Studio setup?
I really only know a handful of people with desktops and they are all gamers. My office is devoid of them aside a few specialist workstations.
FWIW re the article, I'm surprised that the share of desktop Macs is so high compared to Mac laptops. I've never seen one in the wild outside shops, but plenty of people using their Mac laptops as desktop (eg connect a keyboard and monitor)
I think this is down to what I was saying: they're not general purpose machines anymore, they're mostly used for specialised workloads. If you don't spend any time in the sort of environment where those workloads are common, you won't see them. Similarly, many people will go all their lives without ever seeing a gaming PC, even though they're completely mundane in my (and, I assume, your) world.
- people who use their hardware to the full extent of what it's capable of, namely professionals of any kind and some power users that do the same things pros do but maybe not for monetary gains
Apple is useful in some niches of that but not a lot of them.
- gamers
Apple has no idea about gaming, in spite of their mostly laughable recent attempts.
The rest of the users who don't need all the power / don't even use a computer a lot are better served by a portable device with a built in monitor.
I'm also a fan of laptops but they are more personal, requiring a login and so on. And screens are usually smaller.
It's a nice option and it's not the same as a small laptop that is constantly moving around.
I don't agree with this. Most professions are more than well served by any moderately specced computer, laptop or otherwise.
If you're not crunching big numbers, rendering, or need speciality hardware a laptop is more than enough.
Yes, those are the professionals I was thinking of :)
> People that don’t like trackpads or find them hard to use.
On the wintelamd side, I see a lot of people taking out a laptop and a mouse out of their bag. No reason you can't do the same on apples...
I use a ThinkPad with Linux for personal use and a MacBook Air for my job, I used the Sweep with both. While I prefer trackpad to mouse, I imagine mouse enjoyers would probably do something similar.
[0] https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep
And when an M4 Air costs $1k plus or minus a couple hundred, it’s almost a negligible price premium.
Personally, in my own bubble I know few people with laptops, most continue using desktops, especially IT professionals of any kind.
I don't play games newer than half-life 1.
Anytime I am forced to use an x86 laptop, it seems like using a BlackBerry five years after the iPhone came out.
Personally I find my MacBook Pro plenty powerful for most day to day activities, including testing out ideas. The kicker is that when I need real compute, a desktop that’s maybe 3-5x faster pales in comparison to jumping onto a hosted GPU cluster. It also ends up cheaper because I’m not paying for a chunky GPU that’s sitting idle on my desk half the time.
From limited conversation with people in other industries, their experience is similar.
You have to look at Windows laptops and it’s pretty grim. Plasticy machines with some combination of garbage keyboards, shitty displays, terrible trackpads, short battery life, and loud fans (my last 3 machines have been ThinkPads) that are worth almost nothing when you want to upgrade after a couple years.
You can have a win-win combination of high quality components, high performance components, and a low cost device by reuse and iterative upgrades.
- family members of such people
Since they may get the hand me down parts.
Also, it's nice not to have battery fatigue unnecessarily. I'm sure if I used a laptop as if it were a desktop I'd be replacing its battery at least once through its lifecycle.
- It's 0.5cm thinner
- It's 0.41cm wider
- It's 2.3cm deeper
- It's 200g heavier
The aspect ratio on the 11" model was kind of weird too, a lot of apps would barely fit. But a retina screen would help there - just make everything smaller.
I consider the air line dead, tbh—they just lost the magic when they made them bigger and they're just "macbooks" to me now... yea yea it's fanless, but that was never part of the appeal per se. Fewer ports, smaller screen, lighter. Please.
Installed it just to see if it was usable. I expect Linux will be snappier.
It took me a while to find a decent one second-hand, but it has been my ultimate travel companion since. It's small enough to just drop into any bag (handbag even) and can charge of any USB-C charger. No other brand of laptop in that form factor comes even close to build quality. I don't think any other unibody laptop of that size even exists.
If you get a later model (2017-2019, 3rd gen) then you get MacOS 13 (Ventura), which still receives updates. If you can find a later-model with upgraded CPU (i5) then performance is actually quite decent, lower-spec models are also still just fine for browsing, email and terminal work.
Supposedly it runs Windows just fine using bootcamp (I haven't tried). I have mine setup for dual-booting Linux. Linux support is decent, though out of the box no support for speakers (headphone jack works), it has a broadcom wifi/bt chip and the wifi works just fine, but bluetooth is currently broken. There are some out-of-tree patches that add limited BT support. I'm working on writing Linux drivers for audio and BT in my (admittedly limited) free time, if someone is interested in helping with that: find my email in bio.
Upsides:
- Very small and light
- Robust unibody
- Does 10 hours on a battery
- Spare parts still available
- Later models still get updates, including Windows
Downsides:
- Probably won't be long before MacOS 13 goes EOL
- First gen (2015-2016) supports up to MacOS 11 (EOL) and second gen (2016-2017) up to MacOS 12 (still receives security updates).
- Only one USB-C 3.1 port for everything, so if you want to charge and use USB peripherals at the same time you need to carry a dongle
- Very low travel keyboard (obviously)
- It's rare, so limited documentation for Linux support
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-inch_MacBook
For the current youngest generation of humans (Generation Alpha onwards), an iMac is the same as a smartphone or a tablet — neither of these have any interchangeable or individually upgradable parts and both being complete units in themselves. If something breaks or if the performance or function of one part isn’t good enough, the entire unit is (typically) to be replaced.
The iMac is what the MacBooks and MacBook Pros have become over the years. If this trend continues, we probably may not see a computer, display, keyboard and mouse/pointer input made or sold separately. They may exist only in old movies, old TV shows and museums.
<tin foil hat time> I guess it’s easier to add planned obsolescence to a laptop since the battery only lasts so long, keyboard tends to be more flimsy, thermals always running hot (though that’s less of a concern with the apple silicon mac’s) </tin foil hat time>
I would really love to buy a Mac Studio, but it was two generations behind all year and now it’s a generation behind over a year into the M4 generation.
Their Apple Silicon chip rollout strategy makes no sense and they should update their devices all at once or at least their high end devices. How can they release an M3 Ultra chip almost a year after they put an M4 chip in their iPad?
Now I work in corporate IT and all the desktops are being replaced during the next upgrade cycle. The desks have docking stations and everyone has a personal laptop that they can use for WFH or the office.
Personally though, I prefer a desktop at home, I like to sit at my desk and use a big screen to get stuff done, if portable, a laptop is too annoying and I usually only want to look up stuff or view content, so for me Desktop + iPad is the best combo.