Global Mac shipments fell 17.5% ahead of M4 updates

A new market intelligence report indicates that global Mac shipments fell by 17.5% year-on-year in the previous quarter. That’s against a backdrop of roughly flat sales across all laptops and desktops.

Technically Q3 saw the global PC market achieve a fourth consecutive quarter of growth, as total shipments were up year-on-year, though just barely …

PC market continues to grow

Canalys estimates total Q3 shipments of 66.4M units, up 1.3% year-on-year. Unsurprisingly, growth was in laptops at the expense of desktops.

Notebook shipments (including mobile workstations) reached 53.5 million units, up 2.8%, while desktop shipments (including desktop workstations) contracted 4.6% to 12.9 million units […]

Although growth in Q3 was modest, the PC market recovery is now well underway with a number of positive signals indicating stronger performance in the coming quarters.

The firm expects growth to continue, driven primarily by the enterprise sector upgrading Windows machines not capable of running Windows 11. Microsoft is discontinuing support for Windows 10, forcing businesses to upgrade or pay hefty fees for extended-support contracts.

Mac shipments fell, ahead of M4 launch

Mac shipments fell from 6.2M in Q3 2023 to 5.1M in the same quarter this year, representing a decline of 17.5%. That saw Apple’s market share of the global PC market fall from 9.5% to 7.7%.

It’s likely that buyers are now waiting for M4 Macs, the first of which are expected to be announced later this month.

Apple is expected to begin unveiling their M4 Mac lineup as soon as this month, with updates to the iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini to start off the new M4 transition. Although the event will probably be held this month, the new Macs aren’t expected to ship until November 1st.

The Mac mini is expected to see the biggest update – or should that be smallest? – as it shrinks to something close to the size of an Apple TV box.

A series of reports and leaks regarding the upcoming M4 MacBook Pro suggest that the base model will also get a worthwhile boost in specs, to a 10-core CPU (up from 8-core), 16GB memory, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports (up from two).

The latest on the leak front was a Russian classified ad claiming to offer several of the unannounced machines for sale.

Render by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash