Macs have taken a big hit. In Apple’s latest quarterly results the data is terrible: a 34% drop in revenue compared to the same period last year.
This business division has not stopped bleeding since the beginning of the year, and although the presentation of the new Apple M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max should cheer things up in the coming quarters, one thing is quite clear: if the latest Macs have sold poorly, the Apple M1s are (above all) to blame.
Those chips that were announced in November 2020 made an exceptional leap in power and efficiency over the Intel chips that had traditionally been at the heart of Macs, and that led to renewed interest in these machines.
That chart, compiled by my colleague Javier Lacort, makes the evolution over the last five years very clear. Sales throughout 2019 and half of 2020 were limp and were affected by problems such as the (sadly) notorious butterfly keyboards.
But things changed right around the launch of the Apple M1s. The hype generated by those chips caused a sudden surge in sales in the last two quarters of 2020.
Not only were those chips a revolution for Apple, but also the terrible COVID-19 pandemic. Although we had been out of confinement for a few months, the landscape had changed and telecommuting (and “telestudy”) had become almost massive.
Both circumstances made the renewed MacBook Air and Mac mini a success, but also the colorful iMacs that had not been renewed in any significant way for six years. Those machines were a real breath of fresh air for this segment, and showed how well macOS had adapted to the ARM architecture. The transition went smoothly, and it soon became clear that these chips were a turning point in the history of Apple computers.
It was then that PCs experienced a surprising new golden age: manufacturers couldn’t keep up. The impact of the pandemic was felt throughout late 2020 and much of 2021: Lenovo, for example, had PCs taken off its hands, and the second quarter of 2021 was absolutely crazy for Mac sales, which were up 70% over the same period the previous year.
By then Apple had already had the good sense to introduce its M1 Pro and M1 Max, so the MacBook Pros and flashy Mac Studio became perfect options for those looking to refresh their older high-end Intel chip-based machines.
But Apple didn’t count on one thing: the Apple M1s turned out to be too good. In 2022 we finally met their successors, the Apple M2, and although the MacBook Air (2022) took advantage of the launch to change its design and say goodbye to the wedge format, the chip did not represent a particularly significant leap.
But Apple didn’t count on one thing: the Apple M1s turned out to be too good. In 2022 we finally met their successors, the Apple M2, and although the MacBook Air (2022) took advantage of the launch to change design and say goodbye to the wedge format, the chip did not represent a particularly significant leap.
Apple itself seemed to convince us that it was a good time to renew these devices. During the presentation of the Apple M3, all the comparisons that were made focused not on the M2, but on the M1.
Multicore performance improvements reached 50% in efficiency cores (30% in performance cores) between the M1 and M3, a striking figure that is not so striking if we take into account that three years have passed and we are dealing with chips with a 3 nm photolithography compared to the 5 nm of those models.
Will the M3 be able to reverse this trend? It certainly seems difficult to get worse, but the macroeconomic scenario, with inflation skyrocketing, does not encourage spending. That and the other thing, of course.